What Happens When Researchers Give Thousands of Dollars to Homeless People? (cnn.com) 270
CNN reports on "The New Leaf Project," an initiative in which the University of British Columbia partnered with a Vancouver-based charity called Foundations for Social Change:
Researchers gave 50 recently homeless people a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars (nearly $5,700). They followed the cash recipients' life over 12-18 months and compared their outcomes to that of a control group who didn't receive the payment. The preliminary findings, which will be peer-reviewed next year, show that:
- Those who received cash were able to find stable housing faster, on average. By comparison, those who didn't receive cash lagged about 12 months behind in securing more permanent housing.
- People who received cash were able to access the food they needed to live, faster. Nearly 70% did after one month, and maintained greater food security throughout the year.
- The recipients spent more on food, clothing and rent, while there was a 39% decrease in spending on goods like alcohol, cigarettes or drugs...
The 115 participants in the randomized controlled trial were between the ages of 19 and 64, and they had been homeless for an average of 6 months. Participants were screened for a low risk of mental health challenges and substance abuse. Funding for the initiative came from a grant from the Canadian federal government, and from donors and foundations in the country... Direct cash transfers are not "a silver bullet for homelessness in general," and the program focused on "a higher functioning subset of the homeless population," said Claire Williams, the CEO and co-founder of Foundations for Social Change, but she believes the research shows that providing meaningful support to folks who have recently become homeless decreases the likelihood they will become entrenched in the experience...
According to the research, reducing the number of nights spent in shelters by the 50 study participants who received cash saved approximately 8,100 Canadian dollars per person per year, or about 405,000 Canadian dollars over one year for all 50 participants.
"There's a common misconception that the cost of doing nothing is free or cheap and it absolutely is not," Williams said.
- Those who received cash were able to find stable housing faster, on average. By comparison, those who didn't receive cash lagged about 12 months behind in securing more permanent housing.
- People who received cash were able to access the food they needed to live, faster. Nearly 70% did after one month, and maintained greater food security throughout the year.
- The recipients spent more on food, clothing and rent, while there was a 39% decrease in spending on goods like alcohol, cigarettes or drugs...
The 115 participants in the randomized controlled trial were between the ages of 19 and 64, and they had been homeless for an average of 6 months. Participants were screened for a low risk of mental health challenges and substance abuse. Funding for the initiative came from a grant from the Canadian federal government, and from donors and foundations in the country... Direct cash transfers are not "a silver bullet for homelessness in general," and the program focused on "a higher functioning subset of the homeless population," said Claire Williams, the CEO and co-founder of Foundations for Social Change, but she believes the research shows that providing meaningful support to folks who have recently become homeless decreases the likelihood they will become entrenched in the experience...
According to the research, reducing the number of nights spent in shelters by the 50 study participants who received cash saved approximately 8,100 Canadian dollars per person per year, or about 405,000 Canadian dollars over one year for all 50 participants.
"There's a common misconception that the cost of doing nothing is free or cheap and it absolutely is not," Williams said.
its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Interesting)
.... tech majors tend to have an extremely low opinion of the 'soft sciences' like sociology, history, psychology, or economics, then you go out in the world and tech sites like ycombinator and slashdot are just full of people discussing sociology, history, psychology, and economics.
i wonder if you go on sociology websites, do they get really interested in discussing circuit minimization or differential equations?
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can comprehend differential equations or quantum physics then comprehending various social issues (when you have the relevant data) isn't going to be much of a stretch so long as you have a reasonable understanding of human nature too. However if your intellext is maxed out when talking about social issues then you've got no chance understanding challenging subjects like post grad maths or physics.
Yes, thats sounds arrogant but its a fact. Plenty of engineers and scientists in later life move over into the softer social issues and politics in the form of management, almost never do you find the reverse happening.
