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Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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the New Leaf Project. The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
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The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports.
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The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.
✏️ Fighting propaganda. This study has to show that people can be trusted to make good decisions with their money. 👓 propaganda 🔗 View Highlight
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Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system 405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
✏️ More proof of how, when governments say they don’t have money to help people, that’s not a restriction… that’s a choice. Because they are still spending money on people.. they’re spending money on the outcomes of people being homeless, sick, unemployed, poor, etc. Money is being spent on the results of these issues. You could just spend money to help people at the root, and it would be less… but you don’t, and that’s a choice. 🔗 View Highlight
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the evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.
✏️ Some additional data and studies to boost the validity of this claim #followup 🔗 View Highlight
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“The research shows that if you give people a larger sum of cash upfront, it triggers long-term thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
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“While I have no problem with providing cash to people who need money, the solution to homelessness is housing,” Bloch told me. “Especially in a city like Vancouver where housing supply is low and rents are astronomical, it will be very hard to sustain a homelessness intervention without offering long-term affordable housing. I would not want to see these findings used to take pressure off the critical need to provide both long-term affordable housing and long-term income security.”
✏️ Keeping things in perspective.. you don’t solve homelessness by cash alone. As always, you solve it with homes, as simple as that. Cash is to help people just live. 🔗 View Highlight