Charlie does not let Lisa near those scary ultra loud crinkly biodegradeable Sun Chips bags.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/376842

Re: its funny how in college.. (+4, Insightful)
Synonymous Cowered 8 hours ago
Waste of money? $5700 got people into stable housing a year quicker on average. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that also got them into higher earning jobs quicker and easily offset what they were given.
Or I guess we could just give a bunch of billionaires some more tax cuts. We all know they're the job creators and they couldn't possibly create more jobs with the billions they already have...they need more to accomplish that.
And I'm not sure what your issue was with her leading the study. Even in the hard sciences, most people leading studies are people that believe what they are studying is going to work. They want to accomplish something meaningful and publishable with their work, so of course they're not going to pick something they think is destined for failure (the one big exception for that is peer reviewing other studies that you think we're flawed)
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Offset what they were given (+4, Insightful)
Firethorn 6 hours ago
If you read the article, the $7,500 CAD they got was offset within a year by $8,100 CAD from reduced shelter usage alone.
Thus demonstrating what we've known for decades: On average cash welfare transfers are much more effective per unit than "goods in kind" transfers.
Note: "Goods in Kind" is where, rather than providing money, you provide goods or services instead. Goods in kind is like the really old food aid where you went to a site and got a ration of food, a soup kitchen for a daily example. My getting "government cheese", powdered milk, and other stuff directly from the government as a child is a "good in kind". We got cheese, powdered milk, even if we had cheese and powdered milk already coming out of our ears, but the car needed fixing.
Though I'll note that at the time the government at least had an excuse, in that it was rotating the stock in it's emergency stockpiles to prevent an actual famine in the case of crop failure or cattle disease or such. So the food was closer to "free" than if it had been buying the food specifically to provide it to the poor.
Food stamps is similar, but better because it is at least closer to "cash" or other monetary type payment.
Other goods in kind would be things like housing assistance, utility assistance, those crappy welfare cell phone plans, etc...
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Re: Offset what they were given (+2)
MeNeXT 4 hours ago
When you pick and choose the participants you can prove every possible outcome. How about running this study by random selection and see if the outcome gives a $600 savings by participant.
The reasons people are homeless varies. Different solutions will have different results depending on the reason someone is homeless.
The problem with this study is that it doesn't address the problem of homelessness.
There are very few people in this world who wouldn't benefit from more money and they are both at the top and bottom. We don't need a selective study to show this.
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Re: Offset what they were given (+1)
apoc.famine 2 hours ago
The problem with this study is that it doesn't address the problem of homelessness.
By definition it did. People were homeless. They gave a bunch of them money, and they found homes quicker than those who didn't get the money.
Now, it didn't solve all homelessness, but why would you think it would? You've set an impossible goal so you can shit on one strategy not getting there.
There are more strategies than just this to solve homelessness. What this proved is that this method can be successful, for at least some subset of the population. That's very helpful.
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Re: its funny how in college.. (+1)
Malays2 bowman a few seconds ago
"Or I guess we could just give a bunch of billionaires some more tax cuts. We all know they're the job creators and they couldn't possibly create more jobs with the billions they already have...they need more to accomplish that."
These billionaires are money addicts, and they just can't seem to give enough. They always want more.
This is helped along by a society where we literally define the value of somebody's life by their net WORTH*, and he who has the most money is king and just about everyone will bow down and worship you (which is very true and obvious), and being poor makes you a worthless scumbag in society's eyes (also very true and obvious).
*Say what you will about what you think otherwise what "net worth" really means, but society believes this is the value of human life.
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Re: its funny how in college.. (+4, Insightful)
quonset 7 hours ago
By preordaining the result, the Candian government ensured this study would be dismissed with no impact on policy, making it a waste of money.
She did not "preordain" the result. In this case, the perceived notion was if you give homeless free money they will spend it on drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. That's what "conservatives" keep telling people (just like they keep saying if you give tax breaks to corporations money will "trickle down" to employees in the