<story><title>12-year study will look at effects of universal basic income</title><url>http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/12-year-study-looks-at-effects-of-universal-basic-income/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tribune</author><text>Any UBI study that doesn&amp;#x27;t include everyone in a society is not studying &amp;quot;universal&amp;quot; basic income at all. It&amp;#x27;s just giving some people money. It would be very surprising if this didn&amp;#x27;t yield positive outcomes for that group.&lt;p&gt;The big question marks surrounding UBI involve its implementation at a society-wide level. (What are the macroeconomic effects? What if people blow their UBI on dumb things and still end up starving?) Anything short of UNIVERSAL experimentation will not address these.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smsm42</author><text>&amp;gt;  It&amp;#x27;s just giving some people money. It would be very surprising if this didn&amp;#x27;t yield positive outcomes for that group.&lt;p&gt;It would be not surprising at all. It all depends on how you give the money and in what context. There are a lot of stories about people winning the lottery or getting an inheritance and ending up broke and in rehab (or worse). There is statistics that only a small percentage of people who found gold in various gold rushes managed to keep it long-term.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a concept of &amp;quot;poverty trap&amp;quot;, where combination of means-tested welfare programs and wage structure essentially makes stopping being poor unaffordable to the poor, because there&amp;#x27;s a summary income drop when moving up the scale of earned income, and the person can not afford taking that drop.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also a concept of external dependency ruining local business, so that if you flood local marked with foreign aid and money, local businesses can not compete or sustain traditional price&amp;#x2F;market structure and once they are gone, there&amp;#x27;s no means to sustain the economy but continuing the stream of foreign aid forever.&lt;p&gt;Giving people money is not always unquestionably positive, all depends on how. That&amp;#x27;s why real-life testing is important to know if UBI can work or not.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Anything short of UNIVERSAL experimentation will not address these.&lt;p&gt;True but one can argue some insight can be gained from small-scale testing. When we test new drug, we do not test it on every person, even though every person&amp;#x27;s body is different. We test it on limited set of people, and hope they are representative. Sometimes it fails, but it&amp;#x27;s better than not having any drugs until we can test it on everyone, isn&amp;#x27;t it?</text></comment>
<story><title>12-year study will look at effects of universal basic income</title><url>http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/12-year-study-looks-at-effects-of-universal-basic-income/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tribune</author><text>Any UBI study that doesn&amp;#x27;t include everyone in a society is not studying &amp;quot;universal&amp;quot; basic income at all. It&amp;#x27;s just giving some people money. It would be very surprising if this didn&amp;#x27;t yield positive outcomes for that group.&lt;p&gt;The big question marks surrounding UBI involve its implementation at a society-wide level. (What are the macroeconomic effects? What if people blow their UBI on dumb things and still end up starving?) Anything short of UNIVERSAL experimentation will not address these.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>commandlinefan</author><text>Not only that, but I don&amp;#x27;t believe (correct me if I&amp;#x27;m wrong) that any UBI skeptics would argue that UBI wouldn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; the people who received it in the short-term, like in a 12-year-period, but that it&amp;#x27;s unsustainable in even the lifetime of a single generation.  It&amp;#x27;s more like social security, which was a great deal for the first generation that started receiving it, but is getting more expensive and less beneficial with each passing year.</text></comment>