1y ago

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment in Kenya are in - Vox

www.vox.com The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment

Money always helps, but for the very poor, one lump sum can last a long time.

Politics @beehaw.org

www.vox.com /future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri

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23 comments

Tl;dr: extra money makes people happier.
- "Conservatives" hate this simple trick!
- Nonsense. My boss tells me I should be grateful I have a minimum wage job at all

Actual summary:
The article's focus is: lump sum payment vs regular payment.
Program had three groups: $20/month for 2 years, $500 lump sum, $20/month for 12 years.
Lump sum allowed people to invest (e.g., to start a business) in a way that monthly payments didn't.
Monthly recipients often pooled funds in rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) to provide a lump-sum-like investment ability.
Monthly recipients were "generally happier and reported better mental health" than lump sum recipients. Articles quotes speculation of cause to be stress related to investment vs the stability from having monthly payment.
"The researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol".
While you're free to circlejerk about how the article shows how great UBI is, that's not really what it talks about.
- The researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol
  I'd say that this is a pretty important finding. This is a common talking point for people against UBI, so finding evidence to the contrary is promising
  
  I'd say that's the takeaway!
  
  Be careful of this conclusion. When a similar pilot project was done for homeless people (in Canada, I believe), the methodology was rigged. They made it so only people they felt would be most likely to give the pilot a positive result were selected. This created an overwhelming bias towards the outcome.
  I'm not sure exactly what the methodology was for this Kenyan project, but I'm hoping that there was no selection bias.
- Im jerking off so hard rn
- In a general sense it is though. The long-term group did as well as the lump sum group.

Good stuff, don't let people tell you that these things don't work

This is not even really a proper implimentation of UBI anyways right? They are injecting more capital into the local economy of course people were better off...
I still dont see this as a proper experiment of UBI since it's not self-contained within a society.
- Okay, great. Then let's actually do it. Everything below 100 percent implementation is a success so let's stop handwringing over the size of the experiment and pull the trigger.
- What do you mean self-contained?
  
  In this experiment, external funding is paying for the handouts.
  In a self-contained system, the same system/community providing the handouts would be generating the revenue for them (e.g., via taxation). Think of existing social welfare where "the system" generates the revenue that pays for the welfare programs.

23 comments