Source: Show-Me Institute
by Patrick Tuohey
“In a series of sketches for Saturday Night Live, Billy Crystal played a fictionalized version of actor and director Fernando Lamas as host of the talk show ‘Fernando’s Hideaway.’ Crystal’s character would often say that it is better to look good than to feel good. This was on my mind as I reviewed recent evaluations of St. Louis’s guaranteed basic income pilot by Washington University’s Center for Social Development. The review’s claims will sound familiar to anyone who has followed these pilot programs around the country. … But as economists Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley note in a review of the universal basic income literature, the new wave of guaranteed-income pilots is ‘not well suited’ to answer the most important questions about the policy.” (03/12/26)