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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Well we currently have welfare, and we know that there are cases where that prevents someone from taking a job because it will be mean a net loss. Basic income will be an improvement in this regard at least because there is much less disincentive to work if it doesn't mean losing something.

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You see that? That right there - that's tantamount to reliance on a half-measure, and people aren't going to buy those weak arguments.

If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data. This is something which can be tested at small scales, and relatively cheaply. We should definitely do that, scaling the test size up as we go. Hell, a private organization could do this. Where's George Soros when you need him?

Actually the data is available. The city of Newark for example has implemented several small-scale social innovations during the past few years, and they focused very much on data gathering and statistics. We don't see that in the media because it does not fit their narrative, and it does not fare well for opinion-makers to stand-up for that either. But the data is out there

Where is it? A quick google search for 'newark basic income' yields nothing.

Google "Cory Booker". He is a politician, so any link I include here will create controversy, but his model was to implement small-scale experiments, collect data, and use that data to gather additional funding from external sources.

We're talking about basic income here, not increasing housing available to people under the poverty line.

The data isn't available, at least not where you've said it was.

You don't need to jump down my throat with your obsession with data. You won't get data until someone decides it's worth trying, and the broken-ness of the welfare system is an pretty good basis to justify such an experiment. I'm sure if you dig up the data on welfare it can be used somehow to satisfy your statistical justification requirements, but keep in mind that public opinion is not as easily swayed by a good dataset as engineers are.

I'm not suggesting the necessity of small-scale experimentation solely for the purpose of convincing the public that this is a good idea, I'm also suggesting it for the purpose of convincing myself that this is a good idea.

As I said, I'm skeptical that this idea will work. It would however be fairly trivial (and cheap!) to carry out an experiment which could convince me otherwise.

Frankly, anyone who objects to the notion that we should spend $50 million or so to test the idea before implementing it on a large scale is a complete fool.

"If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data"

I think you overestimate the importance of data to most people. It might swing some intellectuals, but generally people are very good at finding reasons to discount data they don't agree with.

Data would be nice so we can evaluate if a basic income is a good idea or not. But is largely irrelevant to actually making it a political possibility.

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