UBI: Stockton, California Starts Universal Basic Income Experiment

[appalachiablue]

Will 'basic income' become the California norm? Town starts $500 no-strings payments. Sacramento Bee, Feb. 15, 2019.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - After months of planning, Stockton, Calif., is sending debit cards loaded with $500 to a select group of residents starting Friday as part of a closely watched experiment in universal basic income, the first led by a U.S. city. Stockton, once dubbed "America's foreclosure capital," was the largest city to seek bankruptcy protection before Detroit's 2013 filing. During the recession, unemployment soared toward 20 percent, and violent crime rose. Today, one in four residents lives below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Now, as the city slowly recovers from financial disarray, officials and advocates look to the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, to provide insight on whether a long-term basic income program is a viable creative approach to lifting residents out of poverty. "The need has only been reiterated" in the last few weeks of preparation, SEED director Sukhi Samra said. "Folks are ready to use this money to pay bills, to save for the future, to pay off debt and pay for medicine."

Each month for 18 months, 130 adults living in the city's lower-income neighborhood will receive $500 to spend however they want. Researchers with SEED will track, study and analyze how the income boost affects residents' spending and saving habits, and how it influences other factors such as quality of life and financial stability. The money for the program comes from a $1 million grant from the Economic Security Project, a network organization that has raised $10 million to fund and explore universal basic income programs and their viability.

"I think (the program) will make people work better and smarter and harder," Mayor Michael Tubbs told NPR last year. "We're not just designed just to work all day and run a rat race. We're designed to be in community, to volunteer, to vote, to raise our kids. And I think the more inputs and investments we can give in people to do those things, the better off we are as a community."...
More, http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/will-basic-income-become-the-california-norm-town-starts-dollar500-no-strings-payments/ar-BBTDu84?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15



- Downtown Stockton, California Waterfront, 2013.

[Igel]

1. The results are already skewed.

They'll be comparing unobserved lower-income behavior with carefully monitored slightly-subsidized behavior.

And then extrapolating that carefully monitored behavior to unmonitored contexts.

The underlying assumption seems to be that people spend their money on the same things when people know they're being monitored and when they're left on their own.

There's a raft of research saying otherwise.

The longer-run finished Finnish experiment with more funding and less carefully selected participants doesn't have final data. Year 1's data was summarized to say, "they feel better and are apparently healthier, but there's no increase in employment."