原文：https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/20798745-cb9fbb39 （上不去，天朝大网络长城去死）
网友翻译，没有润色。

Why we should give free money to everyone?
我们为何应该免费把钱给每个人?
London, May 2009. A small experiment involving thirteen homeless men takes off. They are street veterans. Some of them have been sleeping on the cold tiles of The Square Mile, the financial center of the world, for more than forty years. Their presence is far from cheap. Police, legal services, healthcare: the thirteen cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds. Every year.
2009年5月的伦敦。一项包含了13位无家可归游民的小实验展开了。他们是游荡在街头的退役老兵。其中一些人一直睡在The Square Mile的冰冷瓷砖上，而这里是超过40年的世界金融中心。这些老兵游民的存在耗费了巨大的社会成本。警察治安管制、法律服务、医疗照护等等:这13位游民老兵每年耗费了纳税人数十万英镑的社会成本。

That spring, a local charity takes a radical decision. The street veterans are to become the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays for them. The men will get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. They'll each receive 3,000 pounds, cash, with no strings attached. The men are free to decide what to spend it on; counseling services are completely optional. No requirements, no hard questions. The only question they have to answer is:
那年春天，一个当地的慈善机构采用了一项激进的决定。这些街头游民老兵们将成为一项创新社会实验的受益者。不再给他们食物券、不再有厨房里的晚餐或偶尔才给他们的过夜住所庇护。这些人反而将得到颠覆性的援助:由纳税人所资助。他们每个人都将收到3千英镑的现金，未附加任何的前提条件。这些人能自由决定要把这些钱花在哪里。相关的谘询服务也完全是自由选择的。不再有刁难人的要求或问题。他们唯一必须回答的问题是:
What do you think is good for you?
「你觉得什麼才是对你好?」

Gardening classes
园艺课程
‘I didn’t have enormous expectations,’ an aid worker recalls.
「我对他们的回答没有庞大的期待。」一位援助人员如此回忆道。
Yet the desires of the homeless men turned out to be quite modest. A phone, a passport, a dictionary - each participant had his own ideas about what would be best for him. None of the men wasted their money on alcohol, drugs or gambling. On the contrary, most of them were extremely frugal with the money they had received. On average, only 800 pounds had been spent at the end of the first year.
然而，这些无家可归的游民所展现出来的欲望，其结果是相当卑微的。一台电话、一本护照、一本字典－－每位参与者都有自己关於什麼才是对其自身最好的想法。没有人把他们的钱浪费在酗酒、毒品或赌博上。相反地，大部份的人对於花费自己所得到的金钱，都抱持著一种极端节俭的态度。平均而言，到了第一年的年底，只花了8百英镑。
Simon’s life was turned upside down by the money. Having been addicted to heroin for twenty years, he finally got clean and began with gardening classes. ‘For the first time in my life everything just clicked, it feels like now I can do something’, he says. ‘I’m thinking of going back home. I’ve got two kids.’
Simon的生活透过运用这笔钱而天翻地覆。虽然对海洛因已成瘾了20年，他最后仍成功戒毒并开始去上园艺课程。「在我的人生中，终於第一次每件事都顺利进行。我感觉现在能做到一些事。」他如此说道。「我正想回家。我有两位小孩。」
A year after the experiment had started, eleven out of thirteen had a roof above their heads. They accepted accommodation, enrolled in education, learnt how to cook, got treatment for drug use, visited their families and made plans for the future. ‘I loved the cold weather,’ one of them remembers. ‘Now I hate it.’ After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, eleven notorious vagrants finally moved off the streets.
在此实验开始之后经过一年，13位中有11位得到了居住的地方。他们获得了住房、注册了学校的教育、学习如何煮菜、得到使用毒品后的治疗、拜访了家人并订定了未来的计画。「我过去喜爱冰冷的天气。」其中一位参与实验的成员说道。「但现在我讨厌了。」在有关权威当局数十年徒劳无功的拉扯、罚款与迫害之后，11名「恶名昭彰」的流浪汉终於搬离了街道。
Costs? 50,000 pounds a year, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving eleven individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of at least 7. Even The Economist concluded:
花了多少钱?每年5万英镑，包括给援助人员的薪资。除了让这11位成员浴火重生，这项计画也节省了至少至少7倍的钱。甚至连《经济学人》都下了这样的结论：
‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’
「在无家可归的游民身上，最有效率的花钱方式可能就是直接把钱给他们。」

Santa exists
存在著圣诞老人
We tend to presume that the poor are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, they would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education. This kind of reasoning nourishes the myriad social programs, administrative jungles, armies of program coordinators and legions of supervising staff that make up the modern welfare state. Since the start of the crisis, the number of initiatives battling fraud with benefits and subsidies has surged.
我们倾向於假设穷人没有能力处理金钱。如果他们有任何钱，人们就会推测他们将把钱花在速食和便宜的啤酒上，而不是买水果或接受教育。这种思维的推论，助长了各式各样的社会福利计画、行政丛林、一大群计画协调者与监督人员，最终造成了现代的福利国家。自从金融危机爆发以来，人们已提出各种提议来对抗利用诈骗的手段获得补助与津贴的弊病。
People have to ‘work for their money,’ we like to think. In recent decades, social welfare has become geared toward a labor market that does not create enough jobs. The trend from 'welfare' to 'workfare' is international, with obligatory job applications, reintegration trajectories, mandatory participation in 'voluntary' work. The underlying message: Free money makes people lazy.
人们必须「工作赚钱。」我们喜欢这样想。在最近几十年来，社会福利已用於未创造出足够工作的劳动市场中。从「福利」再到「工作福利」是一种国际趋势，伴随著应徵义务性工作、罪犯为了回归社会而实施的劳动服务、强制性参与「志愿」工作等等。其潜藏的讯息如下:免费给钱会让人们懒惰。

