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Comment by jasonwen | Hacker News Reader

One year is too limited in my opinion. If you want to see what people will do with basic income, you have to give them the feeling the money is near infinite. One year looks to me its not enough to drop everything, as you will know it will soon come to an end. The paychological barrier for me would be at least 5+ years.

Then again if I know it will come to an end in xx years, I will feel more inclined to work harder. It's like a deadline.

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See http://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income: this one-year study is just a pilot, it works as a preparation for a longer-term one.

What if they don't tell the people when the income is going to stop coming in?

Doesn't seems all that ethical thing to do even though it would give a better picture of how it would work.

They've said they're working with an external IRB. Not telling them would be a massive issue for informed consent, and at least if I was sitting on said IRB would generate a pretty firm "Um...no."

A big part of this experiment is that we want to see how (and if) basic income will change people's behavior. To be able to do this, the income stream has to be reliable. That's why the idea is often called Basic Income Guarantee or Unconditional Basic Income.

If the income stream could just stop at any time, you couldn't measure its psychological impact as effectively.

Why not give the subjects a basic income for life? That will mirror the potential reality of basic income. You could still only run the study for a year (or five years) but you'd have to pay out for the rest of their lives if you want the subjects to behave in a realistic way.

I'm sure they're well aware that a one year test won't answer a lot of questions. But it will answer some, and it will probably help them set up a better experiment for the future.

And the same criticism could be levelled at a 5 year experiment. I think that eventually they're going to have to do a lifelong experiment, buying annuities from a reputable insurance company for the recipients. That's going to be expensive, so make sure you have the experiment set up right before you do it.

Hi! I work on the study -- just want to affirm sub-thread clarification that this 1 year portion is a pilot to figure out logistics (not planning to answer research questions), and we hope to follow on with a 5 year study to actually answer the questions.

Ok, we changed the title above to try to communicate that.

There are all manner of logistical and ethical issues that need to be ironed out for a study like this. Doing small, limited-time, "This is not exactly going to produce the same results as the larger planned study" is extremely common.

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