WOOOW. A Canadian research project gave homeless people $7,500 each — the results were 'beautifully surprising'.

Turns out: basic income for the homeless pays for itself. It's free money, because 'the project saved the shelter system $8,100 per person'.
'cbc.ca/news/canada/br…
Here are some of the main results:
1: Cash recipients move out of
homelessness faster. The cash group spent 4,396 fewer
nights homeless over 12 months
2: Cash recipients spend less, not more on goods such as alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs
3: Free money saved money. In total, cash recipients saved an additional $8,172 compared to non-cash participants.
4: Food security of cash recipients increased. 67% of cash recipients were food secure after 1 month, an increase of 37 percentage points from baseline.
Here's the full impact statement of the study, if you want to read for yourself: static1.squarespace.com/static/5f07a92…

They now want to expand and do a much bigger study. Fundraising goal: $10 million --> forsocialchange.org/donate
damn, I'm excited about this!!

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More from @rcbregman

23 Sep
1/ The home of all my journalism, @The_Corres, is celebrating one year of publishing hopeful journalism this month! If you are a founding member, it would be so great if you'd renew your membership by the end of the month via corr.es/renew-now Image
2/ Here are just a few of the stories I’ve published this year:
--> A chapter that I ended up leaving out of my book, about Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince-turned-anarchist who had a VERY dangerous idea: most people are pretty decent.
thecorrespondent.com/443/brace-your…
3/ A few months into the pandemic, it became clear that the era of neoliberalism is over. But what comes next? I wrote that the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago:
thecorrespondent.com/466/the-neolib…
Read 6 tweets
7 Sep
NEWS! I'm so honoured to be guest editor of this week's The Big Issue, UK's wonderful street newspaper. Theme: CYNICISM IS OUT, HOPE IS IN. On the cover: exclusive illustration by the great @charliemackesy! /1 Image
We've got brilliant pieces by @helenlewis and @NesrineMalik on activism and social change. I've interviewed filmmaker Richard Curtis (Love Actually, About Time, etc) about his films, activism and how he's being radicalised by his kids. (Teaser: bigissue.com/latest/richard…) /2
Here's a short version of my own essay about the jaw-dropping generational shift we're seeing right now. If you were young in the 1990s, it was avant-garde to be cynical and nihilistic. Nowadays, activism is the new realism.
bigissue.com/latest/rutger-… /3
Read 5 tweets
9 Jun
This is such a great conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and @ezraklein. Coates: ‘The notion that man is naturally in a state of war (…) is deep in Western philosophy. (...) Is that true? Or is that just an assumption that we made?’
vox.com/2020/6/5/21279…
/1 thread
I had the honour of being interviewed by Ezra a week earlier about my new book HUMANKIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY. The timing wasn’t great, to put it mildly. Talking about the fundamental decency of people after the death of George Floyd… /2
podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the…
But as Ezra says: ‘Now I think it wasn’t [ill-timed].' Big part of the book is about how we humans mirror each other. Someone gives you a compliment, you’re quick to return the favour. Somebody says something unpleasant, and you feel the urge to make a snide comeback. /3
Read 15 tweets
9 Jun
A lot of people still think that we don't help each other when something like this happens (bystander effect). I interviewed psychologist Marie Lindegaard for my book, who found that in real-life situations (not lab experiments) people do help each other in 90 PERCENT of cases.
A 2011 meta-analysis even found that there's a 'reverse bystander effect'.

When the situation is life-threatening and bystanders can communicate with each other 'additional bystanders even lead to more, rather than less, helping.' pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21534650/
But what about the famous Kitty Genovese case, who was killed in 1964 in New York when -supposedly- 37 bystanders saw it happening and did nothing?
Turns out: that was fake new avant la lettre. From my book:
Read 4 tweets
2 Jun
Today is the US publication day of my new book HUMANKIND, A HOPEFUL HISTORY. It feels strange to be publishing it right now, on #BlackOutTuesday, in the midst of a pandemic, while police are engaging in the most savage violence. /1 [thread]
A summary of the book in one sentence would be: ‘Most people are decent, but power corrupts.’

Could be a summary of this moment as well. We see the extraordinary courage of millions of protesters, and the total corruption of those who are supposed to ‘protect and serve’. /2
We've been here many times before. For centuries Western culture has been permeated by the idea that we humans are just selfish creatures. That cynical image of man has been proclaimed in many places - in films and novels, in history books and in scientific research. /3
Read 12 tweets
31 May
I think this is wrong. People don’t turn into monsters if you put them in a uniform. The Stanford Prison Experiment has been thoroughly debunked. See this recent paper, by the first researcher who went into the archives of the experiment: psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-45… [thread /1]
The police violence we see right now is, I think, the result of a much longer history of racism and terrible policing in the US. Take the ‘broken windows’ approach: the idea that you have to arrest people for the smallest of things to maintain the order. /2
Combine this with a crazy quota system, in which officers feel pressured to rack up as many citations as possible. Doesn’t take long before they start fabricating violations. Arresting kids for dancing in they subway, or people talking in the street etc. /3
Read 11 tweets

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