A recent study on basic income, sponsored by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, points out that giving low-income people guaranteed paydays with no strings attached can lead to less work, giving them more time off.
The study, one of the largest of its kind, examined the impact of guaranteed income on recipients’ health, spending, employment, mobility and other aspects of life. see.
Altman first announced his desire to fund education in a 2016 blog post on the Y Combinator startup website.
Some of the questions he asked about how people react to free money included, “Do people sit down and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy?” and are they satisfied?” according to the post. Altman, whose OpenAI is behind ChatGPT’s text input, which threatens to take away some jobs, said in a blog post that he thinks. The elimination of “traditional jobs” technology it may make basic income necessary in the future.
How much did the participants earn?
For the OpenResearch Permanent Income Study, 3,000 participants in Illinois and Texas received $1,000 each month for three years starting in 2020. The transfer of money represents a 40% increase in the income of the recipients. Income recipients were at least 300% below the federal poverty line, with an average income of less than $29,000. A control group of 2,000 participants received $50 per month for their contributions.
Basic income recipients spent more, the study found, with their extra dollars going toward essentials like rent, transportation and food.
The researchers also studied the effect of free money on how much money recipients worked, and what kind of jobs. They found that cash transfer recipients worked 1.3 to 1.4 hours per week compared to the control group. Instead of working those hours, the people receiving them used them for leisure.
“We’ve seen a modest reduction in labor supply,” Eva Vivalt, an associate professor of economics at the University of Toronto and one of the study’s lead researchers, told CBS MoneyWatch. “From an economist’s point of view, it’s a moderate effect.”
More independence, better health
Vivalt does not consider a drop in hours spent working as a negative test result. On the contrary, according to Vivalt. “People do a lot of things, and if the results say that people value having more leisure time – that this is what increases their well-being – that’s a good thing.”
In other words, cash transfers gave recipients more autonomy over how they spent their time, according to Vivalt.
“It gives people the choice to make their own decisions about what they want to do. In that sense, it really improves their well-being,” he said.
The researchers expected that the participants would eventually receive higher wages by doing a well-paying job, but that situation did not end. “They thought that if you looked for a job for a long time because you had a lot of cushion, you could wait for better jobs, or maybe you could leave bad jobs,” Vivalt said. “But we do not find any results in the quality of work.”
Increase in hospitals
At a time when even insured Americans say they have trouble staying healthy because they struggle to get attentionsurvey results show that basic income recipients have actually increased their spending on health care services.
Cash transfer recipients had a 26% increase in the number of hospitalizations last year, compared to control recipients on average. The average host also had a 10% increase in the likelihood of visiting the emergency department in the past year.
The researchers say they will continue to study the results of the tests, such as other cities beyond of the US do their memory tests.
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