- A guaranteed-basic-income program in Austin gave people $1,000 a month for a year.
- Most of the participants spent the no-strings-attached cash on housing, a study found.
- Participants who said they could afford a balanced meal also increased by 17%.
A guaranteed-basic-income plan in one of Texas’ largest cities reduced rates of housing insecurity. But some Texas lawmakers are not happy.
Austin was the first city in Texas to launch a tax-payer-funded guaranteed-income program when the Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot kicked off in May 2022. The program served 135 low-income families, each receiving $1,000 monthly. Funding for 85 families came from the City of Austin, while philanthropic donations funded the other 50.
The program was billed as a means to boost people out of poverty and help them afford housing. “We know that if we trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, it leads to better outcomes,” the city says on its website. “It leads to better jobs, increased savings, food security, housing security.”
While the program ended in August 2023, a new study from the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank, found that the city’s program did, in fact, help its participants pay for housing and food. On average, program participants reported spending more than half of the cash they received on housing, the report said.
The same way you’d assign fees and collections from a credit card or an auto loan or a mortgage you’d defaulted on.
Do you mean “Black Mirror” per the episode “Nosedive”? You can read that as the horrors of a social credit system, but I primarily see it as a critique of the class system with social credit as a layer of abstraction that allows it to persist. Keeping the “wrong kind of people” out of your neighborhood isn’t something we invented in the last ten years. We’ve had redlining and sundown towns for centuries.
Re: Forbes
They’ve been running this same article for 20 years. Even setting aside that it largely neglects how these systems work in practice abroad, the real horror of the story is in enforced artificial scarcity for the purpose of inflating profits. And that’s something tied up far tighter in the Western economic system than in East Asia, because Western economics is driven by financialization and artificial scarcity.
Its merely an alternative to the existing US model of financial credit. The “nightmare” is only real for people who enjoy high levels of disposable income/high credit but low levels of social status. And, given how social status is already a critical component of one’s economic standing, this just isn’t a large number of people.
For lay citizens, its the same gray miasma of western economic credit. A host of opaque figures and metrics that are intended to force you into a queue behind your superiors.
Past that, the far bigger issue you have is in whether your economy prioritizes housing as a place to live or housing as a place to speculatively invest. In the case of China - and the recent collapse of Evergrande is a great data point on this - the answer from the state government is that Houses Are For Living In. For all the paranoia of social credit, the real root of the problem in the Chinese economy was a multi-billion dollar real estate speculator consuming valuable property for the purpose of generating profit rather than generating new housing units.
When you transplant this into the American Economy, the real fear manifests as a speculative market bubble around housing, wherein people are justified as homeless despite ample amounts of excess housing entirely due to their social credit score rather than by their economic status. Given an already expanding US homeless population, I get how this is terrifying. But the solution in the US is to organize with your fellow tenants and resist commodification of empty homes, not to crying into the void about how people are downgrading your credit based on your Facebook profile.
Are you sure it’s only real for high-income/low social status people? Even if so it won’t stay that way. The main goal of dystopian politics in America is to cull the herd of demand when supply is low or when supply is artificially suppressed (like with housing). Got too many people with money and great credit pursuing homes with houses going up to a godzillion per square foot in the outback of Montana? Pinch the pipeline before or after they show good credit and money: add more barriers to entry with Facebook scanning. Let the algorithms look for things like “labor union” or “climate change is real” to weed them out, and disqualify anyone with no Facebook, and make sure no one knows this algorithm exists, just say “Sorry, you got outbid,” Hell, don’t even CALL it a social credit system. Let the conspiracy theorists battle each other over what’s going on.
(Yes, I am a Supervillain University Professor. See my course on how to laugh maniacally and be taken seriously.)
I’d further calibrate what you said to this: the solution in the US is to organize with your fellow Americans at large and vote for politicians who will stop the commodification of empty homes before the powers that be start downgrading your standing as a prospective home buyer based on your Facebook profile.
Its functionally inconsequential for normies. These kinds of laws can impact the modern day Influencers and other celebrities, media heads, and mid-tier politicians, when they try to access high end luxury accommodations. And that’s why you’re seeing so much consternation about Chinese Social Credit from folks at the WSJ or on some Hollywood Social Media channel. They know they have to travel to China from time to time for promotions and they don’t want to be stuck at the Hotel 6 Legs or waiting in line for the Chinese-equivalent of the Greyhound, because Beijing has them flagged as “Legally A Bunch of Assholes”.
But for the folks who are already in the proletariat class, this doesn’t matter because they’re not doing anything important enough to get themselves dinged. They’re already shopping Target and living in the Basic Housing Unit and working the Standard Job. That’s the baseline. And they aren’t commanding these enormous audiences or drawing in these vast revenue streams through which they might be denied privileges of their advanced fame and wealth.
What really matters is that basic standard of living. If its high - if you’re retiring at the age of 54 and living in cozy low-rent apartment blocks with your SO and your dog and your 2.3 kids - then “low social credit” is of marginal worry. But if its low - if you’re barely affording a slum while working two jobs as a bachelor who never gets laid - then “low social credit” is the nightmare Westerners can’t abide.
Again, all of this is already a reality for the folks who don’t have a good credit score because they don’t have good jobs or a pile of surplus cash. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to know that poverty exists.
At least in my home state of Texas, the political system is ITSELF a consequence of the credit system. You need money to campaign and run. You need “social credit” to get free media exposure and positive coverage from “neutral” venues. The folks on offer to vote for are the folks with “good social credit”. They’ve already been vetted and have chosen to toe the line on Labor Unions and Climate Change. They’re the ones who survived the weeding.
So by all means, organize. But don’t expect the guys who survived their primaries to save you. Even if your guy wins, whether they’re in the Tea Party or the Squad, their higher status simply exposes them to a more brutal and draconian form of social enforcement. The voting doesn’t matter if you’re not out on the picket lines and in the street in their defense when the political and private leadership class cracks the whips.