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Comment by Kevin_S | Hacker News Reader

1k people getting 1k a month for 5 years = $60 million. At the end of the day, an expensive group. Really impressed by the ambition here, and hope for great success for the project.

Basic Income research will be vital in the future when it actually becomes a genuine piece of public policy. Although I have little faith it will be used effectively by politicians/decision makers.

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Sorry for being negative but as someone who is paid for desingning and conducting experiments I have to say that this experiment is very poorly designed. (Many of the flaws have been discussed here and at previous occasions, no need to repeat them.) The fact that they are spending $60M on this makes me sad. So much great research could be funded with this kind of money.

impressive, but i feel like this is why we invented computer models and have technology (maybe) to start returning immediate results.

We're basically saying here that $60M (plus the other group) is better spent to see what weights to give to models to see how UBI scales-up rather than spending it to run a full gamut of Test Cases through the models and figuring out which outputs to motivate people to do with the money.

I mean, why are we spending money to figure out what people will spend the money on when we can already envision all the possibilities. Or am i wrong, and no one has modeled this yet??

How do you model a population's (or even am individual's) innate preferences and behavior when their income patterns and ability to spend change? You're essentially describing the economic calculation problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

I too am impressed by the scope of this effort.

I hope it provides some meaningful and insightful data either way, though I'm partial to a positive result from this effort.

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