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That's not an indication of the excellence of mathematicians & engineers... It's a symptom of some of nowadays problems.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a good reason for that. Cognitive decline frequently causes older engineers and scientists to be sidelined by younger, more mentally alert colleagues. The older engineers and scientists respond by moving into less cognitively challenging fields. Almost never do you see the reverse of that happening, either.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would have to agree, I am older and there is to be honest no way in hell I could have conducted that study, my older softer brain would have stopped me. I could not imagine picking 115 people, helping 50 and tracking the misery of the fucking rest. I could not do it, no way in hell, getting paid to watch others in misery, knowing that the team getting paid to do the study could give away all their income and help those poor people.
The study is as heartlessly awful as fuck. Next time arseholes choose to d
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The older engineers and scientists respond by moving into less cognitively challenging fields.
Speak for yourself, mate. Engineer in his sixties in the UK here. Actually thinking about politics and society is more cognitively challenging than you might think. I have always liked being a bit of a generalist, so my comfort zone tends to be new stuff, not what I have I have already learned, which is mostly grunt work that I would avoid if I could.
The thing I have found about politics and sociology is that there is an awful lot of bullshit and very little knowledge, which is not what most engineering is like. So to think about politics and society, and not be seduced into foolish ideologies, you need the bullshit detection faculties operating at full strength, which I can assure you is cognitively challenging.
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If I had mod points right now I'd give you one. There are a number of poor habits of thinking which people who are good at the hard sciences often fall into when it comes to thinking about human science.
One is having gotten used to having their first or second intuition turn out to be the right answer. For a really hard problem, maybe their third intuition. After being given math and physics problems that I understood right away while my classmates struggled again and again over 12+ years of education
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By god, that's naive. I have a PhD in quantum gravity and a master's in mathematics. I've solve differential equations for fun since I was 12. If you think that in any way qualifies me to talk about social policy, you're not just arrogant, you're plain wrong.
Conflating social science with management done by old engineers/scientists is like saying a plumber is doing advanced fluid dynamics.
Proper social science data is hard, it involves vast datasets - the NSSB for example contains millions of datapoints acr
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever notice that the really good TV shows, movies, books, and plays, are about the characters, and not about things?
And the absolute best ones, are not about the characters but rather about ideas.
That's why authors such as Issac Asimov have endured. They write about ideas, but you could completely ignore that and concentrate on the characters. And for people unable to comprehend even the characters, there were always the interesting things in Asimov's works.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
.... tech majors tend to have an extremely low opinion of the 'soft sciences'
If you RTFS, you will see WHY we have such a low opinion.
Claire Williams, the person saying "we told you so" in the last sentence, with a clear preconception of what the outcome was "supposed to be", was the person leading the research. . There isn't even an appearance of objectivity.
What else would you expect the result to be? "Hey, it turns out that the cause I've dedicated my life to was wrong and misguided."
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, you are quite biased.
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The people who predicted the Higgs Boson and the people who found it are different people.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This was an experiment, not a court case. In an experiment, the judge is not the experimenter, but Nature itself. And thus, the experimenter first states what the expected the result would be, and then the experimenter states the Null hypothesis to tell the signal from the noise. And then the experiment is designed and performed and the result compared to the expected result and the Null hypothesis, and then you can tell how significant your result is.
If someone tells me that he criticizes the experiment, because the experimenter was stating an expected result beforehand, I am pretty sure it's personal and not scientific.
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Actually at the time they had the Standard Model which predicted the Higgs Boson and alternative models without it: the goal was to either conclusively prove the existence the Higgs Boson or conclusively disprove it, thus either validating the Standard Model or invalidating it and steering further research towards the "Higgless" models.
Basically, as long as they could conclusively confirm or exclude the Higgs Boson's existence, they would have won them the Nobel prize all the same.
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But when physicists and mathematicians spend 3 billion dollar to build the Large Hadron Collider, because they want to prove the Higgs Boson does exist, and when they find it, say: "we told you so", they get a Nobel prize, without you complaining.
Somehow, you are quite biased.
So at my last job, I worked with a physicist that had worked at CERN on the LHC. He left to go work in finance before the announcement about the Higgs. He claimed he reviewed their data and wasn't convinced. His quote was, "they had spent so much money that they had to find something". Now, I have no idea if the Higgs is real and I know I don't have the background to make such a determination. But even on your most "certain" example, there are scientists with reasonable credentials that are not convinc
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Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps. But I didn't spend $375,000 of your taxes to reinforce my beliefs.
