I admit that I haven't finished the book "Utopian for Realists", but the author showed numerous studies and practical examples that universal basic income works. And believe it or not, Richard Nixon was close to introducing UBI but his Friedmanite-advisors dissuaded him.
When I took out a loan from my bank I swear to God for the first 6 months they were absolutely terrified of my spending habits and I got emails daily about how to spend and and how my spending habits were reckless. I've made every payment I don't understand what f****** high horse they were coming from.
And on the flip side, when you're not spending much money, you're being accused of ruining the economy. Especially if you like avocados.
no that would be socialism, silly
I'm gonna be that guy, since there are a lot of comments saying that "research suggests".
Source?
I do fully agree with it. The drug trade is impossible to stop, but decriminalisation and funding of healthcare will help many that are homeless. From tackling these aspects, helping those that want to free roam to do so safely, basically leaves you with those that just need some money to get back on their feet.
But, even if these things seem obvious, they need a source if you're going to speak from a position of fact.
Assuming the link works, this is a great resource of research papers on the topic - https://www.givedirectly.org/cash-evidence-explorer/
Here's one local to me. Slightly old but quite relevant.
Yup. Programmes that have experimented with giving homeless people hundreds in no-rules cash find that within a couple of months most of them have secured accommodation and reconnected with family and friends. After a while the majority are in paid employment.
Who would have guessed that the most of the problems of extreme poverty could be solved with money?!
Next you're going to tell me you can solve homelessness by giving people housing
But I'm using these bootstraps, they can go find their own!
But to take it a bit further, high capacity public infrastructure can go a long way towards improving the lives of low income working people.
Trains, buses, and subways can eliminate the need to own and maintain a car. Public housing can get people off the street, where they won't be at risk of harm from interpersonal violence or exposure to severe weather. Public education and public health care have more benefits than I could list.
At an individual level, "Just give people money" is an immediate and useful generic panacea. But at a more macro level, geographic access to grocery stores and clinics and colleges and bus stops and permanent homes and factories matter just as much.
Clearly, the Venn of those who're empowered to make those changes and those who've played at least a couple hours of SimCity is two estranged circles.
But to take it a bit further, high capacity public infrastructure can go a long way towards improving the lives of low income working people.
Trains, buses, and subways can eliminate the need to own and maintain a car.
The real problem is zoning. If the density is high enough (and mixed-use enough), people can just fucking walk places whether you've got public transit or not!
Even in areas where we have zoned for dense real estate, we've built these four lane boulevards with barely a crosswalk between them.
At some level, we could use a little zoning. Pedestrianization isn't going to happen via the free market.
It needs to be quality of those things, as well. And they know this. It's designed to keep us too tired, broken physically and mentally to get off the wheel, and not just under it, either. There's enough for everyone, just some few want to hoard it like decades worth of paper, not because it may come in handy, just because bloodsport is still entertainment, no matter how well they dress it.
It needs to be quality of those things, as well.
Oh absolutely. I have a bus stop on my corner, but it only picks up every 2 hours and then doesn't go to downtown.
There’s enough for everyone, just some few want to hoard it like decades worth of paper, not because it may come in handy, just because bloodsport is still entertainment, no matter how well they dress it.
Kropotkin was saying it over a century ago. Bread Book, baby.
People periodically ask how a country like Denmark or New Zealand or Japan can have such high standards of living relative to their individual incomes. Or why a country like the UK or Saudia Arabia can be so rich and yet appear so poor from a street level view.
So much boils down to who has access to quality infrastructure.
At an individual level, "Just give people money" is an immediate and useful generic panacea.
But at a more macro level, geographic access to grocery stores and clinics and colleges and bus stops and permanent homes and factories matter just as much.FTFY.
The wealthy's deathgrip on their money is phenominally strong
Guillotines have a way of loosening one's grip.
I Sweden a liberal lobby group suggested "build apartments without kitchens" for poor people. It is so fucking dystopian.
Housing without kitchens has come up in modern history multiple times: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/
their designs just had single family homes with kitchens. But Marie Howland convinced them to sketch in small groups of kitchen-free houses, each with access to a shared kitchen, where residents would take turns working.
Austin thought it could be a city of kitchen-less houses. And she thought that the food could to each house on a system of underground trains. She drew maps upon maps, and tons of floor plans. She published her ideas in a journal called ‘The Western Comrade’ and even applied to patent her underground food train idea.
But the kitchen-less house movement still didn’t die. In England, the urban planner Ebenezer Howard actually incorporated kitchen-less homes into some of his “garden city” communities. He called these homes “cooperative quadrangles.” They had a shared courtyard and shared kitchen, surrounded by smaller kitchen-less dwellings.
Isn't that just a hotel room?
Ok but have we tried telling them about Jesus instead of giving them money? They're poor because they're bad. If you give them money then they'll use it to be bad again, which will keep them poor. /s
Cereal for dinner sounds pretty reasonable, what do you think?
Noo poor people will just use up the money if we give them some!!1!
Works the same with the climate crisis, amazing!
Ok reusing clothes is not a bad thing. Even in a perfect world with no poverty, it's important to reuse.