The decrease in working hours turned out to be limited. ‘The ‘laziness’ contention is just not supported by our findings’, the chief data analyst of the Denver experiment said. ‘There is not anywhere near the mass defection the prophets of doom predicted.’ On average, the decline in work hours amounted to 9 percent per household. Like in Dauphin, the majority of this drop was caused by young mothers and students in their twenties.
工时的下降从结果来看是有限的。「『懒惰』这个主张就是没有被我们的研究发现所支持。」丹佛实验的主要资料分析者这样说。「没有任何地方出现唱衰者所预测的大规模失败。」平均而言，每间家庭的工时下降了9%。如同在Dauphin一样，工时下降的主要原因是由於年轻的妈妈们与20几岁的学生们所造成。
‘These declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home,’ an evaluative report of a Seattle project concluded. A mother who had never finished high school got a degree in psychology and went on to a career in research. Another woman took acting classes, while her husband started composing. ‘We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists’, they told the researchers. School results improved in all experiments: grades went up and dropout rates went down. Nutrition and health data were also positively affected – for example, the birth weight of newborn babies increased.
「这些给薪工作的工时下降，毫无疑问有一部份由其它有益的活动弥补起来了，像是寻找更佳的工作在家工作。」一份西雅图计画的评估报告如此下结论。一位从未完成高中学业的母亲得到了心理学的学位，并继续从事一份研究性质的职业。另一位妇女上了演戏的课程，而其丈夫则开始创作。「我们现在是自给自足的赚钱艺术家。」这对夫妻这样告诉研究员。而学业表现的改善则出现在所有实验中:学生成绩上升，缀学率下降。营养与健康资料也得到正面的影响－－例如，新生婴儿的出生重量增加了。
For a while, it seemed like the basic income would fare well in Washington.
有好一阵子，似乎无条件基本收入在华盛顿会从此消失。
WELFARE REFORM IS VOTED IN HOUSE, a NYT headline on April 17, 1970 read. An overwhelming majority had endorsed President Nixon’s proposal for a modest basic income. But once the proposal got to the Senate, doubts returned. ‘This bill represents the most extensive, expensive and expansive welfare legislation ever handled by the Committee on Finance,’ one of the senators said.
但「白宫投票赞成社会福利改革」，1970年4月17日的纽约时报头条如此报导。压倒性的大多数人称赞尼克森总统发放无条件基本收入的提议。但一旦这项提议进到了参议院，各种疑问就开始回来了。「这项法案是史上财政委员会所处理过范围最广泛、花费最昂贵的社会福利立法。」其中一位参议员这样说道。
Then came that fatal discovery: the number of divorces in Seattle had gone up by more than 50%. This percentage made the other, positive results seem utterly uninteresting. It gave rise to the fear that a basic income would make women much too independent. For months, the law proposal was sent back and forth between the Senate and the White House, eventually ending in the dustbin of history.
接著那个最致命的发现就来临了:在西雅图的离婚数字上升了超过50%。这项百分比让剩下的其它所有正面结果看起来完全黯淡无光。这造成了人们对於无条件基本收入会让妇女们更独立许多的恐惧。在好几个月内，这项法律提案在议会与白宫之间来来回回，最后的结果是无条件基本收入被扔到历史的垃圾桶里。
Later analysis would show that the researchers had made a mistake – in reality the number of divorces had not changed.
而之后的分析也显示出研究员犯了一个错误－－事实上离婚的数字并未改变。

（全文完）
觉得太长的，请当消遣读物看
我觉得很有道理……直接给钱，反而解决很多问题。
人的自律与对更好生活的向性，往往比我们通常认为的更大。
像是一位原帖吧友的话：（有细微改动）
“有了钱人们自然会花在生活必需品上，为什么要再增加程序？太过细致的指导，不信任大众的行为能力，是精英主义的典型想法。统计一群人需要的生活必需品，并加以甄别和审核，并统一购买和发放，又需要花多少资金？”
或许“Free Money”正是和谐社会的未来。

先顶再看

我觉得把英文部分删了看得更轻松

太长了还混着英文根本没兴趣看...

试着把原文读了五楼，就我这渣阅读速度放学前肯定读不完了。翻译确实不如原文好看，不过现象蛮有意思。meme这个东西在攻壳机动队的挖掘文里看过，自己也去查了一下，记到笔记上去后就没管了。没想到现在还有这个讨论，orz

@闪电脑 豆腐脑要是看见这张图会很高兴的

很好的文章，感谢分享。
确实是一个有趣的解决方式，人们对临时性收入的安排也折射出国民性的差异，不过每个人对于幸福的追寻都是应当被赞赏与鼓励的。
总之快在国内小范围实行一下吧！

……一拉到底，先回复再说……