10 ms·

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one cr

by tomp 10y ago

> In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. This is omitting one crucial detail: for how long will the basic income last. At least for myself, my decisions would be completely different if I was to receive unconditional income for e.g. 10 years (or less), vs. for the rest of my life.

dclowd9901 10y ago
...aaaaand whether or not your children would be receiving it, right? We make many rather large financial decisions based on our choices to procreate or not. If I didn't know if my kids were taken care of, I would probably make different decisions than if I did. There really is no way to test basic income without simply implementing it.
- diyseguy 10y ago
  Oooh, yikes, this could become an incentive for people to have tons of kids - so they can get more basic income.
  - arcanus 10y ago
    > this could become an incentive for people to have tons of kids Or, alternatively, to have fewer kids, if they were planning (as many parents in the USA do) to provide financial support for college to those children.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > Or, alternatively, to have fewer kids, if they were planning (as many parents in the USA do) to provide financial support for college to those children. How's that? Every BI plan I've heard floated around starts paying out when a person reaches 18 years of age (absolutely college age). So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. Seems to alleviate the burden of having a child in that age range.
      - cwp 10y ago
        Only if they go to a college with no tuition.
        Alupis 10y ago
        > Only if they go to a college with no tuition Tuition is due a few times a year (usually twice, but some systems are quarterly). If the student gets a BI every month, there should be no issue affording tuition, in addition to living expenses.
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        > Tuition is due a few times a year (usually twice, but some systems are quarterly). If the student gets a BI every month, there should be no issue affording tuition, in addition to living expenses. Tuition, fees, books, etc., together at many institutions are, annually, is near or even greater than the total amount of annual per-person UBI in many proposals I've seen.
        zanny 10y ago
        I can easily imagine plenty of state schools would trade UBI for room, board, and tuition for the brightest students. For the rest? We need more trade schools today, and we are talking about something theoretical at least years away and probably decades, when we will hopefully be past the ancient university model of tremendous expense and most people are taking courses online or through trade schools at very little cost.
      - sampo 10y ago
        > So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. There are countries where university tuition is free, and the state also pays student benefits to every student, which makes it financially possible to study without receiving money from your parents. Those countries tend to have lower birth rates than USA.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. Most near-term UBI proposals (and all plausible ones) wouldn't pay all living expenses in most college communities + the costs of actually attending college, so the idea that having BI available to college-age recipients would alleviate all parental burdens of college-age offspring is, well, sheer fantasy.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  Just because the government says it will be "forever" doesn't mean it will. When thinking about planing the multi-generational prosperity of your family (something few people do to any serious degree) you can't take the perpetual existence of this-or-that political institution as granted.
  - zanny 10y ago
    Which should be just fine under UBI, where you shouldn't be getting anything for children in the first place. Children are not adults, and are not treated like adults for the vast majority of social contracts, and UBI is certainly one of them - we have no expectation today of children to make any income whatsoever now, but to be provided for by their parents. If parents would only be on UBI, that is not enough to provide for kids, but that is a reflection of negligence on the part of the parents. It is certainly an endemic problem we need solutions for in that the poor, the most promiscuous population, is also the one that cannot afford their own children, but we certainly do not want to give them any incentives to have more kids. Children should absolutely be an expense to the parents, because the parents decided to have them, and unless we need kids (at which point the state can start subsidizing procreation in almost any way they want) we need to maintain strong (and much better than we have) adoption and orphanage faculties, but not excuse bad parents in any way who make irresponsible immature decisions like reproducing without any financial means to care for their own.
