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Comment by NetMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Simply select 2000 18 year olds and give them BI for life. That isn't all that expensive even in worst case and would actually show if BI could work.

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Pretty sure you can find 2000 18 year olds with a trust fund or part of a Native American Indian tribe that distributes gaming revenue.

"Coming from a rich family" or "part of a Native American tribe" is not a wide enough distribution of people to draw conclusions. Any failures / successes could be down to the environment and may not be able to be extrapolated to the rest of society at large.

On the other hand, if you're wondering if people who after the end of highschool, are able to finish college without having to get a minimum wage job to pay rent and for college, are doing better in life after college (and what measured amount better), the data already exists and there are far more than 2000 subjects.

If only it were simple. To actually do that, someone somewhere has to approve a budget of at least 2 billion dollars, that's how much money you're talking about. They have to both find the funding and have the political stamina to withstand the backlash on that kind of spending.

* my assumptions are: $25k income (which is just barely above the poverty line), for 40 years (which isn't long enough).

It wouldn't at all show the effects of a large scale implementation. You can't measure the effects of supply constraints and rising prices with small scale tests.

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