... and after having spent more than 50 pages in describing the experiment and its results and analyzing any number of (wild) guesses, the researchers actually talked to 15 (fifteen) people of the 5,000 (five thousand) involved in the experiment and half of them told the researchers how the money was not enough:
>Indeed, after the study concluded, we conducted qualitative interviews with 15 participants, where—among other things—we asked them how much money they would have needed to receive for it to have made a difference in their lives at that time. About half of participants indicated that they would have needed to receive more than $2,000, with those responses falling between $4,000
and $25,000. Although this is by no means a representative sample or ideal methodology, these responses may at least be indicative of the general order of magnitude needed.
How surprising is it that someone who is living at the poverty level or under it when given a "small" amount of money (no matter if 500 or 2,000) after one month has spent it?
It really seems like an insultingly small amount of money. It's almost like they're trying to disprove something like UBI by association while not actually doing something that's useful.
If they'd given those randomized amounts monthly for a year or 5 years, I would bet the results would be in line with similar studies which show marked benefits.
Yeah were they expecting them to get $500 and within 4 weeks start a company and become cash flow positive? Being poor is often a consequence of education and with a few years of guaranteed income to make them feel safe to take that risk, they probably would have been able to tackle that. But it's not surprising at all that nothing happens in just a month.
Gook luck trying to fund a sufficiently powered RCT to give people $2/month for a year, let alone 5. $2k for 5 years is $120k per participant, so about $120M for a 1000 sample size study.
Sure, but imagine making a medical experiment where you give once 1 mg of the drug (that should be dosed at 1 mg/day as per results of previous experiments for at least 2 weeks) and then writing an article in which surprisingly it comes out that it didn't work well.
>Indeed, after the study concluded, we conducted qualitative interviews with 15 participants, where—among other things—we asked them how much money they would have needed to receive for it to have made a difference in their lives at that time. About half of participants indicated that they would have needed to receive more than $2,000, with those responses falling between $4,000 and $25,000. Although this is by no means a representative sample or ideal methodology, these responses may at least be indicative of the general order of magnitude needed.
How surprising is it that someone who is living at the poverty level or under it when given a "small" amount of money (no matter if 500 or 2,000) after one month has spent it?