JurgenBIG

Hi Paul - Jurgen here, I am involved in the Finnish experiment. First off, kudos for the planned experiment - awesome stuff. I'm very interested in what we can take from the experiments conducted in Kenya (Namibia, India) to learn about basic income in the context of Europe, Canada and US. The big issue here is that both the policy and political context are so different. What do you think are main lessons we can expect to learn from the GiveDirectly experiment that transcend the particulars of a developing world context?

Excellent points Paul. The human nature assumption is definitely one to be challenged (and being challenged) from a variety of angles. Beyond that it is interesting to see how basic income responds to local variation - its robustness across particular contexts is something we should examine and hopefully subsequently develop into a key argument.

The most interesting feature in your experiment, and something we just can't do in Europe/North America, is the long term perspective. Even the expectation of long-term income security should produce tangible outcomes.

Look forward to seeing more from you guys. Keep up the good work!

in short: no where near the numbers you need to get some proper results, let alone a host of other problems raising that amount of money for such a small group.

Not entirely sure what you see as the problem of ex-post data mining. Evelyn Forget's work on the health impact of Mincome does exactly that and while we need to be careful about overstating things (Evelyn herself is the first to insist on that!), her work has proven extremely interesting.

I get the point about massaging stats in all its variety (Mark Twain wasn't far off!), but also worry about the idea that we should stick to a few pre-specified metrics and leave it at that. Discovering a dependent variable that has improved "by chance" may or may not be something worth taking seriously or exploring further. Social science being as complex and messy as it is, best practice lies somewhere in between. Anyways, not quite the forum to debate these points :)