    - Mz 10y ago
      If parents would only be on UBI, that is not enough to provide for kids, but that is a reflection of negligence on the part of the parents. Scenario: Single mom of a child with special needs who is devotedly taking care of said child and does not have time to also work for money. One of my fears with UBI is that I am hearing ideas posited that men will no longer be made responsible for things like child support or alimony because, hey, the woman gets a check anyway. And I think this is incredibly, seriously problematic. Please do not make such sweeping statements about parents. Parenting is a very tough thing and money alone hardly makes one a decent parent. Studies have shown that there is as much neglect and abuse (and addiction) in rich neighborhood as in the ghetto. The best parents are typically middle class. They have consistently made choices to try to balance the need for money (which takes time) and the need to spend substantial time with their child(ren) in order to raise them.
siphor 10y ago
It's 5 years. Outlined in the link below https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income
- mattkrisiloff 10y ago
  And pilot we're thinking 6 months to a year -- though still to be determined / could change.
  - bd 10y ago
    I'm afraid with such short duration you'll not be able to observe true effects of basic income on people's behaviors. It will be more something like "sabbatical" in academia - you can devote a time to some side projects (whether career related or pure leisure), but everything you'll do you'll do with considerations of how your life will proceed once the sabbatical is over and there is no more safety net (assuming rational actors).
    - elizabeth-ycr 10y ago
      The actual study will likely run for 5 years. The shorter pilot will help us refine our research design and mechanics; we don't expect to answer any of our research questions with the pilot.
      - JorgeGT 10y ago
        Most people will never abandon their job for 5 years of guaranteed income, even if they hate their job. What happens after the money ends? They have to re-train, search for a job, apply, interview, explain a 5 years gap, climb the office/workshop ladder from the bottom again... Situation changes radically if the income is guaranteed for life, if they are guaranteed to never have the necessity to work again. Since a study limited to 5 years can't, by design, satisfy this last condition, it won't be significant at predicting how many people will leave a "hard" job.
        10y ago
tdaltonc 10y ago
Somewhere between 10 years and the-rest-of-your-life, you need to start taking geo-political risk into account. Just because a government says it will be forever, doesn't mean it will.
- tomp 10y ago
  Indeed, it would have to be guaranteed by some big insurance company (e.g. YC could simply buy annuities). If those companies fail, there will probably be bigger problems in the world :)
mdorazio 10y ago
The 5 years they are going for just doesn't seem long enough for the reason that if you actually choose not to work during that time, you will very likely be completely screwed at the end of the study when you need to get a job again (similar to mothers leaving the work force for multiple years to raise kids). A person evaluating their options in this program is thus much more likely to use the UBI as supplemental income than as a job replacement like they might if it was guaranteed to retirement age. This is still great, but I don't think the results will be overly indicative of outcomes in a nation-wide rollout scenario.
shkkmo 10y ago
This is addressed in the article: "We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time. But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc."
tmalsburg2 10y ago
There is another problem with such a pilot. I think that many of the positive effects of BI will only be borne out in a society in which everyone has it, where a culture exists around the concept of BI, and where the society as a whole is involved in a discourse about its optimal use. If you are an isolated case, you will run into all kinds of obstacles, practical and psychological, and you will not be able to make good use of it. It's like giving smart phones to Neanderthals, it's not going to work although smart phones are actually a good idea.

