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This seems to come up now and again, so there is actually many articles about this topic floating around. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview [1, 2], for somet

• notahacker 12y ago
  That's kind of the OP's point though: these articles, including the academic one, are all rich in anecdotes and poor in anything resembling hard analysis. We learn that people are warmly nostalgic bout experiments which gave their community more money from outside, that Dauphin residents saw improvements to their general health relative to other areas, which admittedly may have been helped by a relatively new hospital, and that withdrawals from the labour market were small, though people knew the programme was a temporary experiment, the payments weren't that big and labour market conditions were very different then. Major hypothesized downsides to universal BI such as effects on local inflation (of housing costs in particular) weren't recorded as part of the original study. I've always found it strange that Hacker News, a site populated by mathematically-inclined people responsible for all kinds of ingenious micro-optimizations to maximise customer lifetime value by market segment or optimise the ads displayed to demographic X, has so much love for the idea that the optimal formula for distributing benefits intended to tackle poverty is as simple as $WELFARE_BUDGET / $POPULATION_SIZE. Especially based on evidence as thin as these articles
  • ufmace 12y ago
    Woah, wait a second - I hadn't thought of it until I read your "move money from outside", but it sounds like a fundamental part of this scheme that it was financed from outside the region it took place in. IMHO, that makes it basically worthless for any kind of analysis on doing this on a national scale. Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Exactly what you do with that money is a minor detail compared to the fact that it's coming in from the outside. This allows them to completely ignore the essential factor of how to go about taxing the population to get the money to give to those deemed in need, and what the impacts of those taxes and the mincome scheme as a whole will have on the mindset of people in the region.
    • phaemon 12y ago
      > Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Does it not? Your statement is completely wrong so it may well be worth analysing. Google "Dutch Disease" for an example. Check out the "McCrone Report" for ways to avoid this happening.