Raising the minimum wage increases homelessness.
The Great Cognitive Advance. Peter Frost is usually quite fascinating. "On a per capita basis, the highly intelligent became ten times more numerous in England between 1000 and 1850."
China funds American climate activists to reduce our competitiveness.
Universal Basic Income Not Really Effective.
Holly Mathnerd explains the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis. In everyday society, the reaction is "Hey, interesting! Might be true, might not, but worth talking about. And researching." In academia and specific research fields, you are not allowed to talk about this.
2 comments:
Peter Frost cites studies using DNA to estimate cognitive ability. What's that? Are they looking for genes known to _decrease_ it and estimating from absence?
Ann Althouse also linked that UBI article from City Journal, and it resulted in a lively but fairly predictable food fight in the comments.
I don't know if it is well-meaning conservatives or devious leftists who keep commissioning these studies because, as far as I can tell, nothing about UBI was supposed to make it more 'effective' than current welfare, and the studies I've seen reported on uniformly look for effects that nobody would expect to find from what I'd call a 'classic' UBI implementation.
As I understand it, UBI as originally proposed is not a *supplement to* but a *replacement for* virtually all targeted assistance programs such as unemployment benefits, Section 8 housing, tuition and job training, etc and maybe even Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The argument was never that UBI would be more effective, however you define that, but that it would be more efficient since it would largely eliminate the (Leftist sinecures in) the Welfare Industrial Complex devoted to administering the programs in favor of using a slightly expanded IRS refund system to send people a check. This would have some potential though hard to quantify benefits of eliminating mismatches of needs with benefits (the classic one being rent or child care assistance available to someone who actually needs reliable transportation to get to work), the perverse instances where increasing income from employment causes a decline in overall income due to a loss of benefits, and in general treats people as having some agency. As far as I know nobody tries to establish that providing Section 8 housing causes kids to do better in school despite assertions that it does. It's only UBI that seems to generate these kinds of studies.
Post a Comment