By preordaining the result, the Candian government ensured this study would be dismissed with no impact on policy, making it a waste of money.
How hard would it have been to find an unbiased researcher without a political ax to grind? Almost anyone would have been more objective.
Re: its funny how in college.. (Score:2)
They lost me when I found they tracked a similar number of equally-deserving homeless people (their control group, all drug-free, no mental issues) and just watched them scratch out a living with no assistance from the researchers.
They could have gotten the same results by giving all participants an equal share of the funds I suspect ($3,750 CDN) instead of only giving half the subjects twice as much, and they would have improved twice as many lives.
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This was research.
Without a control group, there is no point to it.
The goal was not to help this specific tiny group of people but to find out what works and what doesn't so millions of people can be helped.
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I disagree. This was an activity performed to support a presupposed outcome.
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Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Waste of money? $5700 got people into stable housing a year quicker on average. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that also got them into higher earning jobs quicker and easily offset what they were given.
Or I guess we could just give a bunch of billionaires some more tax cuts. We all know they're the job creators and they couldn't possibly create more jobs with the billions they already have...they need more to accomplish that.
And I'm not sure what your issue was with her leading the study. Even in the hard sciences, most people leading studies are people that believe what they are studying is going to work. They want to accomplish something meaningful and publishable with their work, so of course they're not going to pick something they think is destined for failure (the one big exception for that is peer reviewing other studies that you think we're flawed)
Offset what they were given (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article, the $7,500 CAD they got was offset within a year by $8,100 CAD from reduced shelter usage alone.
Thus demonstrating what we've known for decades: On average cash welfare transfers are much more effective per unit than "goods in kind" transfers.
Note: "Goods in Kind" is where, rather than providing money, you provide goods or services instead. Goods in kind is like the really old food aid where you went to a site and got a ration of food, a soup kitchen for a daily example. My getting "government cheese", powdered milk, and other stuff directly from the government as a child is a "good in kind". We got cheese, powdered milk, even if we had cheese and powdered milk already coming out of our ears, but the car needed fixing.
Though I'll note that at the time the government at least had an excuse, in that it was rotating the stock in it's emergency stockpiles to prevent an actual famine in the case of crop failure or cattle disease or such. So the food was closer to "free" than if it had been buying the food specifically to provide it to the poor.
Food stamps is similar, but better because it is at least closer to "cash" or other monetary type payment.
Other goods in kind would be things like housing assistance, utility assistance, those crappy welfare cell phone plans, etc...
Re:Offset what they were given (Score:5, Informative)
When you pick and choose the participants you can prove every possible outcome. How about running this study by random selection and see if the outcome gives a $600 savings by participant.
The reasons people are homeless varies. Different solutions will have different results depending on the reason someone is homeless.
The problem with this study is that it doesn't address the problem of homelessness.
There are very few people in this world who wouldn't benefit from more money and they are both at the top and bottom. We don't need a selective study to show this.
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The problem with this study is that it doesn't address the problem of homelessness.
By definition it did. People were homeless. They gave a bunch of them money, and they found homes quicker than those who didn't get the money.
Now, it didn't solve all homelessness, but why would you think it would? You've set an impossible goal so you can shit on one strategy not getting there.
There are more strategies than just this to solve homelessness. What this proved is that this method can be successful, for at least some subset of the population. That's very helpful.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
By preordaining the result, the Candian government ensured this study would be dismissed with no impact on policy, making it a waste of money.
She did not "preordain" the result. In this case, the perceived notion was if you give homeless free money they will spend it on drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. That's what "conservatives" keep telling people (just like they keep saying if you give tax breaks to corporations money will "trickle down" to employees in the form of higher wages).
She and other researchers probably had a hunch that if you do give money to the homeless they will spend the money on what they need (i.e. food and clothing) and will eventually reintegrate back into society. They then tested this hypothesis and lo and behold, it's what they said would happen. At that point is perfectly natural for one to say, "I told you so."
