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https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-reports-of-ubis-death-are-greatly>
"To borrow a quip from Mark Twain, the reports of Universal Basic Income’s
death have been greatly exaggerated. This essay serves as my response as a
subject-matter expert in this particular field to recent shots fired against
cash transfers like this liberal one and this conservative one. For over ten
years, I’ve been reading and compiling the results of basic income pilots and
unconditional cash studies. I can assure you that the authors of such
think-pieces, however evidence-informed they may appear to be, are akin to the
blind-folded touching an elephant’s trunk and claiming they’ve discovered a new
species of snake. They know more than nothing, but they don’t know enough to
know how much they don’t know.
Here’s 9 things you need to know about recent unconditional cash transfer
experiments:
1.
COVID-19 happened: For pilots that distributed monthly cash between 2020
and 2023, the pandemic, stimulus, and high inflation need to be considered as
potential confounds by comparing to pilots that happened outside those years.
2.
The U is universal: Part of what makes UBI a UBI is universality. A
non-universal pilot can help inform the discussion, but not as much as a
universal pilot that uses a saturation site design can.
3.
The household size problem: Part of what makes UBI a UBI is also that
every member of a household gets the money. If a household of four gets $500 a
month, that will have less of an impact than one person getting the same
amount.
4.
Prevention versus treatment: It’s one thing to provide cash to those in
need. It’s another to provide cash to prevent need.
5.
Time is a factor: Fewer strong conclusions can be drawn from a one-year
experiment or even a three-year experiment than from decades of data.
6.
The control group problem: Control group details vary from experiment to
experiment. Consider this carefully.
7.
Evidence for thee but not for me: Those who may wish to provide
benefits-in-kind vs. cash tend to not care about benchmarking those programs
against cash.
8.
Missing the forest for the trees: Concluding that targeted cash is better
than UBI is missing the point of how effective UBI is at actually reaching
those in need.
9.
There’s more to poverty than brainwaves: It would be very interesting if
it turns out that UBI can impact brain development, but if it doesn’t, so
what?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
