> Technological superiority was the reason why the USSR lost the cold war
I doubt that. More that the Russian population was fed up with the way their country was being run. And unlike then, internet access now is way more like crack than rock & roll and jeans ever was for their youth in the USSR days. The Kremlin takes it away at their peril.
I got curious as to how true it was that the Wright's first flight was hardly reported, so searched New Zealand's Papers Past. Maybe not front page news, but not ignored, either...
"The reactive model we use is known as object-oriented reactive programming (using a 'push' model), which is both simple to understand and close to spreadsheet's model (i.e. Excel formulas)."
That they've managed to make this work in the language as a whole and not just the GUI is quite wonderful!
What I mean is it won't tell you how a BI will affect the economy as a whole. Not that studying a pension scheme will either, but it can probably provide you with insights that are just as useful as YC's study will.
I think we can assume those whose income is just a state pension or just a BI won't be able to afford cruises...
As with a pension, many of those receiving a BI will have other sources of income, so I think it is a good match. And if you look at my link about Denmark, you'll see that Denmark is to do away with forced retirement. Their pension starts at 65, while their forced retirement age was 70. "Current employment legislation allows companies to dismiss employees when they turn 70, but Frederiksen said the legislation should be changed to reflect the modern workforce."
So even in the country with supposedly the best pension scheme in the world, people still want to keep working beyond 65.
I don't see much point in small-scale tests of a BI. They'll tell us how a few receiving them will behave, but they won't tell us how businesses or the economy will behave when everyone's receiving them. And it's the latter we really should be wanting to understand.
A basic income is supposed to provide enough to live on. So if rents rise, so should the basic income to cover that rise. And the landlords would notice their taxes rising also.
More interesting is what would happen to wages and salaries. If someone's on a wage that's equal to what the BI will be, if it's introduced they could have their wage halved and still have a bigger income. And their boss will have halved their wages' bill.
A basic income would be revolutionary and I doubt anyone has a good idea on how an economy with one will behave.
A lot of people around the world have been receiving old-age pensions for quite a while. Many are still healthy and able, with some of those working and some not.
Why will this study provide better data about how people will behave when given a basic income than the presumably huge amount of data available about how healthy people behave on a pension?
Working out how to plug a basic income into an economy, how to arrive at what it should be and how to transition an economy to include a basic income would be a better use resources.
Maybe some would buy your art instead of paying Netflix to watch other people's art?
I think it's safe to say we don't have a clue how things would pan out with a UBI, since none of the examples have been universal yet.
A few things are a given though:
1) Many people wouldn't consider the UBI to be enough to sustain their lifestyles so they'd continue to work.
2) Low-paid work that people don't like doing will have to become higher-paid work. (Or at least the total of its pay + the UBI will have to become higher. I'm assuming here there'd be no minimum wage.)
3) Higher-paid work which people like doing may become lower-paid or charity work, depending on the work.
4) Work that's not currently done because it's uneconomic may start to get done.
5) Most benefits currently provided could be done away with.
In other words, it'd transform society. Whether it'd be for the better or worse remains to be seen. It's by far the most interesting economic idea around at the moment though, so let's hope some country tries it soon!
I attempted to write programs for C64 GEOS, and I found it worse than assembler! It may have been due to the programmer's manual being for an earlier version of GEOS than I was using (v2), but writing programs that didn't crash seemed to be impossible for me.
That said, I recall very little third-party programs appearing for C64 GEOS, so it may have been the case for most programmers who attempted to write for it.
I doubt that. More that the Russian population was fed up with the way their country was being run. And unlike then, internet access now is way more like crack than rock & roll and jeans ever was for their youth in the USSR days. The Kremlin takes it away at their peril.