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The most important lesson that we should draw from experiments like Mincome is that we need more experiments of this type. Dauphin, Canada was one town in one

by kijin 13y ago

The most important lesson that we should draw from experiments like Mincome is that we need more experiments of this type. Dauphin, Canada was one town in one country in an era that is now forever gone. Since 1973, the politics has changed, the economy has changed, and culture, religion, ideology, and (of course) technology have also undergone tremendous changes. The Internet alone should be a total game changer. Mincome serves as a good anecdote and inspiration, but it is largely meaningless to argue (for|against) basic income based on that data alone. We need more data points, and we need them to be more up to date. Because right now, all we have are a precious few data points from 40 years ago and/or from the other side of the globe, and a bunch of hopeful statements that haven't really weathered any test of evidence (e.g. economic efficiency will increase, or not; people will be happier, or not). Without solid evidence, statements like that are little more than expressions of ideological preference, both on the left and on the right. </edit> The experiment should be repeated, as many times as possible, in various times and places, and for longer durations (5 years, 10 years, 20 years, long enough to study a generation of children who grow up under the scheme). Accumulate enough data to support arguments (whether pro or con) that are based more on actual evidence than on anecdotes and ideological assumptions. Will it be possible to implement a basic income of $20,000+ per year in the United States in 2014? Absolutely not, the political environment is not ready for it. But will it be possible to run basic income experiments on a smaller scale (Vermont, are you listening?) throughout the next two, three, four, five decades? Of course it's possible, and at the end of it we'll be a lot more capable of 1) making informed decisions and 2) squashing the opposition. It doesn't matter whether you support or oppose basic income today. Show me data or GTFO.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
A thousand times, this. But in addition, we need to get politicians to wait for the experiment to finish and look at results before pushing policies. For example, basically no states have changed their plans to expand Medicaid as a result of the Oregon Medicaid Experiment, in spite of the fact that the results surprised everyone. A truly depressing fact - the best experiment in public health policy since 1974 was an accident, caused solely by the fact that Oregon didn't have enough money to expand Medicaid for everyone. Depressing, no?
- kijin 13y ago
  The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) Having said that, yes, it's truly depressing that politics can't seem to wait for proper results. As one of the most influential papers in my field of study (STS) says, "the speed of political decision-making is faster than the speed of scientific consensus formation." Sometimes this is forgivable -- if global warming is real, we can't afford to wait for its ill effects to become obvious, can we? -- but in other times, big-P politics just gets in the way of a good research program. Throwing in a bunch of confounding factors halfway through an experiment and whatnot.
  - calinet6 13y ago
    > The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) You must also understand statistics, and build an experiment that isn't affected by them.
hawleyal 13y ago
In contrast, I would disagree that the most important thing is that we need more experiments. If you have more than others, give them some.
- EpicEng 13y ago
  well that's a nice sentiment, but I'm afraid you'll have a hard time of bringing the rest of humanity around to your way of thinking. Pie in the sky, wishful thinking does not solve problems.
loceng 13y ago
You need a proper framework to overlay onto the data as well, so you can better understand or interpret what it could be saying. If more people had a core understanding of economics, then we'd all realize that costs are greatly inflated due to certain systems that exist and self-perpetuate - those systems can be influenced to incentivize different behaviours and patterns though.
- kijin 13y ago
  Not just economics but also philosophy and an awareness of our shady preconceptions. See my reply to notdrunkatall downthread.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
I'm generally against the notion of a basic income, as I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything, but I am certainly not against the idea of trying it in small experiments and seeing what happens. And as for these experiments, I wonder how many of the test subjects were low-income prior to the introduction of basic income? The fear isn't that people with a so-called 'Protestant' work ethic will stop working, is it? The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working. If you want to get better data, and more specifically, if you want to alleviate the concerns that most people have with a basic income, give a poor black or latino community a basic income and monitor what happens. If the experiment turns out to be a success, do it a couple more times, each time in different locales across the country. That's the data you need if you really want to make a basic income a political possibility. Everything else is just half-measures.
- dasil003 13y ago
  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.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    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?
    - felipe 13y ago
      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
jcampbell1 13y ago
I think there has been a few Native American tribes that have received basic incomes from casino revenues. It would be interesting to know the effects. Saudi royalty gets guaranteed income and there is wide range of payments from as little as $1000/month up to $50,000+/month. Those payments have been going on long enough to measure the effects.
codex 13y ago
How so you test for national inflation on a small or even medium scale?

by kijin 13y ago

yummyfajitas 13y ago

A thousand times, this. But in addition, we need to get politicians to wait for the experiment to finish and look at results before pushing policies. For example, basically no states have changed their plans to expand Medicaid as a result of the Oregon Medicaid Experiment, in spite of the fact that the results surprised everyone. A truly depressing fact - the best experiment in public health policy since 1974 was an accident, caused solely by the fact that Oregon didn't have enough money to expand Medicaid for everyone. Depressing, no?

kijin 13y ago
The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) Having said that, yes, it's truly depressing that politics can't seem to wait for proper results. As one of the most influential papers in my field of study (STS) says, "the speed of political decision-making is faster than the speed of scientific consensus formation." Sometimes this is forgivable -- if global warming is real, we can't afford to wait for its ill effects to become obvious, can we? -- but in other times, big-P politics just gets in the way of a good research program. Throwing in a bunch of confounding factors halfway through an experiment and whatnot.
- calinet6 13y ago
  > The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) You must also understand statistics, and build an experiment that isn't affected by them.

hawleyal 13y ago

In contrast, I would disagree that the most important thing is that we need more experiments. If you have more than others, give them some.

EpicEng 13y ago
well that's a nice sentiment, but I'm afraid you'll have a hard time of bringing the rest of humanity around to your way of thinking. Pie in the sky, wishful thinking does not solve problems.

loceng 13y ago

You need a proper framework to overlay onto the data as well, so you can better understand or interpret what it could be saying. If more people had a core understanding of economics, then we'd all realize that costs are greatly inflated due to certain systems that exist and self-perpetuate - those systems can be influenced to incentivize different behaviours and patterns though.

kijin 13y ago
Not just economics but also philosophy and an awareness of our shady preconceptions. See my reply to notdrunkatall downthread.

notdrunkatall 13y ago

I'm generally against the notion of a basic income, as I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything, but I am certainly not against the idea of trying it in small experiments and seeing what happens. And as for these experiments, I wonder how many of the test subjects were low-income prior to the introduction of basic income? The fear isn't that people with a so-called 'Protestant' work ethic will stop working, is it? The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working. If you want to get better data, and more specifically, if you want to alleviate the concerns that most people have with a basic income, give a poor black or latino community a basic income and monitor what happens. If the experiment turns out to be a success, do it a couple more times, each time in different locales across the country. That's the data you need if you really want to make a basic income a political possibility. Everything else is just half-measures.

dasil003 13y ago
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.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  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?
  - felipe 13y ago
    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

jcampbell1 13y ago

I think there has been a few Native American tribes that have received basic incomes from casino revenues. It would be interesting to know the effects. Saudi royalty gets guaranteed income and there is wide range of payments from as little as $1000/month up to $50,000+/month. Those payments have been going on long enough to measure the effects.

codex 13y ago

How so you test for national inflation on a small or even medium scale?