New Research Shows UBI Makes Life Worse ... BUT WHY?!

In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the latest research and real-world case studies on cash transfers and Universal Basic Income (UBI). They discuss why recent experiments and studies show that cash handouts and guaranteed income programs often fail to deliver the promised improvements in well-being, employment, and poverty reduction. Drawing on examples from Native American tribes, major UBI studies, and historical work programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, they explore the complex relationship between income, work, and happiness. The conversation also touches on media coverage, policy implications, and the future of social programs in an AI-driven world.

Here Kelsey Piper’s essay in The Argument that we referenced for this episode:

Episode Transcript:

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm. I’m so excited to be speaking with you today because we’re gonna talk about universal basic income and how even more. Experimentation and research on it has come to light showing that it does not meaningfully change policy outcomes like housing and stress.

It actually decreases working hours. And even though people still anecdotally say that it, oh, it’s so great, it doesn’t actually help them, and this that we’re gonna be covering is coming from someone who really wants. Universal basic income and cash handouts to work or cash transfers as as they would probably put it.

Yeah. So what we’re gonna do is get into this and try explore. So this is not for

Malcolm Collins: people who think this is not the Sam Altman study. We already did an episode on that one, this giant study that showed if you give people a thousand dollars a month, uh uh, over three years, at the end of it, they’re poorer than the people who got nothing.

Well, we have

Simone Collins: to just explore here and going beyond the, the information that we’re gonna go over in the article that shows in various different studies how it doesn’t work. We wanna explore the really key question [00:01:00] here of why do these cash transfers fail? But it’s super clear in the data that earning more correlates with better outcomes.

So that’s the other thing. Okay. Hold, before we get into that,

Malcolm Collins: I think it’s very important that we frame for people why this is an important conversation right now. Yeah. And why it is such an existential threat to humanity. Yes. Ubi, I an existential threat AI may replace a lot of people’s jobs. The last time we did a video on when will AI actually replace jobs, the head of one of our programming teams.

Bruno had been the one who sort of asked the question. He’s like, I don’t see people being let go because of ai. I don’t see things changing because of ai. Now, like three months later, the R Fab team is just me, him in ai because it has replaced all of those jobs. That is how quickly is you can go from saying, I have no idea how this is gonna, you know, actually replace workers or actually change the economy to like, just months later and like, oh, this is doing most of my work. Right. And I, I, I, [00:02:00] why this becomes so threatening is it’s like, well, how do you maintain an economy around that? And then you have to look at what happens to a population if it’s on UBI Intergenerationally.

Mm-hmm. Right? And you know, you have. Predictions. Like the predictions you get in wally. In Wally, they sort of show, I think an actually pretty accurate prediction of what could happen to humanity, if anything less gruesome.

Wally: Space now. We did that yesterday. I don’t want to do that. Well then what do you want to do? I don’t know. Something.

But over here. Hello.

Time for lunch. In a cup.

. Attention Axiom shoppers. Try blue. It’s the new red. Ooh. Ooh. Lovely.

Malcolm Collins: [00:03:00] So if we’re gonna go over some real life case studies here before we go into the data mm-hmm. You have the. Chen Band of Louisiana Indians in California, despite operating one of the largest, most profitable casinos in the US Chenga Resort Casino, generating over 1 billion annually and distributing substantial per capita payments up to $20,000 per member.

Monthly in peak years. Oh wow. Okay. The tribe reported a staggering 91% unemployment rate with the unemployed individuals often living below the poverty line. Wait, so they’re probably

Simone Collins: unemployed ‘cause they feel like their money is taken care of, but there was still in poverty.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, the money comes on Good years.

So they’re not getting this every year. And so they are living in just like existential property. For another example here you have the HoChunk Nation, Winnebago Tribe, Wisconsin and Nebraska. This tribe runs multiple casinos, HoChunk gaming and distributes per capita payments from revenues, historically 500 to [00:04:00] $1,000 monthly, varying by year.

Yet their unemployment rate is at around 82% in 2005. It fell though recently in 2022 it fell to 32%, but that’s still six x. The national average was poverty affecting around 30% of members. So I’m not gonna keep going over all of these because there are a number of, of, of examples like this, but it is and we’re probably gonna do a, a separate video just on what happens if you’re intergenerationally exposed to UBI and how much it just FAPs your culture of its potentiality.

Mm-hmm. How quickly high skilled jobs just disappear from communities that this happens to. Ooh. And what it would mean for the human species if we lived with this, but continue.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. So what we’re gonna do is go over the article and the argument that goes over all this research called Giving People Money, helped Less than I thought it would by Kelsey Piper.

