Honestly, I think any "Basic Income" research where the recipient classes aren't 100% of the members of some well-defined polity and where the policy is explicitly a close-ended pilot is researching something so fundamentally different from Basic Income (it is well-known that close-ended benefits have a different effect on behavior) that, while there may be some useful insights that have applicability to actual Basic Income, they should be called something else.
This. I can confidently predict that most people will be better off (vs a control group) for having their income topped up for a fixed period by wealthy philanthropists, in addition to any benefit entitlements they may already be eligible for.
But that's not Basic Income. Basic Income is replacing [most aspects of] the welfare state with a programme that redistributes portions of income from each according to their ability to each irrespective of their need, with all the complications entailed by the variable incidence of the increase in taxes required to balance the books and the likely reduction in state benefits to some needier citizens.
You might get some useful insights, but you can't say much about the viability of a programme from a study which only evaluates the bits that people are unlikely to be upset by.
The one thing that I never actually see any of the people who tout BI answer is why it won't just cause an increase in the price of low income goods. Why won't laundry detergent just cost x% more money, etc. I think that the effective spending power low income individuals have under BI would be practically around the same that they had pre-BI if it's used a supplement to our current programs, and lower if BI is used to replace current programs...
> The one thing that I never actually see any of the people who tout BI answer is why it won't just cause an increase in the price of low income goods.
It won't just cause that because of the way supply and demand curves for real goods tend to work. It will definitely cause an increase in the market-clearing price of many goods demanded at the low end of the income scale (because of how demand curves are shaped, and the influx of cash), which will increase the quantity supplied of those goods in most cases (because of how supply curves are shaped), resulting in people who are net beneficiaries (after considering where the funding comes from) affording more total goods, even though they are also paying higher prices for each unit of goods.
And things that lag with an increase in demand? Housing, etc.?
I don't doubt that it will have some benefit towards the TPP of low-income consumers in the long term -- I do doubt that in the model of replacement of current welfare systems that this is an effective approach, and I doubt that it will be effective in the short term as housing prices will skyrocket. The long term effects of the latter would be interesting if the short term shockwaves caused the policy to be repealed.
> And things that lag with an increase in demand? Housing, etc.?
The degree to which housing lags is a function of unrelated (to the benefit structure) aspects of public policy (particularly, local zoning and planning processes.) Places where the low-end housing markets are unresponsive because of these types of policies will remain problematic for the same reason under a UBI.
But avoiding major disruptions is one of the reasons I think a gradual ramp up of UBI and phasing out other benefit programs by just counting UBI in income when determining eligibility is, even though it defers the administrative cost savings of UBI, the best way to move to it.
There is a substantial difference between open ended with no guarantee of continuing, and being explicitly close-ended. (Its equivalent to the difference between cutting a tax -- which might in principle later be restored -- and issuing an explicitly limited-term tax holiday, to use a well-known example.)
Yes, it is substantially different. I guess what I thought of was that if the UBI were to be implemented while not being widely (as in by well over 50% of the voters) accepted, say by a far-left political party, barely winning elections, it could be perceived similarly.
