Folks investigating UBI (Universal Basic Income) screw it up:
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. [Los Angeles Times]
Never mind the absurdly small study size. The fact of the matter is that one of the crucial variables that affects human mentality, which is the essence of the measurement subject, is time. That the study was limited to a year was bad enough; that it was cut off after six months is the mark of the partisan, not the seasoned scientist.
These results are liable to join the graveyard of ghostly results, never to be reliably reproduced, because maybe after a year the typical study subject could easily decide to return to whatever habits put them in the state of homelessness in the first place, assuming it was not some bit of bad luck beyond their control. The longer study might detect this, consigning this study to the curiosity bin.
Such a study is vulnerable to so many insidiously unrecognized variables, such as researcher impact, and then to cut it off short! I like the idea of UBI, and I fear this cutoff does a disservice to the academics of UBI.
