[jeffreyrogers]

> The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular.

And partly because it's not clear a basic income is actually better in practice. It's a huge change to how society operates, so it's hard to predict what effects it will have. I think a conservative approach that starts with small trials makes more sense than dismantling a large government bureaucracy that employs lots of people.

[nitrogen]

Some things simply aren't achievable with a conservative, incremental approach. Imagine yourself having a container ship and needing a cargo plane. You won't reach the skies by trying a pilot program with one engine and half a wing bolted to your hull.

Maybe universal basic income is one of those things where, to escape the local optimum and reach a global optimum, you have to start from scratch and go all in.

[jeffreyrogers]

Sure, but you should bring a lot of evidence that it will actually work before you do something that disruptive. If the criteria for doing something is maybe it will work if we do it at a large enough scale than almost anything is permissible.

Edit: And with airplanes, or almost any engineering artifact, you start with a proof of concept and then build from there. We didn't go from container ships to cargo planes, we went from the idea that a person could fly to a very brief flight in a barely airworthy "airplane" that is nothing like a modern plane.