[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?