I don’t think there is any good way to test UBI at any small scale, I think there needs to be a critical mass of people who can pay their housing and food costs how society and economic activity would be reshaped under such a system.
Social Security and Medicare are already UBI at large scale, but age tested (62 is the minimum age, 70 the max for social security benefits, age 65 qualified you for Medicare, US universal healthcare for seniors). Caveat: you needed to have worked and earned certain amounts to qualify for Medicare and your benefits level.
To test at small scale, you'd need an endowment that would use the investment returns to pay folks their UBI, and then payroll taxes that would include OSDI so they'd gracefully land onto Social Security and Medicare when they reach the age that qualified them. Pick small cohorts: students in their early 20s, some middle age folks mid career, and folks near the end of their career in dead end industries (ie coal). Observe and report.
If you can "cross the chasm" (see: companies going remote first after being forced to see if it can be done with COVID), it then becomes PR getting an audience with the Fed and Congress to rejigger monetary and fiscal policy to print and distribute accordingly. Can't see we can't print, money printer is running exceedingly fast right now [1], but can we put that money in the pockets of average citizens instead of simply inflating asset values of the richest Americans? That's the question.
This is no different than contributing to the "right" Congressional candidates with few dollars so they control hundreds of billions of dollars of policy (or in this case, trillions of dollars). This isn't anything new or weird. NGOs face this issue all the time, having to prove out models before they'll get gov or foundation funding.
I'm not here to convince you, and if you're not a policymaker or the Fed, I don't have to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258277 (HN: Indian farmers to get direct cash benefits)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351708 (HN: Spain approves national minimum income scheme)
I'm a UBI opponent, a short term HM proponent, but I think my posterior probabilities would shift depending on the size of the effect and the duration over which the experiment was performed.
Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage, is much closer to a UBI than "Original Medicare". Nearly 40% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.
Cash alone makes a poor safety net, because humans are humans.
The common theme is that there is some degree of government intervention and regulation, but having the government be the sole payer is definitely an approach, but it's by no means the only approach, nor even the best approach.
Alaska already has almost-universal not-quite-basic income:
If you're not asking them to fund it, you're not testing UBI, you're testing "if an external entity provides money to a community without asking for anything in return, will that be cool?"
The APF is funded by severance taxes on oil & mining. I suspect that most people are entirely fine with that tax model.
The problem is that it only supports a small benefit.
That's income, even if it's not denominated in dollars.
Presumably they also own land and a house, which is wealth.
The point behind the UBI concept that it does it's thing even if you have no income because you love somewhere where you can't farm your own food and have your own land with your own house in it.
That's... not a small test. That's a small city deciding to go all in on trying it.
Implicitly I was contesting it against say trying it for a county or other political subdivision like state/province/canton. By state I meant sovereign state/nation.
If any subgroup is given extra capital, the test will appear to work. This is patently obvious to anyone with half a brain.
Wealth is always and everywhere a measure of disparity.
To use an example the Yang often uses: It may not be economically viable to set up a bakery in some small dying town. But if everyone in that town were receiving UBI, it might become viable, due to a change in the town's spending habits.
The change being that everyone is now spending money earned by someone else.
Find one or more persons who _you_ want to support and support them with a basic income. If UBI works, they will also start supporting other people. Sooner or later, you have an economy of people who support each other with UBI.
Chances are that you are unlucky and your choice of seeding persons wasn't good. But for science, that doesn't matter. If others copy that approach, sooner or later, a working economy will emerge - if UBI works.
There is no need to establish UBI in an area even though it helps. Thanks to the internet, the economic connections can all be organized online.
*edit: marked the _you_
If you imagine that UBI would allow people to live with a lower level of stress around starvation, you have to imagine that they would want to rely on that income a decade from now. Saying "find a rich benefactor to decide to give money away" doesn't reasonably test anything meaningful about UBI. I can tell you that people will generally be happier if you give them money one time. Don't need much experimentation to validate that hypothesis...
There is no need to be rich. Spouses stay at home and are not worried if their partner has a regular job. It doesn't have to work for everybody. For starters, find somebody who can handle the risk of you losing your job.
Of course people are happier if they get rich. But that's not what UBI is about. The question is: do people need a monetary buffer to get on in life and become more profitable so that society benefits as a whole?
If that theory is true, then supporting one or two persons will lead to them making more money and being able to support one or two persons in return by themselves. That's a system that can grow, if UBI works.
So, whoever believes in UBI: start supporting one person, and see what will happen.
Society benefits as a whole when we foster the development of proper adults. If the development to making them a net contributor is not done yet, why would we stop?
We support children for years and all we expect them to do is go to school. While a lot of kids could decide to just not work and be taken care of by their family, the vast majority want to work anyway, if only for the fact they want to move out and build their own family.
This may be the key. UBI + Making people go through further education so that they can have the foundation of knowledge and skills to be able to work. Right now, we have a lot of people who go through years of school and in the end it amounts to nothing because no one will give them a real job unless they had the money and a stable environment that allowed them to go to fancy universities instead of being forced to work to provide for themselves. This is a 3 angle attack. UBI + education/training + lowering the barrier for people being able to get a job. With UBI, you will have substantially less people desperate to get any job, so the supply of workers is no longer so high that companies can afford to be picky, because people will be able to tell those companies to go fuck themselves.
That person is guaranteed the durable benefactor and you can see if their behaviour changes and if they are enhanced through this.
California is a perfect place to test these sorts of public welfare and social safety net initiatives. It's the 5th largest economy in the world, and medi-Cal already covers a third of the population, it only need be expanded.
What is interesting about the payouts is that we magically made the money for them while also magically making the money for a ton of other stuff. Obviously the scale of one time vs recurring is vastly different but I feel like this does go a ways towards proving its possible.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/08/national-d...
If there had been the same testing requirements around say Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism we’d never have seen any of them rolled out.
At some point you have to buy in to the ethos and goals and be prepared to adapt along the way.
How am I going to get back my devalued savings once we find out it doesn't work, all savers have been ruined and fiat money has no value?
There's no need to test it on any scale, including small, because it can't work.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ke...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INTDSRJPM193N
http://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interest...
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/search-interest--ex...
And predictably, we’re here at zero percent interest rates, large levels of private and public debt, and the public starting to realize that they can use the printing press too and demand to be given free money (UBI).