Ask HN: Why not make universal basic income conditional on the crime rate?

If the crime rate rises above a certain level, UBI stops for everyone until it goes back down.

Do you think this would be a good way to keep the crime rate low in a city/country with UBI?

k310 · a month ago

"Crime Rate" has been used as a proxy or dogwhistle for non-white neighborhoods.

Currently, there is deployment of federal troops to "blue" cities with imaginary high crime rates, which are actually low. Truth is in short supply lately.

High crime may be associated with economically depressed areas, but how about fixing that problem rather than a symptom? UBI may help do that by raising the floor, giving people more purchasing power.

allears · a month ago

God no. The people who need the benefit don't have the ability to bring down the crime rate, so it's not an incentive. And the "crime rate" is a statistic that is poorly reported and can be easily manipulated. This just sounds like "behave or go to bed without dinner."

PaulHoule · a month ago

I'm inclined to think of

https://morbidology.com/the-town-that-got-away-with-murder/

I was talking to my wife the other day and she was testing a rather hard position which was that in traditional cultures disabled or crazy people were probably often quietly killed (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men)

You could imagine that a society that thinks that way could be well organized into vigilante groups that would eliminate crime by eliminating criminals. From the viewpoint of our society that seems terrible problematic (do they kill deaf people? all non-conformists? gay people?) but if our civilization collapses the survivors will turn their back on everything it stood for and the next nation might start with a bill of responsibilities rather than a bill of rights.

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8474_s · a month ago

Crime is mostly individual and income-driven, so its both not community-policed and inversely proportional to income level. Laws against crime require police to effectively enforce them, as community cannot "reduce crime" without significant investment and focus on it(police is significantly more effective vs vigilantes/citizen patrols). Whichever this scheme tries to do, is effectively collective punishment for community not allocating resources for policing itself.

dragonwriter · a month ago

> Why not make universal basic income conditional on the crime rate?

There are lots of good answers for why not to do this, but the simplest that is sufficiently decisive, I think, is Goodhart's Law.

> Do you think this would be a good way to keep the crime rate low in a city/country with UBI?

It would be a good way to make the official crime rate track the UBI-related policy preferences of whatever authority was in charge of crime statistics.

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tharga8616 · a month ago

No, UBI is unconditional by definition. Crime reduction is indeed one of the outcomes of UBI experiments.