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 will be more something like "sabbatical" in academia - you can devote a time to some side projects (whether career related or pure leisure), but everything you'll do you'll do with considerations of how your life will proceed once the sabbatical is over and there is no more safety net (assuming rational actors).
What happens after the money ends? They have to re-train, search for a job, apply, interview, explain a 5 years gap, climb the office/workshop ladder from the bottom again...
Situation changes radically if the income is guaranteed for life, if they are guaranteed to never have the necessity to work again.
Since a study limited to 5 years can't, by design, satisfy this last condition, it won't be significant at predicting how many people will leave a "hard" job.
Perhaps, when no longer totally living hand-to-mouth, during those 5 years they can e.g. take evening classes and eventually qualify for a better job.
Five years is much better but fundamental issue is still there - "there is a deadline after which the utopia ends".
Did you consider maybe using fewer participants but possibly much longer time-frames (e.g. for the same budget 10x less people but 50 years of BI, or even 20x less participants and 100 years of BI to have safe margin)?
I'm aware this would be hard / impossible to personally see to the full fruition (see e.g. Up series [1]), but even just that 5 years window frame for the observation and research (which you already prepared yourself for) but with participants who could have "piece of mind for the rest of their lives" could radically alter the results of the experiment.
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Reasonable seeming concerns, but you have to start somewhere to learn anything.
It's less costly than rushing into BI. It's one of those social programs that once introduced can NEVER be taken away.
You might think that, because no country has implemented BI, then considered it a failed project, then scraped that system for something better, yet. But one of the countries on this planet might be the first to try that. It's one of those "nobody done it yet thus it can't be done by anyone" ideas that reality so often find is false.
It may work, it may not. But what we're (the US) doing now isn't working.
[1] Though from the same people you'll hear that work provides so much meaning to life that if people aren't working because they can live without it that they'll just be miserable. Which seems to contradict itself, either work is so meaningful that without we're miserable so we'll work even if we don't have to. Or it's not that meaningful and we'll be fine without it.
Yes, you do. BI will change mating patterns and child-rearing patterns and the consequences of those changes will not show up for a generation or two.
This is a dangerous thing to experiment with when you have a huge nation of 318+ Million population.
It's far safer to let smaller nations, like Finland (whose entire population is less than New York City), test this idea out for a few generations. It's far easier to "bail out" a city's worth of people than it is a large nation, if things don't go as planned.
I don't think a city in the US is a good sample, since people are more likely to move in and out of the city during a generational (or multi-generational) test case. In addition, city lines/boundaries are "fuzzy" a lot of the time, often with one side of a street being incorporated and the other side not, etc. City boundary lines may also shift over time, etc.
In addition, if it's known anyone with an Oakland address gets BI, some (or many) people will attempt to move there, which will cause other unintended economic consequences for the city, skewing the test results.
A [small] nation is a better sample, since it tends to have fewer of these issues over a long time span.
I think that is the point of this pilot -- find the problems that crop up.
Your own argument is that it should not be done wholesale until we know what the effects are at a smaller level: that's what's being done here.
Start small. Fix smaller problems. Ratchet up. Rinse and repeat.
- The sample subjects are incredibly biased, in that they are already founders and presumably motivated individuals. Not a representation of the general population, not even close.
- The study has a time limit (5 years). So no test subject is going to make life-long or life-altering decisions based on this limited trial.
So, this study doesn't seem to accomplish any of the basic tasks needed to study ramifications of such an idea in practice.
All we will know after this study is concluded, is how founders treat monthly cash given to them for 5 years. In reality, it sounds a lot like YC is just paying them a salary to build their business.
YC is testing the outcome of paying their founders a salary in order to achieve greater gains down the road... something any business will attest to being beneficial. This is not a BI study.
I agree, start small, work up. This is why I said let a small nation conduct this test (such as Finland, who is already planning to convert into a BI economy full-scale, from my understanding).
> But you are just guessing at what the problems might be.
No, the issues listed in my previous post are clearly issues with conducting this test at a city level. Part of preparing a study is to examine complications that may impact the findings... and these are obvious complications.
So you are implementing a lottery.
Why not examine existing lottery winner stats? It's essentially identical to what you are doing.
I still fail to see what anyone gains by this "experiment", except for some good PR for YC.
Not to mention, you opted to use a brand new PhD, instead of (or under the supervision of) someone more established and experienced. For this work to be taken credibly, it must have weight behind the research.
If this thing was really just about gathering data, you would have just done it... not wrote-up a blog post about it, posted it to HN, and then spent hours defending it.
It would be interesting to see how many people are lazy for the first 4 years and then get their shit together in the 5th year.
Or, alternatively, to have fewer kids, if they were planning (as many parents in the USA do) to provide financial support for college to those children.
How's that? Every BI plan I've heard floated around starts paying out when a person reaches 18 years of age (absolutely college age). So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. Seems to alleviate the burden of having a child in that age range.
Tuition is due a few times a year (usually twice, but some systems are quarterly). If the student gets a BI every month, there should be no issue affording tuition, in addition to living expenses.
Tuition, fees, books, etc., together at many institutions are, annually, is near or even greater than the total amount of annual per-person UBI in many proposals I've seen.
For the rest? We need more trade schools today, and we are talking about something theoretical at least years away and probably decades, when we will hopefully be past the ancient university model of tremendous expense and most people are taking courses online or through trade schools at very little cost.
There are countries where university tuition is free, and the state also pays student benefits to every student, which makes it financially possible to study without receiving money from your parents.
