Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Women bear a substantial “child penalty” in the labor market, which is responsible for a large fraction of the remaining gender gap in earnings in advanced economies."

"There is also evidence that short-term gains in school outcomes translate into long-term differences in opportunities."

"Some of these effects will therefore likely transmit to the next generation as well."

"However, in the longer term, some twenty-odd years after the initial lottery, large differences in their life outcomes were evident. Young adults whose parents won the vouchers earned $ 1,624 more per year than those whose parents did not. They were more likely to have gone to college, they lived in better neighborhoods, and the girls were less likely to be single mothers."

"This will cost money; these two sectors alone could probably absorb as much money as a government would be willing to spend. But if this is money spent paying people well for stable, well-respected jobs, it will achieve two important goals: producing something useful for society and providing a large number of meaningful occupations."

"At the same time, the care of the elderly is definitely a worthwhile social goal that is currently underserved, and there are enormous potential gains for society from investing in better education and early-childhood care."

"Indeed, an experiment conducted in Peru shows boarding-school students who were randomly assigned beds near highly sociable students gained social skills themselves. In contrast, being assigned a neighboring student with good test scores did not help them get better grades."

"Would French GDP be higher if agricultural production were more concentrated and farmhouses were replaced by warehouses? Possibly. Would welfare be higher? Probably not."

"If we want to claim trade is good for everyone, we need to design mechanisms to make it actually so, and those will involve identifying losers and compensating them."

"It allows for full labor market flexibility, meaning people can be laid off quite easily whenever they aren’t needed anymore, but the laid off are subsidized so they do not suffer much of an economic loss, and there is a concerted effort by the government to get the worker back into employment (perhaps after meaningful retraining)."

"In other words, if we are right that the real crisis in rich countries is that many people who used to think of themselves as the middle class have lost the sense of self-worth they used to derive from their jobs, UBI is not the answer."

"This explains something rather remarkable and frightening. A study found that when workers with long tenure get fired during mass layoffs, they are more likely to die in the years immediately afterward. 54 Losing a job seems to literally give people heart attacks."

"Many studies have found that, on average, displaced workers never fully recover in terms of earnings after a mass layoff. On average, the jobs they find are less well paid, less stable, and do not have the same benefits."

"Better-paid jobs are on average better jobs, but what you do matters as well. People may resist having to move from the job they love to a job they perceive as worthless, even if their income would be more or less unchanged. And, in fact, people do not really land on their feet when they lose a job they have had for many years."

"There will be errors. But as long as we are willing to be liberal in the application of the tests (so that those who need help don’t get thrown out, even at the cost of giving it to some people who do not need it), and as long as the UUBI is there to provide a minimum, we might get the best of both worlds."

"Given all this, the best combination may be a UUBI everyone can access when they need it and larger transfers targeted to the very poor and linked to preventive care and children’s education. The conditions for receiving transfers do not need to be very strictly enforced."

"While we are in favor of a UUBI based on what we know so far, there is no data yet on its long-term impact. Most of our evidence is from relatively short-lived interventions. We cannot be sure how people will react to being assured a basic income forever."

"Ross was frustrated that politicians used anecdotes to justify economic policy, and that there was no factual basis."

"As it turns out, there is also evidence, going back to the 1960s, suggesting that sloth should not be a major concern in the US."

"Perhaps a guaranteed income would make the poor willing to go somewhere else to look for a better job, to learn a new skill, or to start a new business."

"The most plausible explanation is that getting the gift of the asset freed them up from worries of survival, giving them the bandwidth and the energy to focus on their work."

"We are still in favor of giving the money to the woman, because it restores a little of the balance of power within the family and might allow her to do what she deems important (including working outside of the home29), but not so much because we think that the man will drink it up."

"Even men do not seem to waste the money; when the transfers are given at random to either a man or a woman, there is no difference in how much is spent on food versus, say, alcohol or tobacco."

"And cash transfers generally increase food expenditures as much as food rations."

"This was one and a half years longer than onetime billionaire capitalist hero Charles Keating, the central figure in the most famous corruption scandal of the Reagan era (the Keating Five scandal), and the related savings and loans crisis that was to cost taxpayers over $ 500 billion in bailout money."

"Ronald Reagan would return time and again to the image of the so-called welfare queen, who was black, lazy, female, and fraudulent. The model for this was Linda Taylor, a woman from Chicago who had four aliases and was convicted of $ 8,000 in fraud, for which she spent several years in prison."

"To make matters worse, those especially intimidated by the complexity of the sign-up process are often the neediest."

"Being aristocrats, they would rather die than let it be known to the public that they had fallen into such dire straits, hence the artifice of the nightly effort."

"There is one story about this project that stuck in Abhijit’s memory. It is claimed the project took much longer than it should have because what the workers built during the day, the elites destroyed at night. The idea was to give the elites, who also lived off agriculture and were therefore starving like the rest, a way to earn enough to survive."

"If we can engage the world seriously in this quest, and the best minds in the world to work with governments and NGOs and others to redesign our social programs for effectiveness and political viability, there is a chance history will remember our era with gratitude."