If you're so worried about $375,000 being "wasted", you must be in a total shitstorm of hatred for the trillions that have been wasted propping up all those failing companies like American Airlines, J.P. Morgan, Citibank, McDonald's and so on.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Informative)
He also missed the "homeless for average of six months" part.
she believes the research shows that providing meaningful support to folks who have recently become homeless decreases the likelihood they will become entrenched in the experience
Seems reasonable for that small demographic.
Re:its funny how in college.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If this were a medical context, a treatment may only be suitable for some patients, therefore you screen out patients who would not be helped, or would indeed be harmed, by the treatment. It is fairly obvious that a drug addict will tend to spend any surplus income on more drugs, so they are not suitable for a big cash donation, because it would harm them. I think what the study is saying is that many poor and homeless people are locked into their current state of being powerless to change their lives, and a substantial cash donation breaks that lock.
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It will be fantastic if forking over what adds up to small amounts of money (relative to taxes acquired over one's working life) could be used to catalyse the changes made by charitable interventi
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not at all (Score:3)
i just think its a strange observation i have noticed on a lot of tech sites.
you will meet a lot of people in engineering college who say they don't want to study social science in college, some even are calling these courses a waste of time, but in their adult life they spend endless hours discussing them.
like, what changes between someone who is 19 years old saying sociology is a waste of time, and 30 years old writing 15 paragraph essays about sociology on the internet comments?
Captain Obvious called... (Score:4, Insightful)
...he wants his tent back, I guess.
Homeless people are not homeless by choice (if they are, we call them campers, charge them $20 a night, and reward them with dirty toilets and having to sleep next to a Bluetooth ghetto blaster cranked up to full volume).
They are homeless because they lack the cash to... you know... not be homeless. Give them cash and they'll... you know... not be homeless anymore.
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>"Homeless people are not homeless by choice"
Most are probably homeless due to poor life decisions and/or bad luck. Injecting cash helps the latter much more than the former.
>"Give them cash and they'll... you know... not be homeless anymore."
Or they will be "not homeless" for a short time and then be homeless again. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Doing only the former isn't sustainable.
Re: Captain Obvious called... (Score:5, Informative)
The researchers screened out anyone with mental or substance abuse problems.
Re: Captain Obvious called... (Score:5, Insightful)
The key to this research is right at the top: they only gave money to RECENTLY homeless. Broadly speaking, homeless folks fall in to two groups: the briefly homeless and the chronically homeless.
The briefly homeless hit a very rough patch in their lives. They'll get back no their feet regardless. A little help will get them there sooner.
Then there's the chronic homeless. These are the folks who have something wrong upstairs where they just can't function in society. Mental illness. Anger management problems. Drug addictions. Clean them up, take them off the street and they still can't bring themselves to do the things it takes to hold a job.
Re: Captain Obvious called... (Score:4, Informative)
How do you clean up and get off the street if you have no money?
In the real world, it's 'every man for himself'
No, in the real world Governments offer safety nets to people in difficulties. Those safety nets are funded by financially productive members of society and often staffed by people providing a service at well under the fair value of their labour.
Homeless people when helped often become part of that latter group, and some become part of the former group. They contribute to society and help us all have a nicer world to live in.
Even if I didn't have a strange aversion to just letting people die in the street I'd support providing assistance to homeless people.
Re:Captain Obvious called... (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Homeless people are not homeless by choice"
Most are probably homeless due to poor life decisions and/or bad luck. Injecting cash helps the latter much more than the former.
>"Give them cash and they'll... you know... not be homeless anymore."
Or they will be "not homeless" for a short time and then be homeless again. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Doing only the former isn't sustainable.
I can give you one example. A person I know in Australia fled the house of her abusive husband, taking her two children, a plastic bag with some clothes, and three dollars. In a country that was not her own and speaking a language of which she had rudimentary knowledge. She was able to contact a women's refuge who sent a cab and gave her a place to stay. With their help she was able to connect with Centrelink which gave her money to live on each month and eventually a place to stay. She was able to go to school for ESL, then get trained and certified in aged care. She recently passed her citizenship test and has become a tax-paying contributing member of society. Her daughter is finishing high school and will also become a citizen.
