The researchers Stacia Martin-West of the University of Tennessee and Amy Castro Baker of the University of Pennsylvania collected and analyzed data from individuals who received $500 a month and from individuals who did not. Some of their findings are obvious. The cash transfer reduced income volatility, for one: Households getting the cash saw their month-to-month earnings fluctuate 46 percent, versus the control group’s 68 percent. The families receiving the $500 a month tended to spend the money on essentials, including food, home goods, utilities, and gas. (Less than 1 percent went to cigarettes and alcohol.) The cash also doubled the households’ capacity to pay unexpected bills, and allowed recipient families to pay down their debts. Individuals getting the cash were also better able to help their families and friends, providing financial stability to the broader community...
The researchers also found that the guaranteed income did not dissuade participants from working—adding to a large body of evidence showing that cash benefits do not dramatically shrink the labor force and in some cases help people work by giving them the stability they need to find and take a new job. In the Stockton study, the share of participants with a full-time job rose 12 percentage points, versus five percentage points in the control group. In an interview, Martin-West and Castro Baker suggested that the money created capacity for goal setting, risk taking, and personal investment.
More work, less destitution, more family stability, less strained social networks, less stress, fewer incidences of homelessness, fewer skipped meals: This is what welfare could give the country.
And it just might. America’s welfare politics have shifted radically of late, in part because of the economic pressures felt by Millennials, the first generation in recent U.S. history likely to end up poorer than their parents.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ys-off/618174/
Contemporary capitalism’s negative consequences are extensive and disturbing. They are not, however, new. It is only because of the relative prosperity and democratic stability of the decades after World War II that Americans and Europeans have forgotten how disruptive capitalism can be.
Indeed, during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was commonly believed that capitalism and democracy could not be reconciled. Many liberals and conservatives feared that by empowering the masses, democracy would lead to what John Stuart Mill, for example, called “tyranny of the majority”—as well as prove incompatible, as James Madison put it, with “personal security or the rights of property.” In order to protect against threats to economic freedom, it might be necessary, as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others suggested, to suspend democracy in favor of some sort of authoritarian liberalism. Many socialists, meanwhile, assumed that capitalists would quickly discard democracy—“resort to bayonets,” as Fredrik Sterky, a late 19th-century Swedish socialist and trade union leader, wrote—rather than allow a democratically elected government to threaten their economic power and privileges.
Yet during the 1930s and especially after 1945, a so-called great transformation occurred across the West, enabling democracy and capitalism to be reconciled. One critical reason for this was the triumph of a social democratic understanding of the relationship between the two.
Social democracy is a variant of socialism distinguished by a conviction that democracy makes it both possible and desirable to take advantage of capitalism’s upsides while addressing its downsides by regulating markets and implementing social policies that insulate citizens from those markets’ most destabilizing and destructive consequences.
Since the world is currently in the midst of another backlash against capitalism and resurgence of socialism, it is worth reviewing what this earlier transformation entailed, how the social democratic principles on which it was built differed from those favored by other socialists, and what this all tells us about the problems we face today.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/15...ain-socialism/
Boosting the economy = Rich getting richer.
LOL simpletons
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