New results from another completed basic income pilot. This one was in Cambridge, MA where 130 people got $500/mo for 18 months. Did they work less? No. They worked MORE. Recipients went from 36% FT employed to 40%. Those who didn't get it went from 30% to 28%. cambridgecf.org/research-on-...
I can already hear the irate masses. "State benefit scroungers are stealing our jobs!"
They keep doing these studies and they keep getting positive results but it never seems to translate to any policy outcomes.
It's kind of amazing how much mainstream economic wisdom of income substitution effect is just pure theory, completely unmoored from actual data on human behavior.
Simply put they had money to fix cars get medical help earlier so life gets easier and work is more feasible
The pilots will continue until one fails so it can serve as the single solitary anecdote to kill the policy forever.
For those asking "why keep doing these experiments": the researchers know. The repetition of these studies is 1. their version of throwing a binder at policymakers going IT WORKS YOU CHUCKLEHEADS FUND IT ALREADY and 2. helping people who could benefit from UBI by giving them "experimental" UBI
The pilots are great; huge fan. How about support for scaling up, though? Some back-of-napkin figures... $500/mo to the ~165m Americans making < median income = ~$990bn annually (if I'm reading numbers that big accurately). In the long-term, Medicare, etc. costs go down, but how to get started??
Look we've got hard data that an increase in billionaires is bad for people, planet and jobs. Why is that experiment continuing?
I never thought much about basic income as I was moreso focused on ways to deal with capitalism from the top down, but this is very comforting to hear