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It's still a worthwhile endeavor, though: an experiment doesn't have to answer all possible questions about a subject in order to provide value. Right now ther
by scarmig 11y ago
It's still a worthwhile endeavor, though: an experiment doesn't have to answer all possible questions about a subject in order to provide value.
Right now there are some huge basic unknowns about a basic income. For instance, one prediction is that everyone who receives a basic income will drop out of the working population (not a view I'm ascribing to you, to be clear, but not a straw man either--it's something I've seen explicitly stated here on HN and elsewhere). This experiment will give a rough estimate of the sign and magnitude of any disemployment effect: will it cause some people to drop out of the work force? Or everyone? Or will it cause people to join the workforce?
Seeing how people react to basic incomes offered over different time spans is going to be important, but before the shape of that curve can be characterized (in what's ultimately an empirical question) we've got to get at least some basic information. Before Newton could come up with a solid theory about gravitation, he had access to plenty of information; but as far as a basic income goes, right now it's like we don't know whether gravity pushes or pulls.
And your point about inflation is my biggest area of concern about the basic income as well, but focusing on second order price level effects when people are still in dispute about the basic first order effects is putting the cart before the horse.
- FreakyT 11y ago> This experiment will give a rough estimate of the sign and magnitude of any disemployment effect: will it cause some people to drop out of the work force? Or everyone? Or will it cause people to join the workforce? I think the parent's comment is mainly asserting that, because of its experimental nature, the experiment will not be able to actually answer that question. If participants do not drastically alter their work behavior like in previous basic income experiments such as MINCOME[1], that would not necessarily predict how people would act if given a promise of indefinite basic income. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME
- _rpd 11y agoYes, exactly. Instead of "Economic Perturbations Caused By Basic Income," the experiment will study "Economic Perturbations Caused By Mass Local Windfalls." In my mind, the psychological, sociological and economic responses are very different, and the main result of the experiment will be that supporters and opponents will use different sets of assumptions to map the results to a genuine Basic Income scenario, yielding much heat and little light.
- scarmig 11y agoBy that standard, there's no possible experiment that would give any valuable information at all, short of doing a full implementation. And even a full implementation of a basic income wouldn't actually give any information on the results of a "true" basic income, because no government can guarantee the delivery of a basic income indefinitely. The answer to "what are the effects of a basic income" isn't a single scalar value, but more of a function on the size, population, and duration of the income. What you seem to be asserting is that there's a discontinuity or inflection point in that response function, and this experiment probes the wrong side of it. Which is fair enough. But the results with t=2 gives us some information about t=3, just as the results with t=30 give us at least some idea of the results of the minimum income taken for an infinite duration. It's irresponsible and politically impossible to jump in at t=30, though, so we take baby steps, as they say, and gradually build our base of knowledge. I suppose your argument might be "well, we need to do a test of t=5 to provide any additional information over previous limited rollouts of a basic income," but I'd argue that previous experiments have been pretty different and existed in a different social context. Other interested economics and policymakers certainly agree, hence Finland running this experiment.
- _rpd 11y agoMy suggestion is that they are different sets of curves. We're interested in the properties of ice, and they are going to study the properties of tap water that has been put in the refrigerator for half an hour. You and I will have delightful conversations attempting to divine the properties of ice from chilled water, but political activists will declare ice fully characterized and of low viscosity while denouncing the "phase change" theory as a bourgeois boogieman. Inflationary spirals are no joke. Some degree of caution is in order before deliberately engineering one.
- Ntrails 11y agoCan you briefly run through how this will engineer an inflationary spiral? With no information on the replacement ratio this offers vs existing social security costs, and no indication of how it would be funded in a full implementation I can't see the inevitability.