And then we’re gonna talk about this, like, why is it that, you know, ‘cause you, you would think okay if, [00:05:00] you know, having more income. Leads to better outcomes. Why does giving people more income lead to worse outcomes? ‘Cause I think that’s a really key cultural question. So getting into the article, just give people money. It’s the simple brute force solution to so many problems. In low income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash.

Even in high income countries like the US when disaster strikes often the best thing you can do is get money into the hands of affected people. Immediately. They know whether they should use it to buy gas, rent an Airbnb, fly to their cousin’s house. Or one stayed over. So it wasn’t that crazy to assume, particularly once promising pilots were released, that the same should be true for addressing chronic poverty in high income countries.

If you give a new mom a few hundred dollars a month, or a homeless man, $1,000 a month, that’s gotta show up in the debt, right? Alas, a few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new [00:06:00] mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line.

The goal was to figure out whether sizable monthly payments help people lead better lives, get better educations and jobs, care for more of their children, and achieve better health outcomes. Many of the studies are still ongoing, but at this point, the results are uncertain. They’re pretty consistent and very weird.

Multiple large, high quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes, or employment treated Participants do work a little less. But shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either low stress, lower stress levels, or higher overall reported life satisfaction.

So I’m gonna

Malcolm Collins: stop and, and pull out what’s being said here.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That when people are like, well. You know, if, if you just gave me more money or I just didn’t have to worry about money so much Exactly. I would be less stressed. Yeah. It’s the money. It’s

Simone Collins: always, it’s the money. It’s the money. I don’t have enough money,

Malcolm Collins: actually.

Untrue. If you earned more [00:07:00] money, you would be less stressed. Mm-hmm. Not if you were given more money.

Simone Collins: And this is really key and, and we’ll get into this at the end. Because, yeah, total, total highlight. All right. To continue homeless people, new mothers and low income Americans all over the country receive thousands of dollars, and it’s practically invisible in the data on so many important metrics.

These people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid. I cannot stress how shocking I find this, and I want to be clear. This is not, we got some weak counter evidence. These are careful, well conducted studies. They’re large enough to rule out even some more positive effects, and they’re.

All very similar. No, I wanna, I

Malcolm Collins: wanna stop again here. So the studies on UBI are particularly damning because most of them were done by people who were for UBI. Yes. And tried to frame the data as being as pro UBI as possible.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s, so the a, a big issue with this is that many media outlets, if they cover these at all, they manipulate the results to only like very selectively say [00:08:00] that this was good because people don’t wanna hear this.

This is not pleasant news for anyone because everyone’s answer to Malcolm’s point is always, no, just gimme more money and then I’ll be okay. Mm-hmm. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive, and yet you’d be hard pressed to hear about it in the media quote.

Overall, the larger and more credible studies in this space have tended to find worse effects, and yet the press seems to prefer to cover the small pilots. That show positive impacts of a Vivat co-author of one recent open research study on guaranteed income in the US told me the war on poverty is the unfinished business of American liberalism.

No randomized control trial is really going to convince me that money does not improve people’s lives. But I do think cash as an intervention is best used in emergencies for pregnant women, domestic violence victims, or in other narrower contexts where a study is still on note. Did you just

Malcolm Collins: notice that she, she basically said only for women.

For the, the two examples she gave pregnant women and in her mind, likely domestic [00:09:00] violence women, she is saying only for women. And this is how women think. We want to take society’s money and, and use it to make women nuns to the state that

Simone Collins: well, yeah. I mean, that is, that is a whole nother can of worms.

She continues winning. The war on poverty will require more than just transfers. It will require building and improving institutions that provide education, healthcare, and housing. It’s harder this way, but in the words of John Meer keys, Keens, anything we can do, we can afford. The evidence. What do the basic income studies really show?

This is so interesting. First, some good news. Poor Americans do not fritter away cash on vice goods like drugs, alcohol, or gambling. And the best piece of news is that in qualitative interviews, when you ask people how they’re doing and what they did with the money, the recipients give very moving accounts.

The money brought comfort, security, hope and steps toward a better future, just like you’d expect. And this is so interesting because there’s this like. This collective delusion that money fixes things even when it doesn’t like you. You think it does? Yeah. So like if you [00:10:00] were to give me Malcolm just like a bunch of money and like meaningfully it does not make me happy or anything else, I’m still gonna be like, oh, it was so meaningful.

