″… instead of maintaining a giant bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to scrutinize the ‘worthiness’ of each welfare recipient through obsessive means testing, it turns out it’s more effective–and cheaper!–to just give people money.”
In case people think you’re linking to a cast-iron case for ‘UBI as a silver bullet’, I should flag that you’re linking to an intervention that does use means testing (“Give Directly …[targets]… recipients who were chosen simply for meeting a basic means test criterion”) and the proxy of living in a poor Kenyan village.
Very nice piece… but I have some nitpicking…
″… instead of maintaining a giant bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to scrutinize the ‘worthiness’ of each welfare recipient through obsessive means testing, it turns out it’s more effective–and cheaper!–to just give people money.”
In case people think you’re linking to a cast-iron case for ‘UBI as a silver bullet’, I should flag that you’re linking to an intervention that does use means testing (“Give Directly …[targets]… recipients who were chosen simply for meeting a basic means test criterion”) and the proxy of living in a poor Kenyan village.