> This persists through adoption; try to explain that as a socially mediated effect.

(Formal, registered) adoption is virtually impossible for lower-class people, so studies have very little coverage of that.

> Now, that said, this has nothing to do with the fact that people who would most benefit from welfare schemes are the least likely to be efficient capital allocators. We can make the observation that they are not allocating efficiently independently from asking why they are not allocating efficiently.

But we can't even begin to talk about capital allocation if we're only looking at the output side and not the input side. The people who would benefit most from UBI would be mostly those who have seen little benefit from capital yes, but the overwhelming majority of those are people who never had much capital to allocate in the first place.

> The market already efficiently addresses situations like this which actually exist, using schemes like business loans and outside investment.

Access to those things is extremely class-gated.

> You've made the same (understandable) inversion of causality as before. In reality, the latter tends to drive the former. Obviously the causality is bidirectional to some degree, but I think people tend to vastly underweight the primary direction.

There are probably real effects in both directions, but there is certainly a significant difference from having a safety net. E.g. see the bump in people starting businesses once they hit the medicaid eligibility age threshold.

> There is no way in hell some financial knob the government can blindly turn would do as good a job at performing this function as banks and investors who are actually making a conscious decision and putting their own money on the line.

> I agree that society could do a better job enabling outsized performers without means to get access to capital, but we already do a pretty good job and there is no way that some simple welfare system would do a better job than the intentional systems we have now.

Maybe. Simplicity, transparency, and reliability can be a real gamechanger. At one point in the pandemic the government was trying to literally give away money to certain categories of small businesses but found it difficult, because the businesses that most needed the support were also those that were least efficient at navigating bureaucracies and processes. For an older example, Ramanujan won a scholarship to an elite school that was intended precisely to support cases like his (intelligent people from poor backgrounds), but lost it because, despite his mathematical brilliance, his grades in other subjects weren't high enough to meet the requirements.

> This may or may not be true (I'm not much of a historian), but I do know that "some level of support" doesn't mean "far-reaching government welfare infrastructure". It can mean churches, waqfs, and so on.

Sure. But that style of non-guaranteed social support increases the pressure on poor people to live in a conventional, legible fashion, avoid downside risks, and conform. We gain little and lose much from encouraging the poor to be (literally and metaphorically) sober and miserable because it would be not costly but merely unseemly to enjoy themselves (especially - though far from only - when that enjoyable thing is potentially productive, but in a way that's not necessarily understandable to those in charge of that welfare infrastructure).