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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>We can't do controlled experiments

Why not?

Because people aren't lab mice. My favourite example are claims wrt. experiments for the Universal basic income. These experiments always pertain to people who receive more money than previously, but somehow never include a proportional group of people from whom the money is taken away. To do this experiment correctly, you would have to pick a random sample of the population and do the redistribution regardless of what any of the participants want.

So, if you would want to test if, say, a pair of shoes improves running performance, it's not enough to compare to peers without change, or the situation before the new shoes, but you will reject the study unless you also have a third group where you break people's legs? How would that be necessary?

UBI cannot be implemented unless somebody pays for it. It's necessarily redistributive. All existing experiments only look at one half of the equation. I think it's a fair question to ask what the effect will be on people who on net will pay more than before this system was introduced. Breaking peoples legs is not a prerequisite for others to run faster.

Of course not, there are a plethora of factors that would alter the effectiveness of UBI, looking at it so simply and then rejecting it outright is dishonest.

Money would majorly come from those who have the greater means to pay larger amounts into the system, and on the hypothesis that bettering the material conditions of those in the lower and middle class will necessarily lead to increasing productivity and thus (and 'thus' is a large leap) greater general income that can partly be paid back into the system in a cycle.

You can use purchasing power parity differences to check it out. Find like-minded first world people to pool a fraction of their income and you can offer UBI to a third world village or town.

Isn't the typical first principles argument that lowering taxes for the companies etc. pays for itself because of increased economic activity and thus tax income actually increases. Why could the same not apply for UBI?

Except UBI is simply a guarantee of a minimum income, not a distribution without other means of income. If UBI is 5k, everyone makes at least 5k. If you make 15k before, now you make 20k (modulo market adjustments).

Who will pay for this?

Many, with the benefit of a prosperous economy and stable polity.

Are there any studies out there that link UBI and prosperous economy?

It's a bit early in the research space, but yes, the partial equilibria studied thus far show overall improvement.

A reasonable overview: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/unboxing-universal-basic-inc...

I'm not interested to pay 15k in taxes to receive 5k back as UBI, regardless of economy or stability.

How much you plan to pay in taxes to support my UBI?

> regardless of economy or stability.

So you're saying that you're a poor economist, then.

There are very few good economists.

Possibly, but surely only a few of them would be that bad to be willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces like that.

I'm not interested in what you claim to pay in taxes. UBI benefits aren't solely to a person's bank account; the benefits include a prosperous economy and stable political environment their bank operates in.

I expect to pay and continue paying a lot, yet the benefit is more than what I pay in taxes. What's better is that our current UBI is quite a bit above zero already, but the distribution is fraught with large costs in time. Re-organizing and streamlining UBI distribution would result in significant cost improvements to the current US welfare approach, and improve its impact.

> the benefits include a prosperous economy and stable political environment their bank operates in.

Can you back your claim with facts? UBI is universal, not magic.

> I expect to pay and continue paying a lot,

Just say a number, so we will put it into formula to see is your expected taxation will match minimum requirement for UBI.

Typical wealth distribution without UBI:

  ^
  |
  |
  |     *
  |   *   *
  |  *     *
  | *        *
  | *          *
  |*                 *           *       *
  +------------------------------------------------>

   ^ - number of people, > - income

Typical wealth distribution with UBI:

  ^  *
  |
  |
  |
  |       
  |
  |
  |     
  |   *
  |   *
  |    *
  |     *
  |         *      *               *
  +--U------------------------------------------->

   ^ - number of people, > - income, U - UBI level

Please notice, that area (sum of n*i) of both graphs must be same, i.e. you cannot just print money like in computer game.

As you see, UBI erases middle class. Everyone becomes poor, except some rich.

While I appreciate the great efforts to put hand-waving FUD via terminal histogram graphics for insertion into comments[0] (seriously, great job!), your point that the middle class is guaranteed to implode is nonsensical.

The US already has a non-zero UBI[1], it's simply inefficiently distributed via the negative income tax rate and various welfare efforts. That's a clear first area to fix things up. Then, if we need to increase the historically low tax rates on high income households or implement capital tax rates on the wealth, increases in taxes can be considered.

Further, from a theoretical perspective, the economy is not zero-sum. A rising tide lifts all boats; if less money has to be doled out to industries supporting enforced poverty, such as private jail systems among others, then there is more money in the economy for utilization for many things (including but not limited to UBI). General equilibrium effects often have counterintuitive effects, such as they are.

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_the_...

If you're not a bot, then respond to my question.

I must be getting awfully good at hitting the heart of the problem instead of feeding trolls if people are thinking I'm a bot. Turing tests ftw.

I answered your earlier questions already. I encourage you to read full threads.

A representative sample features the same external validity issues you have in many (any) experiments, including in the hard sciences. That's part of science, and it would be unfair to attribute it otherwise. One experiment won't do it.

As for your other point, I guess the issue the lack of a hypothesis regarding basic income. You can't test "basic income" as such, and with such unspecific setup you are sure to conflate rather than illuminate mechanisms of relevance. In any case, it depends on your question whether you need to take income away from anyone. Are you going to start by examining distributive effects? Really? No physisict would test their airflow experiment on a flying rocket, while also trying to measure how he exhaust affects the wind in Costa Rica next week and saying 'something' about the future climate. They would start by putting their airflow gizmo into an isolated chamber - which is, afaik, more or less where UBI experiments are.

> Are you going to start by examining distributive effects? Really?

Fair point. I guess you could run an experiment where money is simply taken away from people, destroyed and then look at the effect of that in isolation.

There are experimental Game Theorist experimenting with such schemes, I suspect because they get a great amount of enjoyment from taking things away from people ;-)

Fascinating. I wonder where he finds his volunteers. :-)

But... UBI doesn't destroy what might be taken away. That money immediately goes and does work, and eventually it potentially improves the environment of those it was taken from. In the form of fewer social issues. Is the theory anyway.

And lab mice aren’t elementary particles, even though inbreeding can make them extremely similar, DNA-wise. Even if they were, they aren’t humans, so extrapolating to them is an art in itself (physicists rarely do experiments with electrons and draw conclusions about neutrons from them)

That it is harder to draw conclusions from experiments in biology than in physics doesn’t imply biology isn’t a science. Economics adds the problem that we (rightfully) don’t want to do realistic controlled experiments (would at times be hard, too. Put a few million people in a country with a given law regime, watch for a couple of decades, draw conclusions. Repeat) but again, to me, that doesn’t imply it isn’t a science.

I think it’s more part of the humanities than a science, though.

Randomized controlled trials happen all the time. The OP is echoing a common Austrian economics approach in claiming that economics cannot apply the scientific method ever.

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