<story><title>A basic income experiment in Kenya</title><url>http://nordic.businessinsider.com/kenya-village-disproving-biggest-myth-about-basic-income-2017-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blueyes</author><text>The title is misleading, because this experiment start in late 2016. Sure, they plan to run for 12 years, but right now it&amp;#x27;s more like a 14-month experiment. Even when the experiment is over, it will have been done on a very small sample. In the dozens, and some will surely drop out.&lt;p&gt;Slightly misleading headline aside, I&amp;#x27;m glad the experiment is being done, since international aid had a lot of problems. The promise of UBI is that you don&amp;#x27;t need huge bureaucratic infrastructure to help lots of people. Maybe all you need is a payment system. Direct cash can put more resources in the hands of the beneficiaries, and less in the hands of aid organizations that exist primarily to persist.[0]&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.npr.org&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;411524156&amp;#x2F;in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.npr.org&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;411524156&amp;#x2F;in-search-of-the-re...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A basic income experiment in Kenya</title><url>http://nordic.businessinsider.com/kenya-village-disproving-biggest-myth-about-basic-income-2017-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Other research has found that people&amp;#x27;s spending on alcohol and cigarettes actually went down when they received direct cash transfers. Faced with a brighter future, many people stop using temptation goods as a way to cope with a hopeless situation, researchers have discovered. In the village GiveDirectly is working with, interviews with nearly a dozen recipients showed that most people have actually worked more since the study began.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is encouraging.&lt;p&gt;I am not pro basic income because I think it won&amp;#x27;t fix anything in the US without other changes first, such as universal basic healthcare and more affordable housing, and most discussions about basic income start from an assumption that it will be handled at the national level. I think the current focus on basic income actively takes attention away from things like healthcare and housing. We already don&amp;#x27;t want to fix those things because they are hard problems to solve. Focusing on basic income strikes me as a variation on how so many people fantasize about winning the lottery. It seems like an easy answer. And people would rather imagine that there is an easy answer than wrestle with hard problems.&lt;p&gt;Like others are saying, I am unconvinced that this experiment really proves anything about basic income. But I think this may be the first time I have heard of a basic income experiment where the money came from elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this approach does not further basic income. Maybe it will only provide new models for charity. Or maybe it provides a different model for basic income, one that puts a floor in globally and potentially starts the process of moving towards a world government, which doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be &lt;i&gt;in place of&lt;/i&gt; national governments. It can be another layer &lt;i&gt;on top of&lt;/i&gt; them.  So emergent global order makes more sense than a top down approach to creating it.&lt;p&gt;One of the issues with basic income is the questions surrounding how it impacts immigration. If you give all Americans $1000&amp;#x2F;mo, that makes citizenship here an even more valuable commodity.&lt;p&gt;But if basic income starts as a global initiative to begin closing the gap between rich and poor nations, instead of a local initiative to help the poor within rich nations, maybe basic income can start resolving some of the problems currently fueling immigration pressures and bring barriers down to a more manageable level.</text></comment>