Item — HN Reader

> The problem I have with studies like this one is that they only measure the effects of getting a stipend during a limited amount of time with a limited amount of people. It's not universal and it's not basic.

You have to start somewhere before being "universal" and "basic".

3 comments

What are you studying in that case? "Income"? We could look at trust fund kids to see whether getting income without doing anything makes them want to work in otherwise not attractive jobs.

This wouldn’t be an experiment, It would be a case study. And it would a case study that could be highly influenced by other factors, such as family network, influence, culture etc.

And that's fair. But experimentally I would like to see the effects measured for a whole town, a city, or even a county.

This was done, as the Mincome experiment, in Dauphin, Manitoba in the early 1970s.

Did all of the basic income funding come from the population of Dauphin though, or was it subsidized by a larger tax base like that of Manitoba or Canada? For a useful experiment to be conducted, seems that the program should be funded entirely from the population that receives the benefit.

Large study in Kenya currently going on https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/

this study does not represent a step forward, however.

It does because it counters one of the top conservative arguments against UBI (or any safety net at all for that matter) because participants _increased_ their days of work compared to unemployment insurance. Too many people are of the "you work or you should die" mentality in the developed world. This makes some sense in some situations but not anymore either. Considering the hilariously stupid things that count as employment today, the concept of "work" must evolve for us to have an honest conversation on what the point of all these programs are for in the 21st century and beyond.

I feel this experiment is better framed as means tested unemployment insurance bureaucracy vs an unconditional cash stipend. This strengthens my longtime argument that means testing is punishing to the less fortunate because it robs them of the resource most precious to all of us - time and energy. I took unemployment before when I was laid off and it was pretty laborious and took me several hours to go through the hoops to file in the first place and the confusion of how to confirm I actually applied for jobs didn't help.