Your example of people volunteering for a study that costs them money is exactly the problem that I am describing, and for a system such as this to work, that's how it would end up--taxes go up for people who this doesn't benefit, and as much fun as it is to assume that "other rich people" will pay for it, it doesn't work that way. That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
That's generally how all taxes work. The people with more money than average pay more than average and the people with less money than average pay less than average. But the people who make $1 more than average are only suffering a net loss of $.20, whereas the people who make $100,000 more than average are paying net $20,000.
> That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
In other words what you think we should do is to actually make it a law somewhere?
That clearly isn't how a real UBI would work. If you literally take $100/month from everyone and then give it back to them, nothing happens. It would have zero effect.
The way UBI works in practice is that everyone gets a fixed amount of money and then everyone pays a fixed percentage in taxes, so that more of the UBI is funded by the wealthier people who pay more taxes. Which is what the experiment is doing.
In theory to make it accurate they should also impose a "tax" on the participants based on how much money they make from external sources, i.e. if one of the participants has a job paying $200/month and we want to emulate a 20% tax rate then they get a $100/month UBI but the funders take back $40 (20% of $200) as "tax" to "fund" it. Obviously that wouldn't work if someone had above average income (i.e. they made $1000/month in Kenya and would have a "tax" exceeding the UBI) because nobody would volunteer for a study that cost them money. But you could at least see what a UBI would do for poorer populations, which would seem to be the interesting question, because for richer people it just looks a lot like any other "take from the rich and give to the poor" welfare program.