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Comment by lambdaphagy | Hacker News Reader

What good is a social policy if you have to implement it at national scale for an unlimited time to see if it works as advertised?

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That largely describes US Social Security.

Democracy worked out pretty well.

Democracy scales and in fact works better in small groups than large groups...

Democracy was tried in many different settings and scopes, over the course of many centuries, before gaining a real foothold. America was NOT a great experiment in a new approach to government - or if it was, that experiment was with a Constitutionally limited system.

It was implemented in ancient Greece as we're all taught. At the time of America's founding, there was already a democracy of sorts in place in the Netherlands. Along the way, many other institutions implemented it - for example, pirate ships were often democracies, with the captain chosen by popular acclamation.

Who said anything about the US?

I'm only speaking to the value of the experiment. Maybe something can be learned by conducting it, but not about the viability of UBI. It was a waste of time and money in that regard. However, the people who have to deal with other people asking about UBI can now say "Our studies show UBI to be a waste of time and money."

The exciting stuff with negative tax/basic income is to see the systemic effects kick in. And yes, this will be very hard to test small-scale. Kind of how it would be very hard to test whether democracy works or not by giving one person a vote.

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