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If I am a participant in this subject and I am told that I will be receiving Basic Income for 5 years I might act differently compared to if I was told that I a

If I am a participant in this subject and I am told that I will be receiving Basic Income for 5 years I might act differently compared to if I was told that I am entitled to Basic Income for the rest of my life. The observation bias alone might motivate people to do work and strive to achieve something with all of their time. Or, it might even cause them to lie about the things they're working on. It will be very interesting to see how they design the study, I think it has to be a little bit more nuanced than "Here's 2000 dollars a month for 5 years, bye."

lg 11y ago
Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?
- smountcastle 11y ago
  Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.
  - lg 11y ago
    If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could just take the first six months off. Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...
swimfar 11y ago
One way to fix that problem is make the experiment last the entire lifetime of the "test subjects". It would be more expensive, but much more informative. They aren't worrying about what they'll do after the money runs out. Randomly pick X people who begin to receive their basic income at 18 years old and let them do whatever they want with it. You'd probably want to provide full health care too. Of course it's not a perfect experiment because they're surrounded by people who aren't receiving a basic income, which could affect their attitudes and actions in many ways. And if you wanted to extend the experiment a bit you could create stipulations like, any literature, art, music, etc. that they produce must go into the public domain. (They could still make money off it in other ways if they want).

lg 11y ago

Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?

smountcastle 11y ago
Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.
- lg 11y ago
  If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could just take the first six months off. Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...

swimfar 11y ago

One way to fix that problem is make the experiment last the entire lifetime of the "test subjects". It would be more expensive, but much more informative. They aren't worrying about what they'll do after the money runs out. Randomly pick X people who begin to receive their basic income at 18 years old and let them do whatever they want with it. You'd probably want to provide full health care too. Of course it's not a perfect experiment because they're surrounded by people who aren't receiving a basic income, which could affect their attitudes and actions in many ways. And if you wanted to extend the experiment a bit you could create stipulations like, any literature, art, music, etc. that they produce must go into the public domain. (They could still make money off it in other ways if they want).