If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
There is massive, long term UBI study happening ongoing in Kenya, and the results are extremely positive.
Early findings from the world’s largest UBI study, Dec 6, 2023 by GiveDirectly
The actual paper, Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus, Tavneet Suri, 15 September 2023