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The Almighty Buck Government

Colorado's Universal Basic Income Experiment Gets Surprising Results (coloradosun.com) 370

In November of 2022, "More than 800 people were selected to participate in the Denver Basic Income Project," reports the Colorado Sun, "while they were living on the streets, in shelters, on friends' couches or in vehicles.

One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights...

The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.

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Colorado's Universal Basic Income Experiment Gets Surprising Results

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  • by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @11:49AM (#64587827)

    People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation. This has been pretty consistently show before, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/a... [bbc.com]

    Considering how much we spend on all sorts of shit, I wish we'd invest into larger scale experients to help drive policy in a scientific manner rather than just going by vibes.

    • Yeah I think there's a core difference as well as giving for example a struggling, working family a UBI versus giving a homeless or disabled person a UBI. UBI tries to fix one problem and one problem only: a lack of income. The former group usually is usually assisted with that issue and as you mentioned will generally spend that money on needs.

      The latter group has underlying core problems that are not solved by income, at least not yet, it's just shuffling their core issues around for a little while but

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        Income should help many homeless people with finding housing, which in turn will help many of them find employment. If you literally have nothing including no home it's quite difficult to address any of your own problems.

        • Depends on the situation though, is there affordable housing in your area you can afford with your new money, especially if you don't also have a job or long work history since you've been int hat situation so long, or are disabled or addicted.

          Like if you had a junkie cousin and he said he need $1k to get a new apartment you'd be like "no, you gotta let me help you clean up your shit first". Money solves a ton of problems but you have to be in a minimum state to even try those, we just need to recognize th

    • I have a dream... A dream in which laws come complete with acceptance criteria. How do we measure whether or not a law works? Set the acceptance criteria ahead of time: "This act shall be deemed successful if the following conditions are met within XXX years..." And, if the acceptance criteria which were set by the people who passed the law are not met, the law can easily be repealed.

      Legislature by vibe just plain sucks.

    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

      People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation.

      That did not happen here. The data shows the control group experienced the same 45% improvement. It wasn't the money. Perhaps for 45% homeless is naturally temporary?

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation.

        That did not happen here. The data shows the control group experienced the same 45% improvement. It wasn't the money. Perhaps for 45% homeless is naturally temporary?

        If California is any indication, about 66% of homeless people are only homeless for a short period of time. So that seems like a low number, but it could be that "a short period of time" is still longer than this study's duration, that the 66% number is based on the total population of people who *became* homeless during a given period of time, rather than out of all of the people who *were* homeless during that period of time (the latter of which would include chronic homeless from previous periods, and t

        • by drnb ( 2434720 )

          I guess being able to afford clean clothes, personal grooming, cab fare to the job interview, and a working cell phone makes you more employable.

          Private charities have helped with that. Collecting suits, shoes, etc. Some barbers have been giving free haircuts. I think we should promote such private programs more, the efforts are more likely to leverage local knowledge than something from the state capital.

  • Which payment plan gave better payoff, bolus up front or uniform monthly? What was the control group? Does data imply a boost is all they need or you will support this person the rest of their live? How does this use of money compare to the base case use for the city? How did these people secure appt?
    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      >Which payment plan gave better payoff, bolus up front or uniform monthly? What was the control group?

      Group A: $566 - 12000 = -11434 per person
      Group B: $753 -12000 = -11247 per person
      Group C: $674 - 600 = 74 per person

      Group C was the control group, which also provided the best payoff.

      > Does data imply a boost is all they need or you will support this person the rest of their live?

      You would obviously need a longer study for that. Researchers mentioned this also in their conclusion. But according to th

  • by seebs ( 15766 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @11:58AM (#64587863) Homepage

    Every basic income pilot program does this, it's not surprising anymore. The first time it increased employment it was counter-intuitive, anyway, but ten or twenty experiments in, it's just not weird or surprising anymore.

  • From the graph in the article on how many were housed at 10 months:
    Group A ($1000/mo): 44%
    Group B ($6500, then $500/mo): 48%
    Group C ($50/mo): 43%

    And then later down, a graph for how many are still sleeping outside.
    Group A dropped from 29% to 9% (20% drop)
    Group B dropped from 43% to 25% (18% drop)
    Group C dropped from 36% to 16% (20% drop)

    Those are statistically identical for a group of 800 people.

    The second graph also makes me question how they selected their groups. Shouldn't the fraction sleeping outside

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @12:31PM (#64587931)
    That’s a cash-transfer scheme to alleviate poverty, and it’s been shown to work, over and over again. While there are, in fact, small numbers of people who are truly undeserving and lazy (the welfare queens that conservatives love to hate), most homeless people are badly down on their luck, and an injection of enough cash to get them off the streets usually gets them on a better path to non-street living and employment.

    The addicts need a separate type of help.

    But the kicker is that this type of spending literally pays for itself. Spend a million dollars on programs like this, and the result is 1.5 million less tax dollars spent on cops, hospitals, jails and halfway houses. The conservatives that oppose these programs are basically shouting “I INSIST WE SPEND MORE TAX DOLLARS ON THE POOR THAN NECESSARY”. This has been shown in dozens of studies.

