Abstract
This chapter introduces and previews the book with a broad overview of the problems involved in conducting Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments and in reporting the results in ways that successfully increase public understanding of the issue. It argues that experimenters should work backward from the big “bottom-line questions” that are most important to the public discussion of UBI to the variables that tests can actually address, and then forward again, closely explaining the relationship between experimental findings and the things people discussing UBI as a potential national policy really want to know.
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- 1.
Jamie Condliffe, “In 2017, We Will Find out If a Basic Income Makes Sense,” MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2016.
- 2.
Karl Widerquist, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can We Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 34, no. 1 (2005).
- 3.
MIT Technology Review, “What We Do,” MIT Technology Review.
- 4.
Condliffe.
- 5.
Widerquist.
- 6.
Similar work in other fields include Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, “Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials,” in NBER Working Paper Series, ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016); and Dawn Langan Teele, ed. Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
- 7.
Karl Widerquist, “Three Waves of Basic Income Support,” in Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income, ed. Malcolm Torry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming).
- 8.
UBI can, of course, be a regional policy. This fact has not been repeated in the rest of the book to keep the language simple.
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Widerquist, K. (2018). Introduction. 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_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03849-6_1
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03849-6
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