Yeah, definitely give me more money. That would

Malcolm Collins: be great. Well actually there’s a great way to think about this. So Simone. It’s very odd in the way that she relates to jewelry and clothing and shoes and everything. Really. You got this for me.

Simone Collins: I decided to wear it today ‘cause it made me so happy. But,

Malcolm Collins: I got that for you because you said like, I was like, what sort of jewelry early in our relationship do you want?

Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: you’re like, well, you know, I’ve always wanted like. Pearl necklace. I think that could look pretty classy, right? Hmm. And so I got her a few chains of pearl necklaces at like a pearl like discounter place where you can get them like in bulk or whatever. Yeah. And after that, you know, like the next girl I’ll be like, what do you want?

And she goes, well, you gave me what I wanted last year and then the next

Simone Collins: one, I have it now.

Malcolm Collins: Good. Yeah. She’s like, you gave me that two years ago. I don’t need, why would I need, like, I’ve got a ring, I’ve got a necklace, I’ve got earrings. I don’t need, why would I need more than one earring? Like I, I, I need one for each ear.

I don’t need, well, I did, I did lose,

Simone Collins: I did lose one of [00:11:00] the false diamond earrings that I really liked. Oh, the talking about one is the globe. No, it was it was just, it was like an Asher cut, fake, fake diamond earring stud. And it, I, I just, it’s somewhere around this house or one of our kids stole it after it fell on the ground.

Like,

Speaker 3: I miss

Simone Collins: it. I wanna, I could just use the ones that your mom left to us, that they’re also just like fake. So I, I don’t have to be scared wearing them around the house. But they’re so big that they kind of don’t work. They’re, they’re a little too, gosh,

Malcolm Collins: but the, the problem is, is the way that you relate to jewels is, well, I need a pair of shoes.

And like for like the three occasions. So you’ve got like boots, like nice shoes and like another pair of boots for wearing outside. But not, not anything more than that. And it’s the same with your outfits. Like how many of these outfits do you have? Like four.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Enough to be able to have something to wear when the inevitable urine or vomit.

That’s from our children. Like, oh yeah, they, they, I mean, you should see my apron now. It’s covered in like bread dough and [00:12:00] stuff. Waffle. But anyway, the point

Malcolm Collins: being

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Is that you you, you, you, if you, I’m with what I have. I don’t need more. If I got you a bunch of stuff, jewels or an outfit, you would look at me and say.

Like this is just a burden at this point. Like this is just stressful at this point, right? Yeah. Where am I gonna put it all? And this is the, but. You would still act like especially if you’re a normal person, because I don’t think anyone else actually gets additional happiness from more shoes or more jewelry or more anything like that.

But they do get in the moment appreciation. Sure. Absolutely. The emotional maturity that you have to understand that actually their life has gotten worse because now they have more fancy stuff. They need to care for more liabilities.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: they feel bad about having this stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I mean, most of these studies are looking at people with much more limited means, and the good news, like she said, is they’re not spending this money on drugs and jewelry like they are actually spending on, on stuff they [00:13:00] need.

But even so it’s not meaningful to make them happy. So to continue what Kelsey Piper’s writing. But if you were hoping that monthly transfers of a few hundred to a thousand dollars could transform the war on poverty, then I think the results are fairly clear that this is, at this point, cash isn’t king.

The gold standard for guaranteed income experiment goes something like this. Researchers recruit a large population, thousands of people, often across multiple cities and split them into experimental and control groups. Sometimes a control group gets a smaller sum of money, 20 or $50 a month, rather than getting nothing.

Researchers arrange to protect. Other benefits so that no one loses eligibility for Medicaid, supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or, or SNAP or other programs because losing eligibility for other benefits would make it much harder to usefully test the effects of cash. Well-designed studies typically preregister what they’ll study, so they can’t p hack their way into the results after the fact.

The team behind baby’s first years one study. Of a guaranteed income program for new mothers with an emphasis on the effects it would have on new mothers and child development. Gave their control group [00:14:00] $20 per month and their experimental group, $333 per month. They recruited low income mothers at the hospitals where they gave birth.

Running the study in Omaha, Nebraska, New York, new Orleans, and the Twin Cities. The experimental group had more money as you would expect, and worked a little less, but it’s probably good if mothers of young babies can cut back on hours slightly. They also spent slightly more money on stuff for their kids, but there was not much else.

The cash transfers did not improve maternal health outcomes or child health outcomes. They had no effects on stress, depression, body mass index, or how often children get. Sick or the children’s overall health, they did not improve mother’s self-reported relationship quality or measures of psychological distress.

