US centric opinion:

Social Security and Medicare are already UBI at large scale, but age tested (62 is the minimum age, 70 the max for social security benefits, age 65 qualified you for Medicare, US universal healthcare for seniors). Caveat: you needed to have worked and earned certain amounts to qualify for Medicare and your benefits level.

To test at small scale, you'd need an endowment that would use the investment returns to pay folks their UBI, and then payroll taxes that would include OSDI so they'd gracefully land onto Social Security and Medicare when they reach the age that qualified them. Pick small cohorts: students in their early 20s, some middle age folks mid career, and folks near the end of their career in dead end industries (ie coal). Observe and report.

If you can "cross the chasm" (see: companies going remote first after being forced to see if it can be done with COVID), it then becomes PR getting an audience with the Fed and Congress to rejigger monetary and fiscal policy to print and distribute accordingly. Can't see we can't print, money printer is running exceedingly fast right now [1], but can we put that money in the pockets of average citizens instead of simply inflating asset values of the richest Americans? That's the question.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

Seems like nonsense to me to say 'this is universal income just except it's not universal.' If you take away the 'universal' then you're missing the entire point.

This is policy and PR hacking in lieu of having incredibly deep pockets. Sorry to tell you that real life is messy. Think of it as growth hacking. This is a sales endeavor. You must sell that the current form of capitalism is fundamentally broken.

This is no different than contributing to the "right" Congressional candidates with few dollars so they control hundreds of billions of dollars of policy (or in this case, trillions of dollars). This isn't anything new or weird. NGOs face this issue all the time, having to prove out models before they'll get gov or foundation funding.

But you can’t prove anything about universal income without the universal part. As without it it’s not the same thing and we don’t know if it’ll have the same effects.

You can approximate. Close enough. It's going to be impossible to implement without testing the concept.

I'm not here to convince you, and if you're not a policymaker or the Fed, I don't have to.

But the 'universal' part is the main thing people including policy makers have an issue with, and that's the bit not being tested.

Ehh, India is dipping their toes in without going full monty. It can be done progressively.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258277 (HN: Indian farmers to get direct cash benefits)

And now in Spain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351708 (HN: Spain approves national minimum income scheme)

So your posterior probabilities on most things will shift zero post intervention? Interesting.

I'm a UBI opponent, a short term HM proponent, but I think my posterior probabilities would shift depending on the size of the effect and the duration over which the experiment was performed.

A small nit: "Original Medicare" isn't really a UBI because you don't really get to choose your healthcare. A key benefit of a UBI is that the government provides cash to buy goods & services, rather than providing the goods & services themselves. Medicare is a government-run service, where the service is a combination of catastrophic insurance, cost-sharing, and general payment.

Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage, is much closer to a UBI than "Original Medicare". Nearly 40% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.

Fair context to provide. In a previous comment [1], I argue the case for keeping both UBI and single payer healthcare.

Cash alone makes a poor safety net, because humans are humans.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246811

Agree, but I'd push back on the "single payer healthcare" bit and say that "Single payer" is not the only way to deliver universal healthcare. Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore all have thriving multi-payer systems. In Switzerland and the Netherlands, ALL insurance is private. In Singapore, while the government covers catastrophic care, 70% of total health expenditures are private.

The common theme is that there is some degree of government intervention and regulation, but having the government be the sole payer is definitely an approach, but it's by no means the only approach, nor even the best approach.

What if you did it in some moderately isolated place, like Alaska?

Alaska already has almost-universal not-quite-basic income:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

How do you handle people wanting to move to Alaska? And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it?

If you're not asking them to fund it, you're not testing UBI, you're testing "if an external entity provides money to a community without asking for anything in return, will that be cool?"

"And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it?"

The APF is funded by severance taxes on oil & mining. I suspect that most people are entirely fine with that tax model.

The problem is that it only supports a small benefit.

Yeah, and to increase it 5 or 10 times would certainly require new taxes. I don't know whether oil and mining will still be profitable with a ten-fold increase in royalties, taxes and fees, but I have a feeling that it won't.

The annual dividend is around $1000. I wouldn’t call this UBI exactly.

Many people actually survive on that one check. Alaskans are fiercely independent for the most part, and those living outside the main cities are typically self-sustainable. They own their land, hunt for their meat, grow their veggies, trade for what they don't have, and spend whatever money they do have on the essential tools to sustain that.

> trade

That's income, even if it's not denominated in dollars.

Presumably they also own land and a house, which is wealth.

The point behind the UBI concept that it does it's thing even if you have no income because you love somewhere where you can't farm your own food and have your own land with your own house in it.

