> Thirty people in the U.K. could soon receive £1,600 ($1,983) each month if the trial by independent think tank Autonomy secures funding. The basic income payments are estimated to cost £1.15 million through the duration of the two-year project.
This is much cheaper than other political tactics and obviously these are cherry picked recipients. This is awful.
Care to expand on your thinking here? In what way do you think these recipients would be cherry picked, and what do you think would be the political goals?
If you're running a study like this and want to ensure a certain result to support your take on the issue it'd be easy to pick recipients to reinforce whatever your goals are. IE. only choose people with stable employment who won't all quit their jobs immediately when they start getting checks, or the opposite if your goal is to sink UBI.
This is the political equivalent of paid Amazon reviews. The goal is to be the winning despot for a socialist regime. It's like the lottery, but for power. They're never going to stop these "trials" until anti-bribery laws are updated to include false philanthropy.
Here's how all these experiments should work: first participants volunteer, then everyone who volunteers will pay a special tax to pay benefits for the duration of the program.
Taking outside money and funneling into a closed system is guaranteed to produce distorted results, likely to be made worse because anyone running such an experiment is extremely likely to have a strong pre-existing pro-UBI bias that makes the result even more of a foregone conclusion.
This is much cheaper than other political tactics and obviously these are cherry picked recipients. This is awful.