If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
It’s not the critics of the experiments that are the problem.
The “experiments” are just watering down the idea of UBI into “just rename existing benefits programs”.
You’d need to restructure an entire country’s tax systems to really do a proper experiment. No country could just afford to give everyone free money. You’d have to structure it so the average person pays back exactly what extra they got, and build affordable housing for the people that actually choose to live on just UBI.
Nobody is choosing to live on just the UBI though. Study after study shows that people do more economic activity with a proper UBI, not less.
And yes, we are at the precipice where we either make the jump or not.