There was no effect on child development. So basically like the kids now have more junk. There’s like more plastic stuff sitting around there, sitting around

Malcolm Collins: their house. That’s it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I was very surprised. We were all very surprised. Uc, Irvine, economist, Greg Duncan, one of the study authors told the New York Times, the money did not make a difference, but maybe it just takes a lot more cash.

Quote [00:15:00] $333. In a time of inflation, a historic pandemic that’s just not gonna go very far. End quote. Amy Castro, faculty director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research observed to me on some level, she has to be right as an area gets richer. People’s life outcomes get systematically better, but it matters quite a lot how much money it takes to see meaningful improvements.

Malcolm Collins: Which we would disagree with and the data would disagree with. Yeah. It’s as they get richer because they’re making their own money, not the money itself that is improving the area. Exactly. And as we have seen this study would go against the Sam Altman study. They should, that they had less money when they were given money.

And that was when they were given a lot more than the 300, you know, and I think

Simone Collins: that’s the problem is that when you get to a higher amount and she, she goes into a higher amount. Studies. So we’re gonna get into more higher amount studies, but I think once you get more and more, then you start to actually scale back your life in a very damaging way, kind of expecting that larger money, like three 30, $3, you’re not gonna meaningfully start to depend on that, you [00:16:00] know, especially in this time of inflation with a new baby.

But, yeah. So to continue the Compton, California RCT. Tried $500 per month for two years. They found no significant effects on the transfers, on labor supply, assets, psychological wellbeing, financial security, or food security. Like what else are you gonna care about? The biggest effect they found was on other income sources.

The groups receiving transfers worked fewer hours and got paid less than people in the control group. The lost non-transfer of income averaged $333 a month. That to me, like if I were reading that, I’d be like. Oh my God. I’ve just damaged these people’s lives. Like when they go off this doll, they’re less.

Set up like they’re, their, their recurring self-reliant income stream is damaged because of what I did with my study. Like, I can’t believe that people aren’t not just perturbed by their results, but embarrassed and concerned about the harm they’ve

Malcolm Collins: done of the harm that they’ve done. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And that they don’t accept that this is what’s happened. Yeah. And this is [00:17:00] how, you know, these results are so accurate. Yes. Because the very people running the study are like, it must have been an anomaly, you know? Well, and as Kelsey Piper puts it.

Simone Collins: In the article, she writes literally after that.

Now I think the working poor, having more free time is a good outcome. She, she, she’s not like putting two and two together that like.

Malcolm Collins: You are damaging these families. Yeah. And this is a problem with socialism, communism, everything like that more broadly mm-hmm. Is that the more that we you know, you take from, from productive individuals and give it to non-productive individuals through whatever means, the more you destroy the psychology and lives of those non-productive individual.

As I think any of us have seen of individuals once they start living on social security. I mean, this isn’t just in this, I have seen, this was in my own life. When somebody starts living on social security, they begin to basically descend into madness.

Simone Collins: Yeah, 100%. She continues, except the participants were asked to rate their own psycho psychological wellbeing and nothing changed.

Okay, [00:18:00] well it’s double it. The open research, unconditional income study tried. Thousand per month for three years, while the control group got $50 per month, they found that participants worked less, but nothing else improved. Not their health, not their sleep, not their jobs, not their education, and not even time spent with their children.

Yeah, they did experience a reduction in stress at the start of the study, but it quickly went away because of course it did. I was surprised at how little we found that looked great. Sarah Miller, one of the study authors told me, I want to pause for a moment and note how weird this is. Most studies on the relationship between income and wellbeing in the US find that increases in income predict increases in wellbeing.

This is the key crux that we need to discuss here, like from a policy standpoint. She continues research from the earned income tax expansion in 1993, found that the extra cash improved stress and material. Material Health Direct cash payments. Not making people better off is a surprising finding, and while baby’s first years in co compton are [00:19:00] relatively small sums of money, open research is larger.

None of the researchers I spoke with believe that giving people money actually makes them no better off. Okay, so also like none of these researchers, despite the evidence being presented to them. I’m

Malcolm Collins: willing to accept this. And I’d also point out that this is why, you know, if you are a white supremacist, you need to support reparations.

There is nothing you could do that would do more permanent damage to the American black community than reparations.

Simone Collins: No, but that’s, that’s worse. That’s not, that’s not even a, being a white supremacist, that’s, that’s being a, I want to hurt black people.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. No. All of these people who are pushing for this, it would just destroy these communities.

