“All men dream, but not equally.”
But Marty, that will change the future!
“The formal purpose of social experiments is to provide knowledge about mass human behavior that will be useful in the design of policies. So the lessons for policy depend on what we read the experiments as saying about behavior.”
How everything just fits nicely together in a mission-driven enterprise operating a research testbed that supports collaborative social experiments in a semi-autonomous and geographically distributed manner.
The foundational research testbed is assembled from a novel combination of 5 key elements; i.e., best-in-class for capturing a treasure trove of knowledge about mass human behavior in the context of basic income.
Study conclusions are to be drawn from analyzing a series of experiments running on this research testbed and interpreting its real-world significance, both qualitatively in the form of individual case studies, as well as statistically in the aggregate. The advantage of organizing empirical studies around such a research testbed is that a group of experimenters can now pose and study, not one, but a whole collection of interesting research questions related to basic income.
This research testbed, once fully up and running, can also be made accessible to any interested basic income researchers anywhere around the world to facilitate collaborative efforts in the field. One can thus think of this research setup as being similar in spirit to the Polymath Project, which makes massively collaborative mathematical research possible among mathematicians and math enthusiasts from far-flung places. What’s more, the research testbed itself is built upon the Ethereum platform and operates robustly as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Now, how cool is that!?
“... Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
References:
- Forget, Evelyn L. (2011, February). The Town with No Poverty: Using Health Administration Data to Revisit Outcomes of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment. Retrieved from: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pdf
- Matthews, Dylan (2014, July 23). A guaranteed income for every American would eliminate poverty — and it wouldn't destroy the economy. Retrieved from: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5925041/guaranteed-income-basic-poverty-gobry-labor-supply