Description
At least six different Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments are underway or planned right now in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Finland, and Kenya. Several more countries are considering conducting experiments. Yet, there seems to be more interest simply in having UBI experiments than in exactly what we want to learn from them. Although experiments can produce a lot of relevant data about UBI, they are crucially limited in their ability to enlighten our understanding of the big questions that bear on the discussion of whether to implement UBI as a national or regional policy. And, past experience shows that results of UBI experiments are particularly vulnerable misunderstanding, sensationalism, and spin. This book examines the difficulties of conducting a UBI experiment and reporting the results in ways that successfully improve public understanding of the probable effects of a national UBI. The book makes recommendations how researchers, reporters, citizens, and policymakers can avoid these problems and get the most out of UBI experiments. Karl Widerquist is Associate Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is an internationally recognized expert not only on Basic Income, which he has written about as an economist, philosopher, political theorist, and policy analyst, but also on Basic Income experiments. He has published several academic and non-academic articles on Basic Income experiments over the last 15 years and is the editor of the book series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee (Palgrave Macmillan). He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies and co-chair of BIEN for seven years. Part one: UBI, available tests, testing problems, and past experiments Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Universal Basic Income and its more testable sibling, the Negative Income Tax Chapter 3: Available testing techniques Chapter 4: Testing difficulties Chapter 5: The practical impossibility of testing UBI Chapter 6: BIG experiments of the 1970s and the public reaction to them Chapter 7: New experimental findings 2009-2013 Part Two: The place of experiments in the political economy of UBI Chapter 8: Why UBI experiments cannot resolve much of the public disagreement about UBI Chapter 9: The political economy of the decision to have a UBI experiment Chapter 10: The chain of misunderstanding between experimenters and their nonspecialist audience Chapter 11: Overcoming spin, sensationalism misunderstanding, and the streetlight effect Part Three: From the debate to the test Chapter 12: The bottom line Chapter 13: Identifying important empirical claims in the UBI debate Chapter 14: Claims that don’t need a test Chapter 15: Claims that can’t be tested with available techniques Chapter 16: Claims that can be tested but only partially, indirectly, or inconclusively Chapter 17: From the dream test to good tests within feasible budgets