Destroy, destroy. We should

Simone Collins: call them like black extinction, because that’s what this would do. Yeah, this would, this would Native Americanize. Black population. Subject to this, to your point earlier, citing how, how income, and I point out, by the way, some

Malcolm Collins: native tribes have made this work, and we’ll talk about the ones that have made it work and the ones that haven’t.

The, the core difference for the ones that have made it work is they make the money conditional on things like education [00:20:00] and grades, et cetera.

Simone Collins: Nice. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: I can’t believe that more income is worse. Miller told me that would mean that recessions are good. We know their consumption went up. A lot of times that’s fundamental measure of wellbeing.

Ha ha, ha ha. But then what’s going on? I scoured these reports for answers. Where was the money going? People weren’t blowing it all on vices like gambling, tobacco or alcohol. It is generally proportionate to overall spending. So. Lots on housing and transportation, some on food and childcare. The Compton study found that people pay down their debt some.

There’s no obvious single pain point for these families. Maybe this isn’t as confusing as it initially feels. If you gave me an extra 10% of my income to spend, it would absolutely make me better off, just not necessarily in ways you could measure. I might give some to friends, going through a time of need, which makes my community stronger.

Even if it doesn’t show up in a study. Looking at my habits, I might take the kids across the country to visit my aging grandparents. Stressful but worth it in a way that probably doesn’t show up in mental health inventory. It’s very, oh my God,

Malcolm Collins: people looking [00:21:00] for their little, and then if you’ve studied this, are they doing more trips to grandma?

No, they’re not. You know, that’s the way it always is because he studies.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it’s very hard. But like Piper, we’ve met her. She’s a great person. She’s

Simone Collins: absolutely brilliant. And, and yeah, she’s. She can do no wrong in my, in my mind. I, I just. She, she’s a very empathetic person and it’s showing up in this quote, it’s very hard to evaluate something like cash end quote, Miller told me you might spend it on a new car and I might spend it on a vacation and someone else might spend it on their kids.

And when you average all that together, it’s hard to find anything. No study with this setup can demonstrate conclusively that money didn’t help someone, but they can and did demonstrate that giving low income people in this format does not advance other policy priorities. It will not at any detectable scale, make them measurably healthier or happier or give them better jobs or improve their children’s intellectual development.

‘cause we just kind of, all that matters, people certainly if it’s not. A big give everyone cash program researchers did point out to me that something much more narrowly targeted as a cash program that is currently underway is [00:22:00] pulling its weight than she, she continues to reduce section, the basic income coverup, death, death by a thousand to press releases.

These latest small to null results largely weren’t surprising to people who watched this issue closely. Many of them had realized years ago when the first studies came out that the effects of cash weren’t going to be transformative. While exciting big results from pilots tend to make headlines and travel quickly on social media, sobering results from RCTs generally don’t.

The depressing facts ever counted to you are largely missing, obscured and glossed over in public communications about these studies. Articles focused on tiny positives, or at best will note, well, the evidence sensor. The

Malcolm Collins: study that we pointed out in that episode, they framed it.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: As a success for UBI.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It was massively misrepresented in the media. They were like, well,

Malcolm Collins: massively misrepresented

Simone Collins: people had more free time. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that nice? Wouldn’t you like that?

Malcolm Collins: No, but I, I think this is important for people to understand is that we don’t have [00:23:00] any other viable alternative right now, and that’s a whole separate episode for what we do when AI starts replacing us.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And if it, it looks like we’re going to have to wally ourselves, wize ourselves, if. This is the path we keep going on, and that’s, that’s, that’s really horrifying. Yeah. Because there, there aren’t you, you would need to create some sort of artificial hardship, but we’ll get to that later.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

She points to one example of this sort of medium misrepresentation. Perhaps the most eg egregious offender is the Denver Basic Income Project. The most bizarre set of findings I reviewed. This is what a prominent part of the report section on their website looks like. Year one research report results.

Groundbreaking findings. All payment groups showed significant improvements in housing outcomes, including a remarkable increase in home rent and ownership, and decrease in night spent. Unsheltered participants reported positive shifts in financial wellbeing with an increase in financial stability and a greater ability to pay bills and [00:24:00] reduced reliance on emergency assistance.

She adds, I guess I can’t tell this is a lie per se, but in reality they gave a thousand a month to homeless people and they were barely more likely than the control group to get housing. Oh my god. Time for some media criticism. It’s not just the researchers’ fault. Even when researchers don’t don’t understate or know.