You need a lot of available land to live off the land. This may work in Alaska but in other states this can’t be done on a large scale.

You really don't need much land to get by. Alaskans who are self-sustainable usually have small greenhouses they only farm in during the summer months. In a place like California where you can grow things year round, a quarter acre plot would be plenty for a whole family. Thanks to marijuana farms, indoor hydroponics equipment can be had for cheap. If you have a space to setup, you can grow fresh vegetables indoor year round.

How would that work in a city where an acre costs millions?

Unlikely that someone paying a million an acre would want to hunt for their meals. Alaska works because people are self-reliant but community bonds are incredibly strong. Beyond a certain population density, that type of community doesn't work.

Hence "not-quite-basic"!

Maybe a small economy somewhere. There are small city-sized nation-states here and there around the world --both in industrialized areas and not so industrialized areas. They could try it in both and see what's what. $5MM isn't enough though.

So... let's say 500k people, 10k a year, 10 years, that's 50 billion dollars.

That's... not a small test. That's a small city deciding to go all in on trying it.

Yes, but you need a self-contained economy to test and prove things out.

There are no self contained economies anymore.

Can I apply for gov benefits from a neighboring staate I don’t have permanent resident status?

That doesn't make it a "self contained economy"

I think for the purposes of UBI it’s enough of a criterion.

Implicitly I was contesting it against say trying it for a county or other political subdivision like state/province/canton. By state I meant sovereign state/nation.

The GiveDirectly trial in progress now (been a few years) is the closest to what you're talking about - 20k people in 197 villages in Kenya getting a basic income covered fully for 12 years.

https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/

Exactly

If any subgroup is given extra capital, the test will appear to work. This is patently obvious to anyone with half a brain.

Wealth is always and everywhere a measure of disparity.

It’s possible, Y Combinator Research seems to be doing just this with a randomized controlled trial study in two states: https://basicincome.ycr.org/our-plan

I believe what OP is getting at is you need a significant portion of a community to be receiving UBI to truly transform the local economy.

To use an example the Yang often uses: It may not be economically viable to set up a bakery in some small dying town. But if everyone in that town were receiving UBI, it might become viable, due to a change in the town's spending habits.

> But if everyone in that town were receiving UBI, it might become viable, due to a change in the town's spending habits.

The change being that everyone is now spending money earned by someone else.

Why do you need a critical mass? Everybody with an income can try it at any given moment:

Find one or more persons who _you_ want to support and support them with a basic income. If UBI works, they will also start supporting other people. Sooner or later, you have an economy of people who support each other with UBI.

Chances are that you are unlucky and your choice of seeding persons wasn't good. But for science, that doesn't matter. If others copy that approach, sooner or later, a working economy will emerge - if UBI works.

There is no need to establish UBI in an area even though it helps. Thanks to the internet, the economic connections can all be organized online.

*edit: marked the _you_

UBI is no good if it's not durable and reliable to the recipient.

If you imagine that UBI would allow people to live with a lower level of stress around starvation, you have to imagine that they would want to rely on that income a decade from now. Saying "find a rich benefactor to decide to give money away" doesn't reasonably test anything meaningful about UBI. I can tell you that people will generally be happier if you give them money one time. Don't need much experimentation to validate that hypothesis...

I haven't said 'find a rich benefactor', but 'be the benefactor'.

There is no need to be rich. Spouses stay at home and are not worried if their partner has a regular job. It doesn't have to work for everybody. For starters, find somebody who can handle the risk of you losing your job.

Of course people are happier if they get rich. But that's not what UBI is about. The question is: do people need a monetary buffer to get on in life and become more profitable so that society benefits as a whole?

If that theory is true, then supporting one or two persons will lead to them making more money and being able to support one or two persons in return by themselves. That's a system that can grow, if UBI works.

So, whoever believes in UBI: start supporting one person, and see what will happen.

You mean like children? Children need you to support them for years as a buffer before they can get on with life.

Society benefits as a whole when we foster the development of proper adults. If the development to making them a net contributor is not done yet, why would we stop?

Hey, that's angle I've never thought about before.

We support children for years and all we expect them to do is go to school. While a lot of kids could decide to just not work and be taken care of by their family, the vast majority want to work anyway, if only for the fact they want to move out and build their own family.

This may be the key. UBI + Making people go through further education so that they can have the foundation of knowledge and skills to be able to work. Right now, we have a lot of people who go through years of school and in the end it amounts to nothing because no one will give them a real job unless they had the money and a stable environment that allowed them to go to fancy universities instead of being forced to work to provide for themselves. This is a 3 angle attack. UBI + education/training + lowering the barrier for people being able to get a job. With UBI, you will have substantially less people desperate to get any job, so the supply of workers is no longer so high that companies can afford to be picky, because people will be able to tell those companies to go fuck themselves.

