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Comment by xrange | Hacker News Reader

Here's something I like to see some discussion on from Basic Income proponents. Does BI need to be rolled out everywhere-all-at-once, or is it possible to do small scale experiments to look at the effects? If you think it is possible to have meaningful smaller scale tests, how small can it be? 1000 participants? 100,000 participants? 10,000,000 participants? And then the big question, would there be any outcomes from these smaller scale tests that would convince you that BI isn't feasible? Can share your list of those undesirable outcomes that would change your mind about the desirability of BI? (No sense in running tests if no one will change their mind). Also, what do people think of the Social Security retirement situation as being a fairly large example of BI, that has been running for the last 80 years on a subset of Americans. Does the fact that they are older invalidate it as an example case in your mind?

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I don't think you can do small scale experiments, unless you do it using an entire small country. The idea is that you raise taxes too, and naturally you'll have winners and losers. I don't think the losers (wealthier people) will tolerate being forced into the program while others are left out of it. If you let people choose, then only the winners (poorer people) will choose to participate, which will deeply distort the results.

If you can do such an experiment (by, for example, instituting BI in a small country) then there are certainly outcomes that would indicate BI isn't feasible. The big questions are whether people in a BI scheme will continue to work, and whether the higher taxes needed to pay for it will kill the economy. If everybody quits their jobs and the taxes strangle the economy then that indicates BI isn't feasible. If everybody keeps working and the economy proceeds as usual then that indicates it is.

I don't think Social Security is a useful example precisely because it's aimed at retirees. You don't get much useful information about people's willingness to continue working when you target it at people who have retired. The tax rates needed to support it also look artificially low because the SS tax base is much younger than the SS recipients, and population growth means the former group is disproportionately large. Finally, it doesn't really look much like a BI scheme, because what you get out of SS is based on what you paid in, it's not at all universal.

>I don't think you can do small scale experiments

What if you started everyone out at $50/month, and increased it slowly over the course of say 10 years or 20 years, or 100 years to whatever target you liked? Or do you think a gradual introduction would invalidate the results, or that you couldn't extrapolate from people's behavior at $300/mo, what they might do when the payout is $1000/mo?

Or what if you started walking the social security age backwards gradually, making people eligible at the age of 60 in the year 2020, and 55 in 2025, and 50 in 2030, etc.?

Can anyone shed insight on Indian reservations and basic income. For some reason I thought that some reservations with casinos had payments to all the tribe members?

>You don't get much useful information about people's willingness to continue working when you target it at people who have retired.

What about the other claims that some people make with BI, like an explosion of new exciting art/music/novels, etc.. Is that testable with SS recipients (say looking at how many novels they write the year before, and the year after they retire, counting the number of hours they watch TV before and after retirement). Or are they an invalid group because they are old? Or are the "other" category of BI claims mostly just feel good claims that no one really believes?

There have been multiple tests of the ideas behind BI:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

* https://decorrespondent.nl/541/Why-we-should-give-free-money...

* http://freakonomics.com/podcast/fighting-poverty-with-actual...

The problem is that it often isn't possible to falsify or confirm ideas based on limited tests. You can set up a minimum income for one town, or give money with no strings attached to several groups of people, but it won't answer a lot of the long term societal questions. It's like asking if you can test social security or universal healthcare. Those tests might not illuminate problems that could occur on a large scale, 50 years down the line.

Sometimes the only way to test something is to do it.

Not a direct answer to your question. But possibly related.

First of all, I think we need a pretty large experiment to reach a conclusion, this because I don't think we are ready to measure the outcome until the experiment has had time to alter our perception of what is desirable. I'm afraid current measuement would be to tied to the current way of thinking, where productivity and gdp is overly emphasized.

I'm a proponent of basic income and do believe there are many economic and social benefits in practice, but it's primarily an ethical conclusion. So even if the theoretic benefits turns out to be false, I'd probably still need something else to change my ethical reasoning.

Like Thomas Paine, my primary argument for an UBI is that it is the way to make property rights fair. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism , but in general my line of thinking is that the right to exclusive control over a resource is not derived from labor alone, as is the popular interpretation of Locke today, but from the agreement with all competing interests. From that I derive that property title must be bundled with full compensation for the opperunity cost incurred on those who now lack access to the resources. To me the most efficient way to implement such a compensation is to demand a rent, equal to what the next highest bid for the resource would be. This rent is distribute equally to all citizen, and thus acts as the compensation for respecting the property owners exclusive rights.

I also happen to believe that it would be an effective way to balance the hoarding effect of capitalism. In the simple tax and divide scheme usually thought of it would at least create a flow in the other direction, increasing circulation.

But hopefully it would also remove some of the rent seeking possibilities from the market and make sure that resources are employed for more productive uses.

However, if you implement UBI my way you probably won't reach levels that would make most UBI proponents happy, which means an additional grant must be distributed according to those people. Perhaps the failure to recognize the true ethical reasoning and instead insisting on treating it as welfare would make me lose hope in ever reaching a workable implementation.

If you insist on treating it as welfare you're probably going to end up taxing he middle class to support the lower class. That would probably turn out pretty horrific for everyone.

Alaskans have been receiving a guaranteed income of ~$1,000 per anum for the past 34 years.

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