Sorry, don’t understate a null or negative result. They told me that journalists are often less eager to go to press with it. Researchers have written a dozen null effect papers. They’re trying to get the result out there. Miller told me people aren’t interested in reading them, and that’s totally legit.

I get that one Research, one researcher said that the university press office seemed to lose interest in a press release about their paper. Once they learned it was a null result saying that publication could affect support for public assistance programs. There is clearly a motive here. The researcher was unimpressed.

The press release did eventually go out. It’s easy to say a bunch of true things yet leave your reader [00:25:00] less informed. And even if a study gets covered, there are several different ways to write the same take When covering babies’ first years, you can highlight the fact that mothers felt more confident about parenting, or you can show disappointing results on child development metrics.

In some ways, the way we identify promising anti-poverty programs is itself setting up us up for failure. Local governments, multiple researchers, told me will often only really get excited about a program if they’ve seen eye-popping results from a pilot program elsewhere. They want a silver bullet. Many of the people working on guaranteed income chafe at the fact that their programs can be criticized for not measuring up precisely because they conducted high quality studies in the first place.

When we look at every other anti-poverty regulation, we don’t test it at this level of rigor. Castro pointed out to me whole nother camera, which means most

Malcolm Collins: other anti-poverty regulations probably makes things worse as well.

Simone Collins: I know, right? She continues. It is true that it would have been impossible for me to write an article about whether high quality randomized studies found SNAP had benefits for food insecurity, even if I wanted to, because we didn’t do RCTs when [00:26:00] we introduced snap.

That’s the biggest food assistance program in the United States for those living abroad. Yep. The standards are higher for guaranteed income than they were for most anti-poverty measures when they were first introduced. But increasing rigor is a good thing. It can allow us to shift focus from programs that don’t seem to move the needle towards ones that do quote.

There’s many of cash options we should be looking at. End quote, Stasia West, director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research told me the cash is large and then there are targeted life events among the many studies still underway. There are much more specific and targeted cash programs say aimed at pregnant women, people just leaving prison or those recovering from a major negative life shock that look promising.

If we hesitate to say what works and what doesn’t, money will be wasted on things that don’t work. Money that could have gone where it will make a big difference. I’m excited to see. Whether Big LEAPS findings, this is another study that cash can help victims of domestic violence is reproduced in upcoming work.

I’m excited to see the results of cash for pregnant women to improve pregnancy outcomes, cash for parolees to prevent recidivism and cash in [00:27:00] response to major shocks in life events. I hope some of these deliver on their early promise and help us advance the project of addressing poverty. But whatever the results are, we should not bury or exaggerate them.

We’re in a dangerous epistemic environment. One where widespread agreement on basic facts is scarce and no lies have permeated the halls of truth seeking organizations like the media, those of us who care about ending poverty, the media, this is how you

Malcolm Collins: can tell she’s a left wing person and she thinks the media the truth seeking organization.

Simone Collins: Well, I, I appreciate her acknowledgement as someone who’s left leaning as someone who has these tendencies

Malcolm Collins: with social programs, whether it’s SNAP or, or, or UBI or you know, anything that you do as a handout. It’s probably making the situation worse and we really haven’t done, when we have done studies, that’s what we find.

Absolutely. And then cases, we just haven’t done the study.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And she ends it with those of us who care about ending poverty, have to choose the integrity of our work over trying to play five D, five D chess and hoping no one else knows the rules.

Malcolm Collins: [00:28:00] So is she gonna become Trump? Is she gonna, is she gonna become maga?

We’re getting MAGA here. I mean, I don’t, I know, I actually think that there’s like a community in the EA world, like, and we’re just gonna be some of the first that it moved over. But I would not be surprised if by the next election cycle. A lot of people like her in a wider sort of intellectual counterculture movement, just mainstream moves, right.

Like, yeah. I mean,

Simone Collins: you already have that sort of heterodox center that really, really, really hates Trump. Like Jesse Single of blocked and reported and his own blog and own work is, is one of those people that like is super, super. So even somewhat Trump derangement syndrome, and yet he still represents someone who’s willing to question the orthodoxy.

There are lots of people like that. Maybe she’s kind of in that zone now. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and maybe once Trump is not the face of the Republican party and you get like a JD Vance, so it’s much harder for people in that crew. To be anti-me.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But, so there’s this, this question of why cash transfers fail, but earning more correlates with [00:29:00] better outcomes.

And, and one thing that you encouraged me to look at is the New Deal which was a set of US federal programs and reforms instituted in the 1930s in the United States, that that responded to the Great Depression. And they primarily did this. It was, it was a big program. So it was jobs, it was financial relief, it was new regulatory systems of millions of people.

