Researchers gave thousands of dollars to homeless people with positive results

I&#x27;m skeptical of these UBI experiments in general, because they don&#x27;t take into account that widespread, permanent UBI will change people&#x27;s behaviour in very different ways from a small, temporary experiment. How do populations respond when they are guaranteed $2k &#x2F; month forever no matter what they do? Do they simply start asking for $3k &#x2F; month after that? Does the median individual stop working and watch TV all day, or do they do amazing creative things?<p>One crazy experiment we could try: Give Finland (they&#x27;ve run a small-scale UBI exp before) $1.2 trillion to run a nationwide, long-term UBI experiment on their whole population(5M (pop. Finland) * $24k &#x2F; year (UBI payments) * 10 years = $1.2 trillion).<p>Make the decision about UBI based on what happens in Finland after 10 years. Not perfect, and it will never happen, but certainly would be a more trustworthy indicator of UBIs real effects on a society :)

Obviously when you give a small subset of a disadvantaged population money, that subset will thrive. When you give all disadvantaged people the same thing, have you done more than raise the floor, creating a population of slightly richer but still disadvantaged individuals? We don&#x27;t know because we keep trying it on subsets.<p>We&#x27;ve seen this trial plenty of times[0], the outcome is always the same. We either need to give up on UBI or start larger programs. More small trials isn&#x27;t going to help anyone other than the ~hundreds of people who were lucky enough to win that particular lottery.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income_pilots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income_pilots</a>

San Jose spent $17M to build 50 tiny single bed sheds (avg $340k per shed). If they’d put that money in some financial investment returning 10%, they could’ve just given 50 people 35k per year until they got back to normal.<p>Politicians (in this case Sam Liccardo) will do anything for 15 minutes of fame.