Here's my piece in Salon about updating my beliefs about basic income. The goal of the piece was to demonstrate the rationality technique of updating beliefs in the hard mode of politics. Another goal was to promote GiveDirectly, a highly effective charity, and its basic income experiment. Since it had over 1K shares in less than 24 hours and the comment section is surprisingly decent, I'm cautiously optimistic about the outcome.
Decent article but pretty basic. Still, a glimmer of reason in the dark pit of Salon.
Didn't know Y Combinator was doing a pilot. They don't mention how many people will be in the pilot in the announcement, but it will be interesting to see.
One thing I never understood is why it makes sense to do cash transfers to people that are already wealthy - or even above average income. A social safety net (while admittedly more difficult to manage) consisting solely of cash income seems to makes more sense. I guess the issue is with the practical implementation details of managing the system and making sure everyone who needs to be enrolled is.
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