How basic income affects macroeconomic conditions (inflation, housing prices, demand for labor, etc.) is really important to figure out, but it’s honestly beyond the scope of this study. Unless BI is implemented on a macro level, we can't measure the macro-level effects. We’re focusing on the individual-level effects as a first step, but we'll be looking at more than happiness and well-being. We're using the pilot to help refine outcome measures, but we'll share those once they're finalized.
I wonder if you could get some interesting data about macro effects by giving BI to a whole neighborhood within Oakland, preferably one that historically has had low levels of migration and shops locally. Instead of sampling randomly from the population of Oakland, universally give everyone within a neighborhood basic income (or run a parallel study doing so).
That'd answer some of the biggest questions I have about BI. What happens to rents & housing prices when everyone has an extra $X to spend? What happens to prices in neighborhood shops? To what degree are people willing to travel to avoid high prices? What happens to the social fabric when everyone is richer? Do people engage more with their community when they don't have to worry about basic financial survival? Or do they isolate themselves and enjoy their new toys? If people choose not to work, what else do they spend their time doing, and how does that effect the community?
At the very least, you'd get some really great data about elasticity of rents, housing prices, and local goods which I bet economists would love to have.
We are focusing on the individual-level effects (not the ecosystem), but it's a lot more than how people act and behave. We'll provide more details on outcome measures later, but we’ll be interviewing participants to understand their decision-making processes and the constraints they face. It isn’t enough to know that certain outcomes are associated with basic income; we want to know how cash transfers generate the effects and why outcomes vary among recipients (if they do). These insights can inform future research and policies.
In all honesty, I will be rather surprised if it really winds up being a truly random selection of the Oakland population. The political incentives for the city to find a way to put a thumb on the scales will be very strong.
> Participants will be randomly selected from the population of Oakland
So you are implementing a lottery.
Why not examine existing lottery winner stats? It's essentially identical to what you are doing.
I still fail to see what anyone gains by this "experiment", except for some good PR for YC.
Not to mention, you opted to use a brand new PhD, instead of (or under the supervision of) someone more established and experienced. For this work to be taken credibly, it must have weight behind the research.
If this thing was really just about gathering data, you would have just done it... not wrote-up a blog post about it, posted it to HN, and then spent hours defending it.
For the short-term pilot, we don't expect to see many behavioral changes--we'll just test the mechanics and refine our research design and outcome measures. We'll begin examining our research questions in earnest with the full 5-year study.
We believe transparency is crucial to the integrity of the research, and we’ll be sharing our research design and data analysis plan for the full study ahead of time. We will also share the data with other researchers. As for the success of the pilot, we’ll consider several metrics, including success of mechanics (payment, data collection mechanisms, etc.); whether the amount of money is sufficient to meet basic needs; and, through interviews with participants, whether the research design is likely to offer insight into how individuals would experience and respond to a basic income.
The actual study will likely run for 5 years. The shorter pilot will help us refine our research design and mechanics; we don't expect to answer any of our research questions with the pilot.
Five years is much better but fundamental issue is still there - "there is a deadline after which the utopia ends".
Did you consider maybe using fewer participants but possibly much longer time-frames (e.g. for the same budget 10x less people but 50 years of BI, or even 20x less participants and 100 years of BI to have safe margin)?
I'm aware this would be hard / impossible to personally see to the full fruition (see e.g. Up series [1]), but even just that 5 years window frame for the observation and research (which you already prepared yourself for) but with participants who could have "piece of mind for the rest of their lives" could radically alter the results of the experiment.
Most people will never abandon their job for 5 years of guaranteed income, even if they hate their job.
What happens after the money ends? They have to re-train, search for a job, apply, interview, explain a 5 years gap, climb the office/workshop ladder from the bottom again...
Situation changes radically if the income is guaranteed for life, if they are guaranteed to never have the necessity to work again.
Since a study limited to 5 years can't, by design, satisfy this last condition, it won't be significant at predicting how many people will leave a "hard" job.
It seems that a large portion of the very poor / homeless is caused not directly by poverty, but indirectly by poor decisions caused by mental health issues.
Obviously BI is not a fix for the health care system, but how do you propose that BI should address people that don't really have "legal capacity" to make decisions on their own ? Do you support paying BI to some dedicated caregiver instead in such cases, or is it beyond the scope of this initial experiment?
Poverty can also cause mental illness. There are plenty of studies on how children raised poor and hungry have developmental issues both physically and mentally, and how even adults who transition into poverty can become trapped in it and have their thought patterns altered through it.
