Re:Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All
by i_am_nomad on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @10:01AM
(#17868265)
This is exactly correct, and your objections apply at both a microeconomic and macroeconomic level. UBI almost certainly would create widespread and profound price distortions. Maybe a similar model would be what's happened with college tuition. The government set out to make it "affordable" for everyone with demand-side policies, and the supply side of the market responded by absorbing the additional spending capacity by raising tuition geometrically.
Testing basic income in an environment where BI doesn't universally exist isn't going to yield any fruitful conclusions. The conclusions will be caveated with "we gave basic income to people who's peers don't have basic income and that could alter the results". This is why economics is such a difficult practice to comprehend because behaviors don't work in a vacuum (read anything by Kahneman and you'll understand).
On the other hand, if this at least gets the population to think UBI makes sense, even if we can't unilaterally test it properly, then I think that's a good thing.