Those countries tend to have lower birth rates than USA.
Most near-term UBI proposals (and all plausible ones) wouldn't pay all living expenses in most college communities + the costs of actually attending college, so the idea that having BI available to college-age recipients would alleviate all parental burdens of college-age offspring is, well, sheer fantasy.
It is certainly an endemic problem we need solutions for in that the poor, the most promiscuous population, is also the one that cannot afford their own children, but we certainly do not want to give them any incentives to have more kids. Children should absolutely be an expense to the parents, because the parents decided to have them, and unless we need kids (at which point the state can start subsidizing procreation in almost any way they want) we need to maintain strong (and much better than we have) adoption and orphanage faculties, but not excuse bad parents in any way who make irresponsible immature decisions like reproducing without any financial means to care for their own.
Scenario: Single mom of a child with special needs who is devotedly taking care of said child and does not have time to also work for money.
One of my fears with UBI is that I am hearing ideas posited that men will no longer be made responsible for things like child support or alimony because, hey, the woman gets a check anyway. And I think this is incredibly, seriously problematic.
Please do not make such sweeping statements about parents. Parenting is a very tough thing and money alone hardly makes one a decent parent. Studies have shown that there is as much neglect and abuse (and addiction) in rich neighborhood as in the ghetto. The best parents are typically middle class. They have consistently made choices to try to balance the need for money (which takes time) and the need to spend substantial time with their child(ren) in order to raise them.
Both child support and alimony are not flat basic-necessity calculations, but are income based. The availability of a UBI doesn't change the fundamental premises on which those are built, or even make any significant impact on the formulas -- under the assumption that a UBI paid to the adults would be counted as each adult's income, and UBI paid for the child to the custodial parent(s) would be treated as joint income when the parents are together and income solely of the custodial parent in the formulas after a split, there would be no need to even touch existing formulas.
Furthermore, I have read up on the history of the American welfare program. It was dreamed up as a means to "help poor, single moms" at a time when intentionally getting pregnant out of wedlock was essentially unthinkable, so most poor, single moms were widows, not women who had given birth out of wedlock. The design of the program fundamentally changed the social contract and actively promoted the numbers of poor, single moms in the U.S., in part by making it less stigmatizing to have kids out of wedlock.
So, whether it is intended or not, if you pass a UBI, an awful lot of people will feel like deadbeat dads are not such a big deal and you will further change the social contract. The indicators I am seeing is that many of those changes will be negative changes rooted in a presumed lack of responsibility for our actions.
Welfare has the same problem with creating deadbeats but much worse, because if the father does actually pay child support or for that matter stays with the mother to raise the child, then the mother loses the welfare benefits. When you have two parents who are very poor but love their child it creates the unconscionable incentive for the father to leave so that the mother then qualifies for welfare while the father sends what money he can in cash under the table.
UBI at least improves the status quo by eliminating that.
To have children without the resources to provide for them is a terrible offense to the child. The single mom you describe made a mistake. Good things can come from bad decisions without trying to sugar coat bad decision making. Your scenario implies she had the child out of wedlock though, because....
> will no longer be made responsible for things like child support or alimony because, hey, the woman gets a check anyway
Certainly not, by my perspective. UBI is for individual needs provisioning. Your children supplant your own needs, and if either parent is exclusively on UBI they are in the unique situation where there is justification for them not having a minimum standard of living even with a UBI because they have committed themselves to taking care of their children first. In practice, that will rarely happen on the side of the custodial parent - the child would just suffer instead - but at least the one paying support would definitely not get out of it.
That is, of course, given that the parents started in a stable financial situation and just divorced, and had the reasonable financial means to afford children. If not, I have no sympathy. You have no right to have society give you money for succumbing to baser instincts, and it is a strong indicator of selfish behavior unfitting of good parents to have kids in such circumstances. And like I said, if the parents had the means, and just got divorced, of course the non-custodial parent should be paying in accordance with their original budgeting for the child, though I would mention that you would often want to the kid to go with whoever has the more stable income rather than who has the vagina more often than we do now (I have experienced through siblings the hell that is custody courts, and it is certainly completely broken today).
> Please do not make such sweeping statements about parents.
If you buy lottery tickets rather than pay your rent, I will make sweeping statements about your financial planning skills. If you splurge on a fancy dinner to then go hungry the rest of the week, I will certainly criticize that decision making as well. If you have children without confidence in your ability to provide for them, I will criticize you for just the same reasons. That does not make you a good or even a bad parent, it just makes you irresponsible.
But it does not matter how much you try to balance time vs money for your children after the fact. If you had them without the resources to provide the time and money they need they are negligent. The best intentions are meaningless when presented with reality, and at the macro-social level your intentions mean nothing next to the millions of other disadvantaged parents who probably mostly also had the best intentions, but led to childhood poverty being at its highest in 50 years in the states because we do not hold people accountable for terrible decision making with some of the most vicious costs possible - the damage poverty does to children is becoming more apparent every year, and it is a travesty to excuse their parents for it because some peoples bad decisions hurt others beyond themselves.
If you are going to replace present means-tested benefit programs and not adversely affect current recipients, you need to have a lot higher per-person level of UBI if children aren't covered beneficiaries.
The most sensible target population I see for a UBI in the US is probably "all US citizens and legal permanent residents (green card holders)", without respect to age.
> and unless we need kids
We do. Permanently greying population would be a serious problem.
"We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.
But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc."