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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#21

Post by badloginagain »

andreasklinger wrote: post #8

Question: Wouldnt it make more sense to pick an more isolated ecosystem than oakland? Eg a smaller town or even a small country (eg an island country - yes sounds crazy but actually why not) Or is the goal rather to find out how people will act? (as in: get lazy or not)

I don't think how isolated the ecosystem is too important. I would be more concerned with the methodology of measuring how behaviour has changed- Are they going to follow around candidates before the checks come rolling in to establish baseline behaviours?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#22

Post by wtvanhest »

> Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary, technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall dramatically.

I am 100% for this experiment. But the assumption that technology will replace basic jobs seems naive. Throughout human history, we have seen rapid and accelerating technology improvements. In 1900, roughly 40 percent of Americans were in farming. Today, roughly 2 percent of Americans are in farming [1].

During that same time period we went from most woman not working to most woman working. We are currently in a period of prolonged, very low unemployment by historical standards with more people working on earth than ever before.

As much as it seems obvious that technology will replace all low income jobs, it may be obvious because we are limited in our imagination about what the future low income jobs will be.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/259572/eib3_1_.pdf

Do not let my comment be mistaken for a lack of interest in Basic Income. Hopefully it will be a well thought out and great experiment. One that teaches us about Basic Income and its potential impact.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#23

Post by elizabeth-ycr »

melvinmt wrote: post #6

> If the pilot goes well, we plan to follow up with the main study. If the pilot doesn’t go well, we’ll consider different approaches. Interesting. What are the metrics to determine the success or failure of the pilot?

We’ll consider several metrics, including success of mechanics (payment, data collection mechanisms, etc.); whether the amount of money is sufficient to meet basic needs; and, through interviews with participants, whether the research design is likely to offer insight into how individuals would experience and respond to a basic income.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#24

Post by stevefeinstein »

I think tis is a step in the right direction, but I can't help but think that raising the floor still leaves people there on the floor. Won't inflation, as well as increased demand for the things people need just raise prices of those things out of reach of those on the floor negating any benefit?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#25

Post by mattkrisiloff »

siphor wrote: post #18
tomp wrote: post #12

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one crucial detail: for how long will the basic income last. At least for myself, my decisions would be completely different if I was to receive unconditional income for e.g. 10 years (or less), vs. for the rest of my life.

It's 5 years. Outlined in the link below https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

And pilot we're thinking 6 months to a year -- though still to be determined / could change.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#26

Post by diyseguy »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #17
tomp wrote: post #12

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one crucial detail: for how long will the basic income last. At least for myself, my decisions would be completely different if I was to receive unconditional income for e.g. 10 years (or less), vs. for the rest of my life.

...aaaaand whether or not your children would be receiving it, right? We make many rather large financial decisions based on our choices to procreate or not. If I didn't know if my kids were taken care of, I would probably make different decisions than if I did. There really is no way to test basic income without simply implementing it.

Oooh, yikes, this could become an incentive for people to have tons of kids - so they can get more basic income.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#27

Post by mnx »

dragonwriter wrote: post #16

Honestly, I think any "Basic Income" research where the recipient classes aren't 100% of the members of some well-defined polity and where the policy is explicitly a close-ended pilot is researching something so fundamentally different from Basic Income (it is well-known that close-ended benefits have a different effect on behavior) that, while there may be some useful insights that have applicability to actual Basic…

Well, if a basic income were to be introduced at the state level, that still has no guarantee of continuing for any period of time.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#28

Post by xienze »

siphor wrote: post #18
tomp wrote: post #12

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one crucial detail: for how long will the basic income last. At least for myself, my decisions would be completely different if I was to receive unconditional income for e.g. 10 years (or less), vs. for the rest of my life.

It's 5 years. Outlined in the link below https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

So in other words, a long enough time to make people think they can draw reasonable conclusions about the viability of BI, when in actuality it's not long enough. You have to study the generational effects of this sort of thing. People are going to behave very differently when they know this will be around for a very short time versus the rest of their lives, nevermind how people behave when they're second or third generation BIers.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#29

Post by fiatmoney »

dragonwriter wrote: post #16

Honestly, I think any "Basic Income" research where the recipient classes aren't 100% of the members of some well-defined polity and where the policy is explicitly a close-ended pilot is researching something so fundamentally different from Basic Income (it is well-known that close-ended benefits have a different effect on behavior) that, while there may be some useful insights that have applicability to actual Basic…

Yes. The effects on procreation alone are one of the most important aspects, and effectively un-studyable without some sort of closed system.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#30

Post by justratsinacoat »

PabloOsinaga wrote: post #9

I wonder how to test controlling for reciprocity. I.e., If I receive a basic income as part of a pilot/experiment I will feel tempted to "give back" somehow, while if basic income is a baseline all humans receive, that reciprocity will not be present. How can you design an experiment so that somehow people don't feel they are receiving money in an extraordinary way, but rather that's just part of how the world works.…

>If I receive a basic income as part of a pilot/experiment I will feel tempted to "give back" somehow, while if basic income is a baseline all humans receive, that reciprocity will not be present. How can you design an experiment so that somehow people don't feel they are receiving money in an extraordinary way, but rather that's just part of how the world works

FWIW, excepting the actually lazy (which I think comprises a vanishingly small minority of the population), I think most people will feel as though they have to give back. Sure, once everyone gets N dollars/month just for being alive, they will no longer be receiving money in an extraordinary way, but culture is hard to kill. The relentlessly inbred Protestant work ethic provably shapes a panoply of aspects of our society even now (8 hour work days that office drones spend half of on Reddit, etc); there's no reason to think that its influence will suddenly drop away with the advent of "free money". I have little to go on beyond the already extant Canadian study of 'mincome' [0] back in the 70s, but that was generally considered a success, with recipients putting the money to use in building their businesses and communities, rather than sitting on their asses (with the notable exception of new mothers and teenagers [1], for respectively obvious reasons (OTOH teenagers' HS graduation rate improved, possibly due to not feeling pressure to go get a job)).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

[1] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pd... , which is a 2011 analysis of the data from the 70s, largely lying fallow thanks to Manitoba's provincial Conservatives

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