by tomp 10y ago

dclowd9901 10y ago

...aaaaand whether or not your children would be receiving it, right? We make many rather large financial decisions based on our choices to procreate or not. If I didn't know if my kids were taken care of, I would probably make different decisions than if I did. There really is no way to test basic income without simply implementing it.

diyseguy 10y ago
Oooh, yikes, this could become an incentive for people to have tons of kids - so they can get more basic income.
- arcanus 10y ago
  > this could become an incentive for people to have tons of kids Or, alternatively, to have fewer kids, if they were planning (as many parents in the USA do) to provide financial support for college to those children.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > Or, alternatively, to have fewer kids, if they were planning (as many parents in the USA do) to provide financial support for college to those children. How's that? Every BI plan I've heard floated around starts paying out when a person reaches 18 years of age (absolutely college age). So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. Seems to alleviate the burden of having a child in that age range.
    - cwp 10y ago
      Only if they go to a college with no tuition.
      - Alupis 10y ago
        > Only if they go to a college with no tuition Tuition is due a few times a year (usually twice, but some systems are quarterly). If the student gets a BI every month, there should be no issue affording tuition, in addition to living expenses.
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        > Tuition is due a few times a year (usually twice, but some systems are quarterly). If the student gets a BI every month, there should be no issue affording tuition, in addition to living expenses. Tuition, fees, books, etc., together at many institutions are, annually, is near or even greater than the total amount of annual per-person UBI in many proposals I've seen.
      - zanny 10y ago
        I can easily imagine plenty of state schools would trade UBI for room, board, and tuition for the brightest students. For the rest? We need more trade schools today, and we are talking about something theoretical at least years away and probably decades, when we will hopefully be past the ancient university model of tremendous expense and most people are taking courses online or through trade schools at very little cost.
    - sampo 10y ago
      > So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. There are countries where university tuition is free, and the state also pays student benefits to every student, which makes it financially possible to study without receiving money from your parents. Those countries tend to have lower birth rates than USA.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > So, as soon as a child goes to university, they get BI, and parents don't have to afford a single expense. Most near-term UBI proposals (and all plausible ones) wouldn't pay all living expenses in most college communities + the costs of actually attending college, so the idea that having BI available to college-age recipients would alleviate all parental burdens of college-age offspring is, well, sheer fantasy.
tdaltonc 10y ago
Just because the government says it will be "forever" doesn't mean it will. When thinking about planing the multi-generational prosperity of your family (something few people do to any serious degree) you can't take the perpetual existence of this-or-that political institution as granted.
- zanny 10y ago
  Which should be just fine under UBI, where you shouldn't be getting anything for children in the first place. Children are not adults, and are not treated like adults for the vast majority of social contracts, and UBI is certainly one of them - we have no expectation today of children to make any income whatsoever now, but to be provided for by their parents. If parents would only be on UBI, that is not enough to provide for kids, but that is a reflection of negligence on the part of the parents. It is certainly an endemic problem we need solutions for in that the poor, the most promiscuous population, is also the one that cannot afford their own children, but we certainly do not want to give them any incentives to have more kids. Children should absolutely be an expense to the parents, because the parents decided to have them, and unless we need kids (at which point the state can start subsidizing procreation in almost any way they want) we need to maintain strong (and much better than we have) adoption and orphanage faculties, but not excuse bad parents in any way who make irresponsible immature decisions like reproducing without any financial means to care for their own.
  - Mz 10y ago
    If parents would only be on UBI, that is not enough to provide for kids, but that is a reflection of negligence on the part of the parents. Scenario: Single mom of a child with special needs who is devotedly taking care of said child and does not have time to also work for money. One of my fears with UBI is that I am hearing ideas posited that men will no longer be made responsible for things like child support or alimony because, hey, the woman gets a check anyway. And I think this is incredibly, seriously problematic. Please do not make such sweeping statements about parents. Parenting is a very tough thing and money alone hardly makes one a decent parent. Studies have shown that there is as much neglect and abuse (and addiction) in rich neighborhood as in the ghetto. The best parents are typically middle class. They have consistently made choices to try to balance the need for money (which takes time) and the need to spend substantial time with their child(ren) in order to raise them.

siphor 10y ago

It's 5 years. Outlined in the link below https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

mattkrisiloff 10y ago
And pilot we're thinking 6 months to a year -- though still to be determined / could change.
- bd 10y ago
  I'm afraid with such short duration you'll not be able to observe true effects of basic income on people's behaviors. It will be more something like "sabbatical" in academia - you can devote a time to some side projects (whether career related or pure leisure), but everything you'll do you'll do with considerations of how your life will proceed once the sabbatical is over and there is no more safety net (assuming rational actors).
  - elizabeth-ycr 10y ago
    The actual study will likely run for 5 years. The shorter pilot will help us refine our research design and mechanics; we don't expect to answer any of our research questions with the pilot.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Most people will never abandon their job for 5 years of guaranteed income, even if they hate their job. What happens after the money ends? They have to re-train, search for a job, apply, interview, explain a 5 years gap, climb the office/workshop ladder from the bottom again... Situation changes radically if the income is guaranteed for life, if they are guaranteed to never have the necessity to work again. Since a study limited to 5 years can't, by design, satisfy this last condition, it won't be significant at predicting how many people will leave a "hard" job.
      - 10y ago

tdaltonc 10y ago

Somewhere between 10 years and the-rest-of-your-life, you need to start taking geo-political risk into account. Just because a government says it will be forever, doesn't mean it will.

tomp 10y ago
Indeed, it would have to be guaranteed by some big insurance company (e.g. YC could simply buy annuities). If those companies fail, there will probably be bigger problems in the world :)

mdorazio 10y ago

The 5 years they are going for just doesn't seem long enough for the reason that if you actually choose not to work during that time, you will very likely be completely screwed at the end of the study when you need to get a job again (similar to mothers leaving the work force for multiple years to raise kids). A person evaluating their options in this program is thus much more likely to use the UBI as supplemental income than as a job replacement like they might if it was guaranteed to retirement age. This is still great, but I don't think the results will be overly indicative of outcomes in a nation-wide rollout scenario.

shkkmo 10y ago

This is addressed in the article: "We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time. But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc."

tmalsburg2 10y ago

There is another problem with such a pilot. I think that many of the positive effects of BI will only be borne out in a society in which everyone has it, where a culture exists around the concept of BI, and where the society as a whole is involved in a discourse about its optimal use. If you are an isolated case, you will run into all kinds of obstacles, practical and psychological, and you will not be able to make good use of it. It's like giving smart phones to Neanderthals, it's not going to work although smart phones are actually a good idea.