Or involved with this. Although really and recovery didn’t go all the way until World War ii, but there were some programs within the New Deal which long term studies have shown were very impactful. So specifically there was this one youth employment program, the largest employment program, youth program, employment program of its time, the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The ccc. Yeah. Which saw sustainably improved outcomes, including higher. Lifetime earnings, better health and lower disability rates. Which is huge. ‘cause here’s this program that existed in the US that provided employment to youth that lasted, didn’t force them to work well. Yeah. But after, after, no, it [00:30:00] didn’t force ‘em to work.

After it ended, it had sustained impact. So lifetime earnings, no

Malcolm Collins: wait. It didn’t force him to work.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It wasn’t forced work. It was, it was a job opportunity for you. No, that’s what I mean. You have to work for the money. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. You can’t, you don’t get the money if you don’t work. Yes. But it wasn’t like a, it wasn’t like a labor camp.

No, it wasn’t a gula. The point is,

Malcolm Collins: is that if you give money to people for no work, you make their lives worse.

Simone Collins: Yes. So just, I just wanna go over the findings for this ‘cause they were so shocking to me. Lifetime earnings were five to 10% higher than those for similar peers who did not participate.

Those with longer CCC service experienced improved height. Health status and longevity, and they lived about a year longer. On average, they had lower stress and disability. With, with CCC alumni claiming disability benefits 0.4 years later in life. They had 10% lower rates of social security disability insurance claims, which is huge for the government.

Like, talk about ROI. They had higher geographic mobility and educational [00:31:00] attainment among those exposed to work relief and childhood and their midlife income and cognition. Were, were much better than those who. Did not participate in these programs. So their health was like, in terms of all the things Kelsey Piper was looking for, right.

She’s like, is there psychological wellbeing better? Is there earning better? Is there education better? Like the, you know, policy outcomes as she put them in her article.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: The CCC did that. Why are people not looking at that? Why are people not looking at putting people to work? Why is this just give people money?

‘cause they don’t,

Malcolm Collins: it’s, it’s antithetical to their world perspective. They do not want to work.

Simone Collins: So I will point out just one, one little caveat that I, I I, I tried to find evidence of other work programs like in India, in other countries, in Europe, et cetera, China where that, that had such lasting impacts as the civilian conservation corps.

Many of them are more, were more, more targeted, like, oh, this is for vulnerable people. It’s only for this little period of time. Pretty much all of them had. The kinds of [00:32:00] of outcomes that she had hoped for during the treatment periods of the studies that she looked at. So like lower stress, better financial security, better feelings of empowerment, et cetera.

Like it actually created the effect she’s looking for, but it ended with those programs. So there’s something special about the CCC. I don’t know if it was because it was targeted at youth or because it was more broad or because it was, you know, I’m, I’m not sure it could, it could have even been the nature of the work.

A lot of this was like. I, I remember walking on trails, like hiking trails as a kid that people were like, oh yeah, this was built by the civilian Conservation Corps. So like, it, it was a really big cool, like infrastructure project, but also involved a lot of physical work. Maybe that was good for people.

I’m not really sure if it’s like the nature of the work that’s given that can also have an effect on whether this, this lasts longer. But yeah, I, I just find this really interesting. Maybe one way to do a controlled research on this is to look at people who served in the military and their outcomes.

Yeah. Because that’s government payments that you get only in return for work. [00:33:00] Right. So what

Malcolm Collins: happened

Simone Collins: with the military? I haven’t, I haven’t looked at that. If people who went into the military,

Malcolm Collins: well, what we need is to conscript the poor, force them to work out, you know, get a, that’s how they get their, their money.

Simone Collins: I mean, south Koreans have mandatory conscription. Israelis have mandatory conscription.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You, you see, mandatory conscription in a lot of you know, well,

Simone Collins: yeah. Like successful, industrialized, influential, innovative countries.

Malcolm Collins: I think it matters a lot less now that we have ai, AI’s gonna totally change warfare.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, but I mean, military doesn’t have to mean. Fighting, it can mean engaging in IT or health or cybersecurity. I mean, even now the US is shifting its use of military from like foreign policy stuff or like foreign conflicts too. You know, hey, maybe we can maintain order in Chicago, California and Washington, dc it’s like more local stuff.

