Right away, the data clearly showed that cash helped people spend more on their basic needs. Those who received $1,000 monthly spent $67 more per month than the lower-paid group on food, $52 more on rent and $50 more on transportation. They also spent about 26 percent more financially supporting others, typically family members or children, suggesting that the beneficiaries of guaranteed income programs extend beyond the actual participants.
Some of the volunteers told the researchers that the money allowed them to stop living paycheck to paycheck and start imagining what they could do if they had more financial breathing room. Karina Dotson, OpenResearch’s research and insights manager, often heard participants talk about the cash giving them a “sense of self.” She said it “gave them head space to dream, to believe, to hope, to imagine a future they couldn’t imagine before.” Other research has found similar outcomes.
Those who received $1,000 monthly were 5 percent more likely to report having a budget, spending an average of 20 minutes more a month on finances than the group that received $50 monthly. The money also affected how much medical care people sought, how much they considered entrepreneurship or additional schooling and even the kinds of jobs they took. Those choices varied widely from person to person.
In before someone claims this isn’t actually a leftist policy because it doesn’t throw in the towel and endorse Trump, or some such nonsense.
I will bite.
There are leftist that call for reform to capitalism. UBI is one such reform to help capitalism exploit fewer people. Similar reforms are minimum wage. UBI could make capitalism easier on workers.
I prefer a system that does less harm to workers by means such as the abolition of private property and the employer class. Workers should get the value of their work. They don’t need an employer parasitically taking that value.
If you emphasize giving workers what they literally produce instead of its value, the contrast is even greater. With value, you are still emphasizing the pie metaphor, which capitalist economists invented to obfuscate the real issues. In terms of property rights to the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs, workers qua employees get 0% while employers qua employer get 100%. In the property theoretic terms, workers don’t get the fruits of their labor at all
@humanities
I love this comment. Thank you. Value does obfuscate the product of labor. If I pick apples and cook them, I have apple sauce. The apple sauce is mine to share as I will. Value points to some form of storage where I can exchange the apple sauce for some other product later.