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Edit 3: one last edit that I'm putting at the top because I'm not sure if people are only reading part of what I've written, jumping to conclusions and then putting words into my mouth; or if I've just been very bad at conveying what I'm trying to say.
Firstly: I'm arguing from an American perspective, something I failed to specify.
Secondly: money is great, however, many people need more than money. By all means, give them money, but make sure they have other resources in case they need it. If nothing else, there are a lot of people in homelessness or poverty with serious mental health needs. Money isn't going to help if they can't afford healthcare.
Thirdly: I also failed to give examples of what I meant by, do something else too. I meant, cap rent, build public housing, ensure that people have access to food even when CEOs are renting out pineapples, etc.
Finally: the US runs on greed. Prices in the US are outstripping wages dramatically because CEOs realized they could charge more. I think the reason why giving money works in studies is because CEOs don't know who's getting the handouts; if they did, they'd absolutely try to fleece them for the assistance money. That's why doing it universally, so that CEOs know that a lot of people are getting additional money, without any other form of assistance, will just lead to people being priced out of life again.
Not sure how much I'll contribute or respond after this. I'm feeling kinda discouraged due to how many people are putting words in my mouth (it may be a misunderstanding, but it's still demoralizing).
I'm not convinced that just cash will solve homelessness or poverty. It may help, but it seems like a "give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime" kinda situation. Give people the fish so they can eat, but if you want them to actually be independent, then you gotta make sure they have the tools they need to do so.
And you know what, maybe they just are that way, maybe they're just cursed to always be a dependent on someone. However, if that's the case then they're going to need way more help than just fish. In the meantime though, maybe treat them like human beings that are down on their luck but otherwise capable of supporting themselves. Yeah, make sure they have food, a roof over their head, water, toilets and so on, but don't stop there. That's why I'm saying this, there may be people who see your post and think that just throwing money at the problem will make it go away. It'll help, but it's not gonna fix it 100%.
Edit: I'm not sure why it's controversial to say that people need more help than just money. Personally? If I was homeless or in poverty, I'd want more than just money. Like, I'm not saying to not give people who are homeless or in poverty money, but what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't stop there.
Edit 2: I don't understand why people are so confused here. I'm not saying it won't work for some people, but there are people that it won't work for. To repeat something I said further along, in my experience, there are people who take these things literally. In my experience, there are people who would look at this meme, say, "sounds good, let's do that" and then get mad when it doesn't work for everyone.
I'm not saying that money won't help a lot of people; it would. It's just that there are people who will take this literally and believe it's the only thing you have to do.
Most people who are homeless were a paycheck or two away from homelessness.
It's easier for the housed to become homeless, than for the homeless to become housed. It's systemic, and a good chunk of it is employers mistreating employees.
Thing is, the research into direct cash transfusions and other straight basic income has shown that poor people generally have a very good idea of what they specifically need to do to get out of poverty, be that a gym membership to shower, good clothes, a bike or car, an apartment, someplace to keep documents and medications where they won’t be thrown out by cops, getting a GED after their parents threw them out for being gay, a preschool because their minimum wage job won’t let them keep a baby around the building, or other prerequisite to getting a job / a job that pays well enough for an apartment, they just don’t have the money to actually do any of it.
A person have a good community kitchen they can go to and get free food, and as such food stamps are worthless to them, but they can’t spend that same pittance on something that would actually help them get out of poverty like clothes and a gym membership or saving up for a small car where they can store their stuff and get to jobs, all because a government commite of people and lobbyists who have never lived outside of a gated community have decided what each poor persons budget should look like and coincidentally they all look the same.
People know how to learn to catch fish, they just can’t do it without the right tools, or because they have to be back standing in line at the shelter by 3PM each day.
We can choose to either provide for those who lack food, housing, and other things, or we can choose not to. We often choose not to despite having both sufficient food and shelter.
We can also choose to pursue the goal of making the poor independent.
But if we choose to leave people unprovided for, that is just what we have chosen. There is no way around that.
Making the poor independent is a separate project, in the same vein as making people stop being violent, or unhealthy, or depressed, or sick. An eternal pursuit , with a curious caveat. Because in the case of the poor, if the population of dependent poor die off while the newly improved Independent population remains, it would be a success. No more dependants is the goal, quite literally. It is treated more like ridding ourselves of leeches.
Because contribution is demanded, no matter how banale, cynical, useless, performative or downright harmful. Marketing, manipulation, waste and serving up garbage is all much better than the insufficiently productive poor. Learn to weld, only to make giant steel flower beds to decorate an apartment building, supply the ridiculous demand. Supplying something is the point, regardless of how necessary the demand is.
There's also the matter that we've chosen very explicitly to disallow the poor any power to simply leave the city and establish their of towns of rejects with the materials that exist in nature, as harvesting huge quantities of wood and clay without permissions – unlikely to be obtained – is expressly illegal. Apparently we have to, to protect the environment from people. But it's not civilization's responsibility to rectify that injustice, is it? It can just disallow you your shelter and leave it at that. Civilization does not have to compensate a man for the option it has taken away from him.
People just need enough to buy a rod
