[toomuchtodo]

25% of foster kids end up homeless after aging out of the system. Direct cash transfer value is mostly proven from a social work/benefit perspective. Sure, coaching and counseling through social services must also be provided to help underprivileged humans take care of themselves and reach their full potential, but cash benefits help, full stop. The moral hazard argument needs to die. There is a difference between struggle you can overcome to grow and plain ol’ suffering that will kill you, or cause you to kill yourself.

[Difwif]

No they have a point and you're covering your eyes and ears to the problems you make. I received $20k when I was 16 for reasons related to my mothers death. I did not spend that money wisely at all (literally drugs). It's one thing when we're talking about fully developed adults (the 25yo kind, not the 18 ones) getting a UBI and another when we're talking about kids in bad environments with poor mentors.

I wish someone would have taken that money from me and put it in college fund or IRA at the very least. Likewise this is a wellfare program for kids and we should ensure it's spent on their wellfare.

[slg]

From the article:

>Two hundred randomly selected former DCFS foster youth across the county between 21 and 23 years of age will now receive $1,000 a month for the next two years

Both literally and in terms of maturity, 21 is closer to 25 than it is 16.

Also one lump sum payment is much easier to waste than an ongoing monthly payment.

[Difwif]

If I spent that $20k on drugs at once I would have been dead. Instead it supported years of poor decision making and avoiding building my future. I started getting my act together at 19 (money was long gone) and it wasn't until 23 that I stopped making really poor decisions.

The best thing I did with it was use a couple thousand to buy a used car. The money should have gone into a trust with someone guaranteeing I used the money on food, clothes, school, etc. What I needed the most was someone that cared enough to guide me. The money by itself set me back.

[slg]

I'm not discounting your own experience, but in your anecdote you acknowledge that got you act together 2 years before anyone in this program would get the money. An example of a 16-19 year old being immature is not a good argument that 21-23 year olds aren't mature.

[Difwif]

There's no point getting this in the details of my personal experience but I _started_ the path at 19 because I ran out of money. I was still doing incredibly dumb and destructive things until 23.

I really do think this program will help a lot of foster kids. I just wish we could acknowledge that stipulating how the money is used will prevent worse outcomes for some. Free money will give some of these kids the resources to destroy their lives because the money isn't their main problem yet. Both groups of people matter and I want to see programs that don't ignore the negative side effects of free money.

Means testing absolutism doesn't need to be the hill people die on. First we need take care of the people, and then we can figure out the most efficient way to administer it.

[smcg]

you were 16 and coping with the death of your mother. nobody should be given that kind of responsibility to set up their finances. how much did they teach you about finances by 16? if that money was set up in a trust for you that dispersed income over time or directly paid rent then that probably would have been very helpful.

[LMYahooTFY]

The responses that completely ignore addiction and mental health need to die.

Can you address what the parent described about mental health and addiction?

Would you rather invest $10k into someone who has shown you they're reliable, or someone who has shown you they are unreliable?

Please answer both questions.

[baseballdork]

The parent merely stated that they don't think they could have handled $1k/m. That's fine. They aren't in the group that will receive.

As for the second question, is the implication that former foster kids are "unreliable" and we should instead be investing somewhere else?

Why don't you address the "25% of former foster kids find themselves homeless" stat? Are these kids just getting too much assistance to be driven to... work fast food?

I really don't understand these perspectives.

[Bjartr]

> Would you rather invest $10k into someone who has shown you they're reliable, or someone who has shown you they are unreliable?

Since the goal is to produce functioning members of society that produce a net benefit, I'd invest the money in making the unreliable one more reliable.

[giraffe_lady]

You're ignoring mental health and addiction just as much though. Both are complex and interrelated. Poverty is incredibly stressful; my mental health was never as bad as it was when I was homeless.

Harm reduction is effective. I literally got off the street because someone gave me a garage to sleep (and use drugs!) in and $14k. Having a private space meant I stopped getting arrested for using, didn't risk losing all my possessions every time I went to a job interview. Allowed me to think about a future farther than 30 hours away. I could afford (and store) weed and beer instead of vodka and crack. I didn't have to be obliterated to sleep through the cold & noise of the highway under the bridge.

The first small steps were only possible because no one held me to the sort of standard you're advocating for.

[toomuchtodo]

I have invested more than that in both cohorts, and would do it again. Everything is luck, the money buys dice rolls. Some dice are weighted towards success more than others. I like to gamble on people, it’s a worthy cause and brings me happiness.

With regards to mental health and addiction, I support Medicare for All and robust access to mental health and addiction treatment for those in need. We have the means, we simply choose not to implement efficiently. Set the tax rate at whatever is necessary. There will never be perfection, never the perfect time for policy components. Implement what you can when you can and accept good enough is all that can be done.

[Karunamon]

Steelman:

1. Perhaps GP is just exceptionally sensitive to bad mental states or addiction. I know the social "sciences" have an entirely well-deserved bad reputation, but it isn't good science to extrapolate from n=1 either. Pilot programs like this one are useful.

