this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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My friend's dad once told me that studies have shown that if you give $1,000,000 to someone without money and the same to a rich person that almost all the money will be gone from the poor person and will have increased when left with the rich person, because poor people don't know how to manage money and that's why they're poor.
My reaction was shock followed by, "it costs more than half a million dollars to pull someone out of poverty??? And won't putting a million dollars in the bank almost always gain interest? I wonder why people without money don't know how to put their money in the bank instead of starving!!"
It's also been known by economists for time immemorial that the best way to improve the economy is to give money to poor people, nothing else required. Literally just giving poor people money to spend skyrockets the velocity of money, whereas the hoarders just put it in an account to do nothing but gain interest.
It's not a fair comparison. Someone in poverty will use that million in order to lift themselves out of material poverty. Which means they will pay off debts, buy property, pay college tuition for themselves and/or their descendants, possibly start a business, and a whole bunch of other things I can't think of. That would easily cost half a million. Someone who's already rich will already have all that.
Because your dad is wrong.
Many of the UBI-type (universal basic income) studies show that most people continue to work and in many cases they are able to increase their income from work in short order.
Turns out relief from chronic money stress liberates mental resources that increase personal resilience and that translates into better employment for many.
My dad is dead, tyvm. He was pretty sure he wasn't having a heart attack, so you're right that he was wrong.
But also my friend's dad is wrong about a lot of stuff, including when his son's and I are being sarcastic by saying "thanks Obama," and that it's an invitation for him to shit on social safety nets.
Has there ever been a UBI study that lasted the person's entire life?
Not that I can find. I volunteer if any scientists want to conduct one, though.
Not that I'm aware of, just because studies haven't even been considered for long enough to have lasted any entire lifetime, to my knowledge.
However, a many have been going for decades at this point, and there's some great summaries of the findings over these expansive timeframes from the Stanford Basic Income Lab where they have a map and many other resources.
The conclusions seem to remain consistent, across studies lasting anywhere from one-time payments, to months, years, or decades, and I think that the conclusions, while not set in stone, seem to be quite comprehensively backed up to the point that if they were deployed at a larger scale, it would probably show similar outcomes.
I believe Alaska has some sort of ubi. Maybe start there.
Gosh, I don’t know. Not a domain expert, just an avid reader of primary studies on subjects I like.
It would surprise me, but I bet there are other studies you could with post-hoc data analysis, perhaps on lifetime outcomes of people who receive only a small income from a trust over a long period, like people with a moderately prosperous grandparent who put together a meager trust for them.
I know a couple of people with such a situation. They could definitely make much different life choices, even in one case where the trust paid out about the same as the take home pay from a job in retail.
I feel confident predicting that a broader survey of such folks would show vastly different life outcomes, professional attainment, marriage stability etc. when compared to people who started out without that.
It’s sort of obvious but you have to beat people over their heads with data before concepts even get widely considered.
Of course they would fare vastly better. You could work an actual retail job and have double the income. You could be a festival weenie for four years, get therapy, figure out your shit, and network with the better off festival weenies. The point being the universe of realistic and attainable life paths expands greatly with even small amounts of basic income, being able to say no to a bad deal is huge.
Which is why we will need to implement global reforms against extreme wealth. Social mobility scares the hell out of billionaires.
It's stupid in even more ways. The economy needs people to buy things to keep going and allow people like your friend's dad to have jobs and act condescending to people who don't have jobs.
So if everybody was "smart" like that theoretical rich person and kept all their money, there wouldn't be an economy for them to leech passive income from.
Nuh uh. The economy needs billionaires to peepee money on me.
If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It's almost like people without enough money need it for something