34
votes
A University of British Columbia study gave fifty homeless people $7,500 each and debunks stereotypes about homeless people’s spending habits
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- Title
- Homeless People's Spending Habits Are Not What You Think
- Published
- Aug 29 2023
- Word count
- 530 words
These research pieces have been done to death over the years, and they all come back with the same realisation. That giving money to poor people is so much better off than if it's given in voucher / monitored forms.
Actually treating people as grownups works so much better for the health and agency, it's unreal.
Yeah. The problem isn't that we don't know it, because we knew since... maybe ever. Not that it's a bad thing to confirm it and its many variations.
The problem is a lot of people believing the homeless deserve it by their own fault or even divine judgment. And science doesn't influence such beliefs.
This is probably the crux of it.
Lots of right-wing spin around, "Your taxes paying for the freeloaders" for the past 200+ years is killing off the West spectacularly.
Such a shame. We could be so much better if we cut down the egotists and narcs who demand control to the detriment of everything else.
Agreed. When morality starts getting applied to mental illness (addiction, etc.) then it's easier to justify saying someone doesn't deserve the help they need.
I'm not so sure about these results. To gain more certainty, the study should be replicated 500-700 times in Canada alone
Better pay more buddy think tanks more money to study again and again.
Cynicism aside:
7500 paid for less than a third of the year of housing on avg. Which isn't surprising for Vancouver: so many people are close to homelessness because of the sheer unaffordability.
Dr Zhao is going to replicate this study in larger sizes across Canada. Which isn't because he needs convincing it's because we still have so many stubborn fools who think couple hundred bucks or CERB paid for years of low employment. The repeats are hopefully going to convince some voters and decision makers. UBI will, once in place, save us so much money.
Did you perform a power analysis to get that number range?
Yes, I've performed power analysis and found severe power imbalances in our societies.
Seriously though, I took these stats and divided them by sample size
By power analysis I mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_a_test#Power_analysis since I was wondering how you got to such a specific number of 500-700.
Dividing by sample size doesn't mean anything... Measures of certainty don't work like that. In cases where the variance is small and/or differences are large, you don't need large sample sizes.
In this case, since the results are rather profound, it wouldn't be wrong to qualitatively say that the sample size is sufficient. There's no point in wasting money in another study, just execute.
I think Minty's suggestions was more about giving $7500 to all homeless people in Canada, rather than the potential statistical results from the study.
Thank you! I started to worry no one will get it lol
sigh... Poe's Law certainly holds true, especially for a site like Tildes where we're more used to serious discussions.
Pro tip: things before "Seriously though" tend to be a joke ;)
Unless it is exceedingly explicit, lacking all subtlety and nuance, irony tends to fail on the internet, and Tildes is no different :P