This, this, this could military service in the future could mean things like maintaining public parks, fixing up crumbling infrastructure, which [00:34:00] we’re going to need. I mean considering, you know, the, the small towns initiative or whatever they’re called that’s trying in the United States. Yeah. To raise awareness about the fact that many cities and towns that have been built in the United States were built on somewhat shoddy infrastructure that was funded by the property developers and now has to be paid for by the municipalities that set up around them who have no tax base to afford it.

You know, it, it could be that in the future, a big saving grace if the government gets its policy gears in order. Isn’t UBI but rather employing people and, and giving them jobs, but also helping to maintain the infrastructure that is inevitably going to crumble as we lose the tax base to support it.

But I also am not exactly sure how we’re gonna pay for that. But tell, tell me about the cases in which tribes in the United States indigenous tribes in the United States. We, we’ll go

Malcolm Collins: into that in a separate episode.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. We’re not, we’re not going take it here.

Malcolm Collins: No.

Simone Collins: But yeah, I guess you’re saying it’s ‘cause they, they worked there or they had to do stuff for it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. They, they have to do stuff for it. You cannot give people giving, like, it [00:35:00] psychologically destroys people reparations money for free Look.

Simone Collins: When you look at mental health, right? And one of the biggest things is like within workplace, Jo, like jobs. Mm-hmm. What are the jobs where people are really stressed out and miserable or they have really poor mental health, and what are the jobs where people are in a really good position when you feel like you don’t have control or you don’t have ownership of your work, your mental health is really crappy.

And then when you do feel like you’re in control and, and your, your, your life is not subject to the vicissitudes of some system or some manager. Your mental health is way better.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And I, I think this is one of those, and so many of our episodes just turn to like external locus of control. You know what would be

Malcolm Collins: a very interesting study in this area?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Is to apply a multiplier to somebody’s Uber earnings give somebody cash handouts, and then have a control group and see if the Uber earnings groups. Sees a, a positive,

Simone Collins: so like turn, turn gig work into more of a living [00:36:00] wage thing. Yeah. And see if that gig work produces Oh, that would, yeah, that would be interesting.

Yeah. Anything where people have to work for something. Even if it’s just like. Picking up trash in a park or something.

Malcolm Collins: Love you. Did Simonon. Have a spectacular day. And you know, we work for you guys to give us money, please. You got our Patreon here. We got our and Substack.

Simone Collins: For those who hate Stack, Patreon is

Malcolm Collins: shut down as well.

You know, let’s see. They, by the way, Patreon and Substack have the exact same benefits. It’s just two different play play,

Simone Collins: and the benefits include, I mean, we’re gonna keep it up. I, I’m pretty sure so far we haven’t, we’re on an unbroken streak one weekend episode every day, so, sorry. Two weekend episodes.

You get a Saturday episode and a Sunday episode. So if you wanna upgrade from, we’re

Malcolm Collins: producing an episode every day of the week now. Yeah. If you wanna go from

Simone Collins: five days a week to seven days a week of base camp, you can.

Malcolm Collins: The weekend episodes are often stuff that I don’t think will do well on the main channel because they’re too No, but

Simone Collins: it’s stuff that people ask

Malcolm Collins: for.

Yeah. They’re, they’re stuff that people ask for, but they’re often like. [00:37:00] How do you vibe code, you know, something like that. Like this isn’t a channel on how to do that, but, or like

Simone Collins: more personal stuff. This, this most recent one we ran was on our Debauched health regimes, which include functional disorders, you know, medicated

Malcolm Collins: whatever.

So, Simone if, if I was gonna sum this episode up, would you say to people work makes one free work will set you free. Sorry. Do you know you know what that’s from?

Simone Collins: Yes,

Malcolm Collins: they were wrong. I, I mean, in that context it was a lie. Yes. That was a lie. So for people who don’t know, that was yeah, I mean it there, the sign should

Simone Collins: have been incinerator will set you free, but like.

Malcolm Collins: The general premise. Yeah, no that, that, that was on the concentration camps in, in Nazi Germany. That was, yeah, that

Simone Collins: was a sign on Auschwitz specifically.

Malcolm Collins: Auschwitz specifically. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I can just imagine some like nice German architect being told that like, oh, this is a work camp, you know, we’re, we’re trying to, you know, we need to build stuff for [00:38:00] the war effort, you know, can you help us out here?

And they’re like, you know what? I think a really inspirational message for people coming in to help the German war effort. Oh

Malcolm Collins: my God. That their, that generation’s version of like the cat. On like the string, like hang in there or something? Yeah, like at the Auschwitz it’s just like, hang in there, hang in there buddy.

Simone Collins: Oh my