promethea.incorporated

wirehead-wannabe:

sadoeconomist:

theunitofcaring:

GiveDirectly’s launching a test of universal basic income!!!!!!!!! They’re doing it properly, giving money to everyone in the selected communities and committing to do that for 10-15 years. And they’re good at rigorous data collection. And if this works, we can scale it up.

10-15 years isn’t ‘for life,’ though, even in Africa - and the difference is actually important, the basic income experiment they did in Canada suggested that people didn’t change their work behavior because the program was set to exist for a limited time and if they had stopped working it would have left them without the ability to support themselves after the program had concluded

Guaranteed lifetime basic income would be much more damaging to the incentive to work than any limited experiment would show and could easily result in permanent dependence rather than development

Prediction: this study will overestimate the degree to which basic income causes people to plan for the future. That is, people will invest in long-term goods like government bonds and education with the knowledge that they will need something to keep them afloat after the fifteen years is up. If it lasted for life they might act differently, spending more on immediate needs and pleasures with the security of guaranteed future income.

Okay, at $3M a year, why wouldn’t they commit to doing it indefinitely to these people? It surely won’t be too expensive, and the data will be for the Greater Good. And hopefully it would either shut up the people complaining about incentives (why are the poor always perceived as being basically ill-behaved children who need the coercive guidance of others so their idle hands won’t do the devil’s work? because it definitely is a Thing) or give valuable data on how the problem compares to the bullshit of non-UBI systems of welfare which also massively disincentivize working and also hurt people in a million inventive ways.