2. The obvious answer to your rhetorical question is the second one, but in this case it is irrelevant; the program is targeted at a random set of applicants, their reliability is unknown.

[godelski]

> Please answer both questions.

Which costs more?

1) Indiscriminately handing people $1k/mo

2) Developing a means test, applying the means test, setting up a system for verification that people meet the means, distributing the money to the people that match the criteria.

I mean I can't tell you because there are dependent variables on what those means are. But two cheap options are #1 and #2 with a means that is so high that you don't pay anyone out but instead have that structure where we're still paying people (we could adequately call it a jobs program at that point).

But let's think about this from a different point of view that I don't think many here are, despite that this is an engineering perspective: failure modes. #1's failure mode is that people that don't need the money will get the money (we'll include things like drug addicts and irresponsible people here for simplicity's sake), #2's failure mode is that people that need the money won't get the money while minimizing the number of people who take advantage of the system (non-zero number).

Truth is we need to balance these two: cost and failure modes. From the high level perspective that this entire thread is at and really the entire comment (and basically every conversation had on this subject) is nowhere near the resolution where we can remotely say that 1 or 2 is better. All we can say is #1 is easier to implement. #2 is undefined because its parameters are undefined. Having a conversation at this level is just idiotic. There's very little for us to reasonably discuss and impossible for any real definitive answer to be made. The way these discussions are being framed can only lead to fighting because there is no means of determining better and there can't be (until we define and get more detail).

[addicted]

Good reason to screen out people with mental health and addiction issues, at least in a trial, and if it’s successful then when you do start incorporating people with those issues you can come up with a plan to address that as well.

[gameman144]

If the goal is to reduce the rate of negative outcomes for youth aging out of foster care, though, aren't the ones with mental health or addiction problems exactly the ones who would need help the most?

[edgyquant]

> Direct cash transfer value is mostly proven from a social work/benefit perspective.

There is basically nothing in social sciences that are a consistently reproducible fact. “Mostly proven” is Orwellian double speak akin to “the science is settled”

[mrcrumb1]

Regardless of what you see as an exaggeration on his part, the evidence is he's referring to is surely better than the individual anecdote of the parent post.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2222103120

https://socialinnovation.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqtOfZG2sSanWgUdzn-lx-pwSXZ...

https://www.occatholic.com/targeted-cash-assistance-can-help...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-social-po...

https://www.chapinhall.org/wp-content/uploads/Cash-Transfers...

> Direct cash transfer programs are supported by a vast international evidence base (Baird et al., 2013). Globally, they are among the most well-evaluated interventions for addressing poverty, boosting well-being, increasing educational attainment, and improving health outcomes and employment (Baird et al., 2013; Pega et al., 2017). In the U.S. and Canada, numerous programs offer examples of how DCTs have have reduced childhood obesity, improved health outcomes, reduced hospitalization rates, increased savings, and supported economic security. These include the maintenance income experiments of the late 1960s in Denver, Seattle, New Jersey, Iowa, and Indiana, the Canadian ‘Mincome’ Experiment, and the ongoing Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (Forget, 2011; Guettabi, 2019; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, 1983).

> Counter to common public narratives, numerous studies show that offering DCTs to people experiencing poverty and adversity do not result in money poorly spent, increased substance use, or reduced motivation to work (Evans & Popova, 2017; Morton et al., 2020). Instead, cash is primarily spent on basic needs--food, utilities, other goods--as evidenced in the early report on the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (West et al., 2020). The Child Tax Credit further illuminated that regular unconditional cash contributes to reductions in food insecurity and overall poverty (Parolin et al., 2022; Shafer et al., 2022). Furthermore, in Canada, a randomized trial of DCTs to adults experiencing homelessness also found improvements in the speed of exiting homelessness, reductions in the amount of time spent in homelessness, and reductions in spending on alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs among DCT program participants (Foundations for Social Change, 2020).

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

The research on the effects of cash transfers are not universally positive. This study found a significant negative effect on employment: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4375359

We are in the “needs more research” stage of this question, not the “tell the people who are asking to shut up” stage.

[chmod600]

Right. Social systems and the effects various interventions have are very complicated. The idea that some intervention is proven or disproven is, in all but the simplest cases, ridiculous.

Even with research, the results are going to be hard to understand and apply without unintended consequences, and whatever intervention is going to have mixed results even if the overall effect is positive.

[addicted]

And pilot programs are to a great extent research.

Let’s do this thing and see what happens in a small enough setting that we can intervene if something really goes off the rails and even if it does the impact is minimal.

[bko]

You should check out the movie reversal of fortune. It follows a homeless dude that was given 100k no strings attached. He was specially chosen as he did not have any substance abuse issues. Despite that the story has a sad ending but it does humanize the struggle as you grow to like and empathize with the guy while the slow rolling train wreck carries on

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_of_Fortune_(2005_fi...

[fastball]

Proven? At what scale?

[encoderer]

it is a way to help individuals while harming society as a whole.