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It's a time to be alive and unlucky if you're not a resident of Denver, Colorado. Denver recently experimented with giving people $1,000 a month and the result that they published was that it reduced homelessness and increased full-time employment, but is that really what happened? An experiment in universal basic income, that's what. Universal basic income has been something that has been discussed a fair amount recently with the claim being that having a universal basic income that is funded by the government could help millions of Americans have more stable footing and overcome poverty.

Not everyone feels the same way about this idea though, so it often gets voted down or completely disregarded because there is the question of funding and how to stabilize the markets to prevent price gouging among other things. To be clear, it was not the city government of Denver that was responsible for this experiment; it was the Denver Basic Income Project, founded by Mark Donovan.

How did they go about seeing how effective the basic income experiment was? Roughly 800 "unhoused" persons were given between $50 and $1000 in monthly payments for at least a few months with no strings attached. Participants were not told how to spend their money, nor were they given any sort of conditions they had to maintain in order to get or keep their payments.

What the researchers saw as a result was that persons who received $500 or more were more likely to find stable work and have housing. The study is not complete, as the report that has been published is an interim report and they plan to follow their population of people for at least a year for "true" outcomes. In addition, the homeless population tends to be transient and difficult to follow, so we are unsure of how many of the original 800 subjects the researchers were able to get self-reported data from.

Either way, the results so far look promising even if it's based on 10 people. Denver isn't the only city experimenting with universal basic income, in fact at least 4 other cities have begun experimenting with it as well. So far, none of them have published any results, but a Google search will show that Santa Fe, upstate New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia all have some level of a universal basic income program in place.

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