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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

UBI appears to work, in small-scale trials at least. We should try that out.

Has anyone figured out how to avoid everything mysteriously being repriced to account for UBI?

Increase Total Factor Productivity so that there's still just as much stuff to go around even with fewer people putting in less work to make the stuff.

Forget UBI and implement UBS instead. Income is an unnecessary artifact in accessing services.

Who or what will provide the services and how do you incentivize them or it?

In this hypothetical, AI / robotics automation I suppose.

AI+Robots. They need as much incentive as your laptop or phone to do as asked.

Every basic income trial I come across ends up being GBI rather than UBI. Which UBI trials are you looking at?

tbh I'm not sure of the difference between UBI and GBI.

Does it change the point? If we say "GBI appears to work, let's try that" is that different?

UBI sees everyone receive an income, typically with a clawback mechanism. GBI sees an income paid to only those who need the support (means-based). The difference is subtle, I suppose, but could have a dramatic effect on what the studies show — or maybe not, I don't know. The key takeaway here is that I've never been able to find a UBI study to contrast the numerous GBI studies I am familiar with against. You spoke of UBI studies so I was hoping you'd be able to share. But, it seems not.

I don't understand the questions you are asking at the end. Apologies for not having a good answer.

My point was in response to the parent "there's a lot of things that need to change before we get to Star Trek Federation economy", I pointed out that we have done trials on UBI that seemed to work, maybe we should try that.

I was wondering if your correction from UBI to GBI changes that point; these trials seem to work and solve at least part of the problem that this whole thread discusses, so maybe we should try that at a national scale. Does GBI invalidate that?

The question asked which UBI studies you were talking about in order to close my gap in being unable to find any. It is clear now that they don't exist, which is fine, but a bit disappointing as I would have loved to see them. There are GBI studies abound, but it seems nobody is willing to try UBI.

I hadn't gone that deeply into the studies to work out the exact thing they were testing.

The core thing that the studies have proven, I understand, is that if you guarantee people a basic living income, they don't sit around doing drugs and watching TV (or at least not for long). Which is usually the main objection from naysayers - the Theory X hypothesis that people are lazy and must be forced to do anything useful. And this is the thing that is disproved by these studies.

You seem more familiar with them, though, is that your reading too?

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