I've yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that's about it?

[–] elouboub@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So what if there were 100 or more small scale experiments in 50 different countries, in similar conditions. I won't be playing with the money of the entire nation|state|county|city to possibly lose it and not get elected again!

I want vaccines to be tested on 30% of the population to see if it works.

We should be putting this prototype hardware in the hands of 40% of the population to see if there are any side effects before deciding whether to legalise it.

We will do a double blind test on 50% of the population with these new safety regulations to see if there's an impact on incidences. The study would be invalid otherwise.

Models and small scale experiments are for wimps. I, the ruler of the democratic country, declare an experiment shall be run at national scale! The economy of region X with will not be comparable to that of the rest of 90% of country!

[–] Liz@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Uh, the key issue is that it's very unclear whether the results will hold at scale, since you're suggesting a modification to society. There's no (or very little) social component to the effectiveness of a vaccine or a new tool. Money is fundamentally a social construct and so what works in isolation or very small groups might not work the same way at large scale.

If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change. So far I've only seen studies where a few people embedded in a larger society are given money, and that's not the same thing.

You have to remember that industrialized countries already have a systems where people get money for "nothing," but those quotes do a lot of psychological heavy lifting. Disability, unemployment, retirement, food stamps, etc. The difference being that it's not universal and each payout is either "earned," temporary, or a pity case. As such, the psychology behind that money just isn't the same.

I'm interested in UBI, I just want to see results that can actually be reasonably transferred to a population the size of my country (350 million) before I make hard statements about its effects.

[–] elouboub@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change.

I honestly doubt you would. The typical arguments of:

it's not comparable to a country of 350M, they're barely as big as $cityWithOver1Million
their society is very different from ours
their implementation is different from what we could ever manage
the circumstances were different

would come around.

You're making exemplary conservative arguments to stalemate progress by creating a chicken and egg problem.

Won't accept results of change in a small environment because they aren't representative of change in large environment
Demand results of change in a large environment before applying them to large environment
Won't apply changes to large environment because results of change in large environment don't exist

[–] Liz@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

You just made up a bunch of arguments I would never make. Please don't put words in my mouth. I can't help it if my current stance is an argument made by people who have no interest in UBI at all. Fuck, I want UBI to work as advertised, it would be a very simple and easy solution to a lot of problems (though it obviously wouldn't be a 100% solve for all of them).

If we can get a small economic zone that's in control of its own currency to run UBI, those results would be likely to transfer to any other larger economy. Really the only requirement is that the country must be in control of its own monetary and fiscal policy and the program must actually be universal.

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