UBI+further education sounds like a great idea. After graduating people won't be stressed about finding a job to help pay for their mounds of student loan debt and will have the knowledge to work on projects that they find meaningful.

That's right. People hear about UBI and lament how people are going to become lazy and quit working, but they don't ask themselves why some people would stop working. They don't think that maybe some jobs are not worth doing unless you are at the threat of poverty and homelessness from not working. We need to reevaluate if we want to continue this horrible system where a class of people are denigrated to working slave tier jobs with poor wages and working conditions so that the classes above them can enjoy their first world lives.

Anyone who is contemplating durably changing their life predicated on the receipt of basic income is in the situation of “find a benefactor”.

Sure, but by flipping the direction, you can just pick an arbitrary person, set up a trust fund that only disburses a certain amount and set this person up for life. If you have 10 people, each contribute $100k, that's a $1 million fund. Fund a person in Nebraska for life with the fund for $36k a year with an annual rate of return of 4% (fairly conservative).

That person is guaranteed the durable benefactor and you can see if their behaviour changes and if they are enhanced through this.

I've proposed this very idea to UBI supporters on many occasions, and they always seem to dodge and say it will only work if everyone does it through the government. It's apparently an all-or-nothing situation where the outcome of failure is catastrophic economic collapse. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

We are currently with unemployment doing a great UBI experiment. Lots of people are earning more with unemployment than before. The benefits are only a year, but I'm willing to bet these people take their time finding work if it means a pay cut.

California is a perfect place to test these sorts of public welfare and social safety net initiatives. It's the 5th largest economy in the world, and medi-Cal already covers a third of the population, it only need be expanded.

Isn't the whole point about UBI that you don't lose it if employed?

Even something like $1000/year for every citizen will be significant enough to affect lives of some people. Assuming over 20% of Americans have near-zero amount of savings, this can be just enough money to avoid eviction, or pay off credit card debt, have home internet, or travel to other city for job interview etc.

You cannot test it at small scale, but it also works at small scale, so that's a nice bonus to dupe naysayers with.

Were the US Coronavirus payouts not a small-scale test of UBI in themselves?

Not really, the central premise of UBI is that its recurring allowing you to plan for and adapt to the income. This was just a bandaid for a financial disaster.

What is interesting about the payouts is that we magically made the money for them while also magically making the money for a ton of other stuff. Obviously the scale of one time vs recurring is vastly different but I feel like this does go a ways towards proving its possible.

True that it was a band-aid, but the Magic was a massive increase in the national debt[1]. Be careful wishing for any more.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/08/national-d...

No more so than the 2008 stimulus checks. Both programs were non-universal and under both the number of dollars sent to eligible recipients depended on their incomes.

Oh maybe I'm mistaken. I was under the impression that the COVID payouts were universal.

The cutoffs before payments started to taper off—not even get cut off entirely yet, but drop—were pretty damn high. Much higher than I expected when they started talking about it. Not by SV or NY professional-class wage earner standards, but very high for normal people. It wasn't universal but it wasn't too far off, either.

I think the idea that it needs to be tested before just jumping in and trying it somewhere is just a way to state that you don’t support it. Which is fine, but just say that.

If there had been the same testing requirements around say Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism we’d never have seen any of them rolled out.

At some point you have to buy in to the ethos and goals and be prepared to adapt along the way.

Really? Just like Krugman's QE!

How am I going to get back my devalued savings once we find out it doesn't work, all savers have been ruined and fiat money has no value?

There's no need to test it on any scale, including small, because it can't work.

Savers aren't entitled to a return. No one is entitled to fiat holding or increasing in value. The utility value of capital is declining, plain and simply.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ke...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INTDSRJPM193N

http://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interest...

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/search-interest--ex...

It almost seems like the best use of cash is to use it as a down payment for a loan on an appreciating asset (like a house)

What happens if the house no longer appreciates?

Yeah, they’re entitled to a loss through inflation-based monetary policy and debasement.

The central bank exists to ensure that your fears here are misplaced.

Central banks exist to ensure debasement. By its very nature, fractional reserve banks cannot honor their contracts. The purpose of a central bank is to print money to ensure the solvency of the fractional “reserve” bank cartel.

And predictably, we’re here at zero percent interest rates, large levels of private and public debt, and the public starting to realize that they can use the printing press too and demand to be given free money (UBI).