    But this is NOT a UBI scheme.
    • by Rhys ( 96510 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @01:28PM (#64588075)

      The conservatives oppose them because rich conservatives tell them to oppose them, because other rich conservatives own large chunks of the prison industrial complex, or its ancillaries (eg, police equipment manufacturers) and it would be terrible if those folks went broke and had to get a real job.

    • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @01:39PM (#64588101)

      That’s a cash-transfer scheme to alleviate poverty, and it’s been shown to work, over and over again.

      It did NOT work in this case. The control group experienced the same 45% improvement. Perhaps for 45% homelessness is naturally temporary?

      I'm all for helping people, but this study is saying we need to look somewhere other than cash transfer.

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @05:00PM (#64588579) Homepage Journal

        That’s a cash-transfer scheme to alleviate poverty, and it’s been shown to work, over and over again.

        It did NOT work in this case. The control group experienced the same 45% improvement.

        The control group experienced a 3.58x increase in the number of people who were paying for their own housing. The other groups experience a 7.33x and 8x increase, respectively. They did *NOT* experience the same improvement. They experienced the same end state. There's a difference. You can't just blindly compare outcomes between experiment groups that don't start out at the same point.

        Say you have a clinical trial. The control group was mostly stage 1 cancer. The experimental group was mostly stage 4 cancer. The control and experiment groups both have 50% remission rates at the end. Did the drug do nothing because the groups ended up with the same outcome? I mean, to be brutally honest, you can't say for sure with just those numbers, but it is likely that the drug saved a lot of lives. To find out for sure, you have to do cohort analysis on the raw data, comparing groups of people who started out at similar stages.

        The same thing needs to be done here, with cohorts based on whether they started out in a house or apartment that they were paying for, living with family or friends, living in a shelter, or living outside on the street. Each of those groups should be further subdivided into sub-cohorts in each group based on whether they were or were not employed at the start of the period and whether they have children. Each of the various combinations should be analyzed independently.

        Mind you, this is a path that can lead to p-hacking, but you would legitimately expect differences between those groups in terms of how well a UBI helps them, so it isn't quite the green jelly bean theory here.

  • by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@@@tedata...net...eg> on Saturday June 29, 2024 @12:32PM (#64587935) Journal

    The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights.

    But who wants to save taxpayer dollars when we can instead funnel all of it to medical service providers [fiercehealthcare.com] and incarceration service agencies [morethanourcrimes.org]? I mean, those corporate jets don't pay for themselves!

  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @12:35PM (#64587943)
    According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements. Therefore, it is not due to UBI.
    • by stwrtpj ( 518864 )

      According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements. Therefore, it is not due to UBI.

      The control group was likely the result of a placebo effect. The small amount of money they got -- or perhaps just the idea that someone gave a shit -- was enough to boost their confidence and let them pull themselves out of their situation. Either way, it worked.

      • A real control group would have got $zero but still been watched/studied. $50/month was not a control, it was a different test group.

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements. Therefore, it is not due to UBI.

        The control group was likely the result of a placebo effect. The small amount of money they got -- or perhaps just the idea that someone gave a shit -- was enough to boost their confidence and let them pull themselves out of their situation. Either way, it worked.

        Not necessarily. It may simply be that for 45% homeless is naturally temporary.

    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements.

      Not true at all. The control group showed a similar number of people paying for their own housing at the end of the period, but started out with twice as many people paying for their own housing as the experiment groups did, so the improvement was actually considerably smaller.

      The control group also showed a decline in full-time employment, while the experiment groups showed an increase in full-time employment.

  • "Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights..."

    There seems to be a disconnect between my idea of savings and this. So to spell it out, $9.2 million was spent on various aspects of this study, which resulted in an additional $589,214 being spent on something other than the public services for which it had been explicitly designated. In particular, this did not result in $9,789,2
  • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @01:05PM (#64588021)

    Again, we have a tiny fraction of a percent of people, means tested to receive money among an overwhelmingly larger population of people not receiving benefit. So they are in competition with an advantage, which isn't how UBI would work.

    Also, they go in knowing the party will be over in a matter of months, so even if hypothetically they would be inclined to "coast", they would know they need to be prepared to go without.

    This is just more means tested welfare.

    The experiments do not model how a level playing field would look, how funding it would be implemented, how the economy would react to a new numerical baseline for "income", and people's behavior of it is a confidently permanent benefit rather than a short term benefit that you need to prepare to go without.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @01:12PM (#64588035)
    We've had this research since the '80s when sociologists first noticed that means tested welfare programs meant that as soon as somebody started to get on their feet we pulled the rug out from under them and they collapsed.

    We just changed the name from welfare program to UBI because we've had decades and decades of propaganda attacking the word welfare and associating it with groups of people we dislike.

    If UBI ever gets off the ground in any real capacity they will do the same thing again. I'm not sure The younger generations dumb enough to fall for it again but maybe. They're going to spend a lot of money to make sure it doesn't happen.

    Because remember it's no good being rich if nobody is poor
  • One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research."

    So we can conclude one of two things. Either:

    1. $50/mo works just as well as any of the other amounts (I'm guessing that nobody wants to conclude this), -or-
    2. Some other factor was at work. This is actually fairly common in various medication and therapy studies - somehow just being in some kind of structured study, getting some kind of attention, seems to confer some kind of therapeutic benefit.
  • UBI, DEI and LGTBQ a whole lot of slashdoters heads would explode.

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