Without the support system she would have had no choice but to return to her country with her daughter and abandon her young son to live with the abusive drug-addict father. Instead they have a stable home, the son has a good life instead of a terrible one, and Australia will have three good citizens. Money well spent, and as a bonus that family has a good life. Seems like a win-win.
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Yes, that is it. Bad life choices, for example by choosing a job in a line of work killed by Covid.
In any case, it is cheaper for society if people get out of the rut they are in. In my country heroin addicts were given methadone. Drug related rates dropped, less people in jail (which costs tax payers money) and the lives of the drug addicts improved and many could shed their addiction or handle it. And heroin addiction became more rare because they didn’t need to attract new users to support their ad
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Just because something is obvious doesn't mean that it's true. Indeed, the major stated argument against direct payments is that the homeless won't spend it on getting out of homelessness so any welfare program has to be attached to a large nanny apparatus. This is actual evidence that the stated argument is at least not universal, and raises suspicion that the stated argument was not the actual argument.
Note that the major feature of this trial is not giving money per se but giving unconstrained money dire
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"They are homeless because they lack the cash to... you know... not be homeless."
Exactly. I expect the researchers will come next month and tell us that giving food to hungry people makes them unhungry.
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The conditions in Cali put lie to that statement It is true of some but not all.
Re: Captain Obvious called... (Score:5, Insightful)
The researchers only helped people without mental or substance abuse problems , so since they only helped people whose main challenge was financial by giving them a 3-6 month runway, it far from surprising that their situation improved.
Did they ever do anything to help the control group of homeless people they simply monitored for 6 months?
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"they'll most likely eventually end up back on the street again."
While what is obvious is not necessarily true, what is contrary to evidence is necessarily false.
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Plenty of them (not all obviously) started out with a home and lost it through reckless behaviour such as drinking too much or gambling or prison. Just putting them back in the same situation they were in before they were homeless and giving them cash doesn't solve the underlying issues and they'll most likely eventually end up back on the street again.
Not necessarily. Maybe they actually learnt something from their homelessness experience, like it sucks to be homeless and it should be avoided at all cost? It's like prison, it really does nothing except motivate people to not come back.
If you screen out those with substance abuse and mental issues (like they did) I'd say it is very likely that they learnt something from the experience.
Re:Captain Obvious called... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, that I want to downvote something ridiculous like this that was modded "Insightful" of all options, I don't have mod points any more ...
You have obviously never lost your job without being at fault. Or become ill (or one of your loved ones) with high medical costs. Or were involved in an accident which was not your fault.
There are so many possibilities why somebody can become homeless without "reckless behaviour", that I can't even list them.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yup. Here in the UK a huge proportion of homeless are alcoholics. Now that might be a cause of their situation or it might be an effect of it, but either way they spend money on booze and just giving them cash is a recipe for disaster without some other kind of support and guidance.
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Despite the typical bleeding heart liberal complaints its labels and stigmatizes people the biggest complainers turned out to be Bars and clubs who watched the sales of liquor and gambling fall
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"Participants were screened for a low risk of mental health challenges and substance abuse."
Well that's why it worked. Many homeless people have those problems, which is why they're homeless. There are many, many stories of giving homeless money which turns into drugs. Obviously this study stacked the deck.
You're rather conveniently ignoring an important line in the summary: "The recipients spent more on food, clothing and rent, while there was a 39% decrease in spending on goods like alcohol, cigarettes or drugs". So yes, you could say that the screening "stacked the deck" if you were looking to let your preconceptions shit all over the attempts they're making to help disadvantaged people. OR you could acknowledge that for some folks, homelessness is the cause of their substance abuse, and that helping them
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I guess I was triggered by your use of "stacked the deck" - I perceived it as pejorative and dismissive. My apologies if I was wrong.
Re: Screened? (Score:2)
To what end, are they going to start visiting homeless shelters, interviewing the homeless to decide who among them is worthy of their life-changing cash payout, and who is Not?
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Re:Screened? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're missing the point. Why be so negative?
