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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:
Published on 3 months ago