[anotherarray]

Isn't that the whole point of the experiment?

You need to understand how people react to the idea of "not doing anything and still get paid".

Do they give up? Do they get depressed? Do they create things? Does entrepreneurship increase? Violence rate?... These are all interesting questions

[InclinedPlane]

> "not doing anything and still get paid"

That's not what UBI is about at all. UBI is about getting paid no matter what you do. Which could be doing nothing. Or it could be studying or practicing or learning a new career or even working. The fact that UBI doesn't disincentivize spending ones time in a certain way (whether that's economically productive or not) is hugely important.

This is an aspect of where there's a huge misunderstanding about UBI due to competing economic theories. There are some people, a lot of people, who believe very strongly that the economy is fundamentally coercive. And, more so, that coercive economies are natural, beneficial, and overall desirable. A lot of that thinking has certainly been baked in to a lot of conventional wisdom, culture, laws, and regulation in the economy of western countries for centuries. There are other people who believe that the economy is or at least can be fundamentally cooperative, and more importantly that a cooperative economy is more beneficial and desirable and no less natural than a coercive economy. And this is where UBI comes in, because UBI is essentially how you bootstrap a more cooperative economy. One where people work not because they are coerced to participate in toil due to the alternative being starvation and privation but instead because they enjoy the work or are fairly compensated for it and treated well.

[anotherarray]

>"not doing anything"

refers to "not performing a comercial activity", which means the same thing in my native language.

If you read my whole comment you can clearly see that's my point:

>Do they give up? Do they get depressed? Do they create things? Does entrepreneurship increase? Violence rate?

[insickness]

> Do they get depressed?

I think this is a huge factor that isn't getting enough focus. When people's jobs are replaced by automation and they are on UBI, how do they achieve self-worth? A lot of people get their self-worth from their work, even if their job is monotonous and relatively low-skill. We may be able to replace a low-skilled worker's wages with UBI, but we can't replace their feeling of self-worth. Not everyone can become an artist and even if they could, that may not be enough to give them a sense of purpose. In the long run, this may be a much bigger question than whether or not we implement UBI.

[slavik81]

If there are conditions, it's not universal. The distinguishing feature of universal basic income in comparison to traditional welfare was that it doesn't have the disincentives to work caused by means testing. If you add means testing back in, you've defeated the purpose.

[ScottBurson]

No. As I said previously [0], means testing is not the problem per se. The problem is a particular simplistic way of doing means testing, which is what mathematicians call a step function: below a certain income value you get 100% of the subsidy, and above it -- even very slightly above it -- you get zero. So there's a point where increasing your earned income very slightly results in a massive decrease in your total income.

It's very easy to describe and administer such a subsidy, but it has a terrible bug, which is obvious and everyone has known about it for decades, but somehow we haven't mustered the will to fix it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13202659

[slavik81]

You are advocating partial basic income, not universal basic income.

Your argument has a place, but it's tangential to my point.