We *are* doing something now: providing help in a particular kind of way, and paying for some support, and law-enforcement and emergency health care.
This study is trying to establish if there is a more effective *systemic* way of using the same resources. They didn't simply toss money out into the street, they had designed a specific process for giving a specific amount of resources to specific people:
"In total, 115 participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups:
Group 1 $7,500 + workshop & coaching, N=25 ...and then followed each group for 18months to measure the impact ....see? Science.
Group 2 $7,500 + workshop (no coaching), N=25
Group 3 no cash + workshop & coaching, N=19
Group 4 no cash + no workshop / coaching, N=46"
By the way, as far as I can see, this work was funded by a charity, Foundations for Social Change, so I don't think 'a bucket of grant money' was involved, just voluntary donations.
So in other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Researchers discovere that tackling a problem seriously to solve it once and for all costs less in the long run than letting the problem linger on.
Wow... That's worth a Nobel prize.
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In Conclusion... (Score:2)
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I suppose one could draw the conclusion from this study that throwing money at the symptoms of homelessness is cheaper than not doing so
Not necessarily. If homeless shelters start handing out $5000 to everyone who shows up and claims to be homeless, it is possible that homelessness will increase.
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If homeless shelters start handing out $5000 to everyone who shows up and claims to be homeless, it is possible that homelessness will increase.
Well, we started giving out $600/week for people without a job. It was very successful in making/keeping people unemployed, so you're probably on to something there.
UBI (Score:3)
Re: UBI (Score:4, Insightful)
The participants in this study were carefully selected to eliminate anyone with a history of drug or mental problems - the problem with UBI is that first letter "U", which stands for "universal". Also, this study was a one-time payment, UBI is, as commonly understood, intended to be on-going, perpetual distributions of cash.
So you think a study that hands a one-time payment to hand-picked recipients proves that we should continually hand money to everyone forever?
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So you think a study that hands a one-time payment to hand-picked recipients proves that we should continually hand money to everyone forever?
Yes, I think you should continually hand money to me forever.
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No, just give it to the poor and let the money trickle up to the top [slashdot.org].
It's in the name... (Score:4, Informative)
UBI stands for "Universal Basic Income"
If you're picking the receivers of it in ways more than "Is a citizen/resident of the country giving it", then it isn't universal.
Duh (Score:2)
The vast majority of vagrants... er, "homeless," are drug or alcohol addicts or mentally ill or both. If you select for the small minority who are just "normal" people who had bad luck, like losing jobs or a health situation, you will get positive results.
Re: Duh (Score:2)
I wonder how many homeless people they had to interview to find 100+ without drug or mental problems...
garbage stats (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the bottom chart they actually spend more on these items, but it was less of the total because they had more money.
So it only took about $400K CDN... (Score:2)
They spent $400K CDN to determine that if you give thousands of dollars to homeless people without substance or mental issues, it improves their lives? Was there even a question about how this would turn out?
I bet you the results would have been the same if you halved the payment and helped the control group as well, you know the 60 some drug-free, mentally stable homeless people the researchers just watched and provided zero help to.
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Well, what you keep hearing in some circles is that "it is not a problem of money, it is a problem of character". I suppose that study shows that part of the problem is clearly a money problem.
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Aa others pointed out, this study screened out people who had the most obvious "character" problems. What fraction of candidates was that? If it was 10%, that's good evidence that homelessness isn't primarily a problem of character. If it was 75%, that's good evidence that this kind of cash transfer will only help a small fraction of the homeless.
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I've seen figures bandied about that indicate over half of the homeless population have moderate to severe mental issues, substance abuse issues, or both. Broken down (this varies by study, of course), 33% mental issues, 38% alcohol issues, 26% other chemicals, with various degrees of overlapping, of course.
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That would be why they screened the participants for no drugs, no mental health issues - "character".
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It also saved the shelter 8100$ per person per year, meaning an overall cost reduction of 600$ per person per year. It may not sound like much, but it means the same money can help 14 mentally stable homeless persons per year instead of 13, a 7.69% incr
Re: So it only took about $400K CDN... (Score:2)
So when a mentally-stable, non-addicted, non-alcoholic shows up at a homeless shelter, we should hand them $5,700 US and send them on their way, confident we changed their life and applaud ourselves for saving money?
