Guaranteed Basic Income To Be Tested In The US

They are going to test it in Oakland:

We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.

But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods–how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.

Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality. We think these traits make it a very good place to explore how basic income could work for our pilot…

In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what. People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom…

One reason we think it may work is that technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources. Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary, technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall dramatically.

Hypotheses are only hypotheses until they are tested, but based on my current understanding, all they are going to prove is that the era of post-scarcity will be an epic disaster of unimaginable proportions.

The problem is that they are completely focused on the environment, and completely ignoring the effect of the environment on the human machine, especially at the level of amygdala exercise and development. It is as if they think the only thing which ever changes is the environment, and the human is the same no matter what environment you put them in.

The truth is you can’t change the environment without changing the human, and more and more it looks like you also change the human germ line in Lamarkian fashion through epigenetics, in ways which aggregate generation to generation.

The human machine evolved to meet harshness. Introduce ease and safety, and the human form degenerates into a neurotic, panicky, fearful tyrant – and each generation is worse than the last. Indeed, I think if you could supply enough ease and safety for long enough, the effects absolutely would be on par with direct structural ablation of the amygdala. Compared to supplying free resources, simply brain damaging everyone with a scalpel would have the same effect, and be far cheaper.

Given the damage free resources inflicts on the human brain, I am beginning to wonder if it is the final Darwinian selection pressure a species is exposed to. Once so exposed, humans who seek out comfort are effectively culled by their own hedonistic desires. Those who pass the Darwinian test are those who find the ease interminably boring, relentlessly seek out amygdala-developing stimuli, and who are driven to make an escape from the tyrant r-strategists which the ease generates.

It might mean that if we ever find little green men who travel in flying saucers, they will be genetically-selected thrill seekers who revel in hardship and adversity. It would not be surprising, since they will have left a planet of unimaginable comforts and safety to travel across the galaxy, just to poke around.

Plus, if they were the type of individual to seek out free resources, you know they aren’t going to be accomplishing anything great like space travel.