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Basic Income Research Proposal

basicincome.ycr.org

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Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#21

Post by Jemaclus »

chimeracoder wrote: post #15
ianai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economists largely consider payments like this to be the best way to enact policies. It gives people more options instead of trying to control through legal pressures.

> Economists largely consider payments like this to be the best way to enact policies. It gives people more options instead of trying to control through legal pressures. That's not true at all, and in fact, the last time a large number of economists were surveyed about a proposal, the response was overwhelmingly in opposition: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/universal-basic-income Many economists would agree that,…

Citation needed (from both of you).

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#22

Post by NickLamp »

influx wrote: post #8

At what point does the government controlling your income start to impede personal freedom? Wouldn't any politician campaigning to increase the basic income be almost automatically elected?

Is everyone currently clamoring to elect politicians that want to increase welfare and other "Great Society" programs?

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#23

Post by roymurdock »

Really awesome to see this coming together. 2 q's - how was the $1,000 per month figure calculated, and will you be deploying in a small, low-income, isolated community where local inflation might occur, a large metropolitan community, distributed randomly across the 2 states? Interesting problems to consider in this study design!

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#24

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

influx wrote: post #8

At what point does the government controlling your income start to impede personal freedom? Wouldn't any politician campaigning to increase the basic income be almost automatically elected?

You're still free to seek out other sources of income under these models and the amount recieved from the government effectively decreases as income is raised due to taxes you pay into the system.

>Wouldn't any politician campaigning on this automatically get elected?

No, lay people would be quick to confuse this with communism. The irony of it is that this sort of a system was one of the few things Keynes and Friedman agreed should be part of public policy.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#25

Post by koolba »

Jemaclus wrote: post #18
koolba wrote: post #6

> We tentatively plan to randomly select 3,000 individuals across two US states to participate in the study: 1,000 will receive $1,000 per month for up to 5 years, and 2,000 will receive $50 per month and serve as a control group for comparison. So obvious question on many minds, " Where do I sign up for the free money? " Also, will it be randomly selected or will the selection criteria factor in cost of living, curr…

It says in the quote that you quoted that it will be randomly selected individuals across two states. ;)

I meant the split between $1,000 or $50.

It's not clear (to me at least...) if the randomness applies to choosing the original 3000 people selected to take part in the study, the bucketizing of them afterwards into 1000/2000 groups, or both.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#26

Post by adangert »

You know this might be speculative, but I feel like a basic income applied to a national allows that population to act more like an ant hive. In the sense that only 3% of the population is actually doing the real hard work, but this is a healthy paradigm, and is much better than forcing individuals who shouldn't be doing the work they currently are to pursue things they actually care about, such as taking care of loved ones, or some creative pursuit. Jobs such as these don't pay much, but are equally valuable to society.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#27

Post by notahacker »

koolba wrote: post #6

> We tentatively plan to randomly select 3,000 individuals across two US states to participate in the study: 1,000 will receive $1,000 per month for up to 5 years, and 2,000 will receive $50 per month and serve as a control group for comparison. So obvious question on many minds, " Where do I sign up for the free money? " Also, will it be randomly selected or will the selection criteria factor in cost of living, curr…

YC probably has the contacts to find $66m of philanthropic cash. Though if you wanted to find out whether UBI is a functional improvement on current systems as opposed to whether people like receiving free money from the SV elite, you'd need to test the funding system by raising taxes by much more than $1k per month on all the higher income recipients and eliminating most govt benefits for the lower income recipients. Of course, you might find fewer people willing to participate in the study then.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#28

Post by vasco »

I would speculate that any end date on this scenario will invalidate results. What a person does if it is guaranteed a job for life vs 5 years is wildly different, as you'll need to make sure when those 5 years are up, you'll be ready to enter the job market again, etc. I believe the same will happen with basic income. If we want to study where people gravitate to more fulfilling jobs, feel happier and so on, you need to guarantee them that stability forever. Otherwise people will just rationalize that they got some free money for a while and will not behave in the same way.

Re: Basic Income Research Proposal

#30

Post by liquidise »

One factor that would be lost in a controlled, basic income test is the inflation effect. Implemented on a national scale, cost inflation of basic consumer needs is a near certainty. On a controlled test of 1000 people inflation would be nearly impossible to achieve without localizing the test to an absurd degree.

I could see this test could serving as a dataset for calculating anticipated inflation rates on a national scale. If money is sent out via a trackable card instead of raw cash, you could begin to extrapolate where this basic income spends would be going, be it consumer products, bills, etc.

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