What happens when they come back for more? Is charity now one-and-done, or do we just keep handing out cash and "saving money"?
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The same thing that happens when any other program ends. It ends. If you're on unemployment you have x amount of time before it runs out to find a job. If you're on food stamps, you have x amount of money to use in a particular time. People who are given welfare of this nature are told what the limitations are. If they squander those resources, it's their problem. Most people don't. So stop promoting this myth that giving people a helping hand turns them into
Interesting results (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s certainly an interesting interpretation of the results.
Glancing through the source linked by the CNN article, this appears to be their published data:
https://static1.squarespace.co... [squarespace.com]
The charts seem to show that yes, people who were given a relatively large lump sum of cash were suddenly able to spend more cash on everything.
For the first ~6 months they appear to increased their spending on everything including housing, clothes, food.
After 6-9 months their month-to-month metrics then appear
Re: Interesting results (Score:2)
Did they ever help the members of the control group? I'm guessing not, they deserve to remain homeless, for the good of the study.
Re: Interesting results (Score:2)
That seems to be the case.
The month to month stats for the control group donâ(TM)t appear to improve over the period.
The only thing that happens is that the people who received money slowly fall back to the same level as the control group after several months and no one is better off at the end of the day.
(Except for the researchers, they probably enjoyed their monthly paycheck.)
Re: (Score:2)
They "spent less on drugs and alcohol" because they were screened to not be into drugs or alcohol before they were allowed to participate in the study.
Re: Interesting results (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s the thing... the people receiving money did NOT spend less on drugs and alcohol. They spent more.
We can only deduce one thing from this! (Score:2)
A lot of people are homeless because of alcool problems. Hence, the alcool is the problem. Let's invent synthehol and get rid of homelessness, once and for all!
This isn't new research (Score:4)
What's amazing is 30 years later we're still "researching" it.
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back in the late 90s it was shown that it's cheaper to just give homeless shelter, food & some money
Citation needed.
Many cities have made many different attempts to deal with homelessness. The cities that have tried the hardest (SF, LA, NYC, Seattle) have had worse results than cities that have done much less.
Cities with the most homelessness [usnews.com]
Not random (Score:2)
In other words, this was not random at all. The people in the surveys hand picked people who would be more responsible. Meanwhile the vast majority of actual homeless people probably wouldn't qualify for this, but when the study's results are released, this little tidbit won't be in any of the media coverage.
...which will be peer-reviewed next year... (Score:2)
Every case is different (Score:2)
But a stable address and three square meals does help in finding a job (and in getting off the alcohol)
The key bit (Score:2)
Participants were screened for a low risk of mental health challenges and substance abuse
That's the important bit now isn't it, finding the rare homeless that would actually benefit from a simple lump sum. The results would not be anywhere near as pretty if same money would be given to just average homeless. Some social housing to use on the other hand would benefit every single homeless, even the hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. And would cost less too if specifically built for the purpose.
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Unfortunately the vast MAJORITY of homeless are there by choice ...
Got any proof of that?
They were not cherry picking participants to suit their conclusion. They were providing money to people who could benefit from it, and withholding the money from people like drug addicts who would be harmed by it. I do not think anybody would suggest that a big cash donation to every homeless person would solve the homeless problem once and for all.
Re:The name gives away the Bias. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately the vast MAJORITY of homeless are there by choice
So what? If some percentage of them can be helped with a simple cash infusion minus the bureaucracy which is cheaper to society and faster to get them off the streets, that still matters.
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Being a citizen does not require money. Apparently, you do not want to live in a free country. The solution to homelessness is not prison. Why not give them housing, give them food, give them some stability? If you read the summary you'll see that this works better doing nothing (which currently involves law enforcement), even if its not perfect.
https://www.woodyguthrie.org/L... [woodyguthrie.org]
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So, you're all for "Show me your papers." because I'm taking a stroll? No, piss off.