I'm skeptical. We have millions of folks receiving thousands per year in "temporary" assistance (cash, housing, medical, energy assistance, public transportation, etc.) and they never seem to emerge from their situation.
How were these test folks selected? How much supervision/hand holding did they get during the trial period?
“I’m skeptical. We have millions of folks receiving thousands per year in “temporary” assistance (cash, housing, medical, energy assistance, public transportation, etc.) and they never seem to emerge from their situation.
How were these test folks selected? How much supervision/hand holding did they get during the trial period?”
I think you hit on the key with “temporary.” The people in this experiment were given a one-time stipend of 3,000 pounds, presumably with no promise of money into perpetuity. It’s the perpetuity that screws the system up. Give the poor a lump sum, say that’s all you’re getting, and make it all they get, and then you get different results than when you continuously extend the benefits.
I think the point is that it’s a lump sum, and the recipients knew when it was gone, that was it. So they had more of an incentive to use it wisely than they would an amount that would come in every month indefinitely.
That being said, I’m still skeptical. How many of us know a family member that has gotten lump sums from other family members and still can’t get it together? Remember that case in the news of the man who won a lottery but still didnt want to give up his food benefits? I realize that when people win lotteries, or get big legal settlements, as Rodney King did, were talking about more money. Maybe the secret is that it not be a huge amount of money, just a few grand. Back in the seventies, members of Indian tribes got lump sums. They also got houses(not very good houses, I guess) and continued to get their other Indian benefits, so may not be a good comparison. I don’t know about other localities, but on the reservation we lived near, they mostly bought vehicles, so the car dealerships had extraordinary years those years, and most of the Indian families were back to business as usual after a few months. They also spent the money on lesser purchases like clothes. It’s no secret there that any Indian who wants to be “successful” in the middle class white sense of the word needs to leave the res, because there’s no jobs around the res, for one thing. (White young people generally leave those places too, unless they’re involved with a family business or something) Those non-res Indians, a lot if them, probably did use their lump sums for savings, investment, putting into businesses, house improvement, etc. I won’t speculate about drugs and alcohol, because I don’t want to contribute to the drunk Indian stereotype but everybody knows that the combination of lump sums of money and addicts often have tragic results, regardless of the race of the recipients. There is also the problem if parasitic friends and relatives who will crawl out if the word work when they smell money.