Abstract
This chapter discusses several general problems that virtually any experiment in the Universal Basic Income will have to deal with: community effects, long-term effects, the Hawthorne effect, the streetlight effect, and the difficulty of separating the effects of the size and type of program being studied.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
- 2.
Angus Deaton, “Instruments, Randomization, and Learning About Development,” in Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences, ed. Dawn Langan Teele (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 177; Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 143.
- 3.
Jim McCambridge, John Witton, and Diana R. Elbourne, “Systematic Review of the Hawthorne Effect: New Concepts Are Needed to Study Research Participation Effects,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 67, no. 3 (2014).
- 4.
Thanks to Evelyn Forget for alerting me to this last issue.
- 5.
Paul Johnson, “Parallel Histories of Retirement in Modern Britain,” in Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity, ed. Paul Johnson and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1998); http://blog.spicker.uk/experiments-with-basic-income-were-never-going-to-settle-the-arguments/
- 6.
P.K. Robins, “The Labor Supply Response of Twenty-Year Families in the Denver Income Maintenance Experiment,” Review of Economics and Statistics 66, no. 3 (1984); Widerquist, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can We Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?”
- 7.
Dawn Langan Teele, “Introduction,” in Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences, ed. Dawn Langan Teele (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Angus Deaton, “Instruments, Randomization, and Learning About Development,” ibid.
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Widerquist, K. (2018). Testing Difficulties. In: A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03849-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03849-6_4
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