So in other words, a long enough time to make people think they can draw reasonable conclusions about the viability of BI, when in actuality it's not long enough. You have to study the generational effects of this sort of thing. People are going to behave very differently when they know this will be around for a very short time versus the rest of their lives, nevermind how people behave when they're second or third generation BIers.
There's only one way to study something like this.. and that's to do it. 5 years is a pretty amazing amount of time and I'm sure some great data will come out of it. Some smart people will probably treat it as a short-term thing and treat it as such, but the majority of the population are probably short sighted and will treat it as if it will be there forever. You can do a lot in 5 years.
> There's only one way to study something like this.. and that's to do it
This is a dangerous thing to experiment with when you have a huge nation of 318+ Million population.
It's far safer to let smaller nations, like Finland (whose entire population is less than New York City), test this idea out for a few generations. It's far easier to "bail out" a city's worth of people than it is a large nation, if things don't go as planned.
I don't think a city in the US is a good sample, since people are more likely to move in and out of the city during a generational (or multi-generational) test case. In addition, city lines/boundaries are "fuzzy" a lot of the time, often with one side of a street being incorporated and the other side not, etc. City boundary lines may also shift over time, etc.
In addition, if it's known anyone with an Oakland address gets BI, some (or many) people will attempt to move there, which will cause other unintended economic consequences for the city, skewing the test results.
A [small] nation is a better sample, since it tends to have fewer of these issues over a long time span.
Well, it's difficult to see how this trial study is going to yield any useful information.
- The sample subjects are incredibly biased, in that they are already founders and presumably motivated individuals. Not a representation of the general population, not even close.
- The study has a time limit (5 years). So no test subject is going to make life-long or life-altering decisions based on this limited trial.
So, this study doesn't seem to accomplish any of the basic tasks needed to study ramifications of such an idea in practice.
All we will know after this study is concluded, is how founders treat monthly cash given to them for 5 years. In reality, it sounds a lot like YC is just paying them a salary to build their business.
YC is testing the outcome of paying their founders a salary in order to achieve greater gains down the road... something any business will attest to being beneficial. This is not a BI study.
I agree, start small, work up. This is why I said let a small nation conduct this test (such as Finland, who is already planning to convert into a BI economy full-scale, from my understanding).
> But you are just guessing at what the problems might be.
No, the issues listed in my previous post are clearly issues with conducting this test at a city level. Part of preparing a study is to examine complications that may impact the findings... and these are obvious complications.
In all honesty, I will be rather surprised if it really winds up being a truly random selection of the Oakland population. The political incentives for the city to find a way to put a thumb on the scales will be very strong.
> Participants will be randomly selected from the population of Oakland
So you are implementing a lottery.
Why not examine existing lottery winner stats? It's essentially identical to what you are doing.
I still fail to see what anyone gains by this "experiment", except for some good PR for YC.
Not to mention, you opted to use a brand new PhD, instead of (or under the supervision of) someone more established and experienced. For this work to be taken credibly, it must have weight behind the research.
If this thing was really just about gathering data, you would have just done it... not wrote-up a blog post about it, posted it to HN, and then spent hours defending it.
I think you are putting too much weight on this pilot. They aren't trying to find out if BI is going to work, they are trying to suss out basic, mechanical issues that they might not have thought of. If good BI data comes from it, great, but that's not the point yet.
Yes but it's a starting point. Conducting a generational study will take, well, generations, and that's too long. Unfortunately the longer term, multi generation study will have to be "done in production" so to speak.
It may work, it may not. But what we're (the US) doing now isn't working.
True but there's a lot of benefits that BI proponents (and I personally) believe will happen that will show up in subsequent generations like closing the educational attainment gap between the poor and everyone else. Also there's the question of if it's sustainable in case the fears of it just making everyone drop out of the work force are true. [1]
[1] Though from the same people you'll hear that work provides so much meaning to life that if people aren't working because they can live without it that they'll just be miserable. Which seems to contradict itself, either work is so meaningful that without we're miserable so we'll work even if we don't have to. Or it's not that meaningful and we'll be fine without it.
But did you read what they said? That's not the point of this. It's a pilot study to get their feet under them and get some idea of how the real, long-term study would go. The point of this isn't to draw conclusions about BI, it's to draw conclusions about how to study BI so as to help them set up the long-term version more effectively.
That's certainly an issue, but your demand stifles any effort to learn more by saying that you have to study "generational effects" (what, maybe a 50 year study before you can learn anything). Which will just be followed up by the equally valid criticism that you can only study this if everyone has BI (to see if it's the relative effect that matters).
Reasonable seeming concerns, but you have to start somewhere to learn anything.
> That's certainly an issue, but your demand stifles any effort to learn more by saying that you have to study "generational effects" (what, maybe a 50 year study before you can learn anything).
It's less costly than rushing into BI. It's one of those social programs that once introduced can NEVER be taken away.
You might think that, because no country has implemented BI, then considered it a failed project, then scraped that system for something better, yet. But one of the countries on this planet might be the first to try that. It's one of those "nobody done it yet thus it can't be done by anyone" ideas that reality so often find is false.
Did you miss the part about this being a small pilot? I sounds like they want to figure out the administration and reporting issues more than anything.
