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.
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.