Marshall Islands. Looks like it’s because the US made a payment as compensation for using their islands as nuclear testing grounds.
Ah damn, so I guess that means it won’t be a very good experiment. Too small and based on reparations means it won’t be very representative of other economies.
It’s a great experiment. You mean it may not scale up, which is a different thing entirely.
I wasn’t passing a value judgement on UBI or if these people should have it. Just saying that we won’t learn much from it since it doesn’t represent a “standard” economy.
For instance, one of the biggest open questions (and common arguments against it) is whether or not it’s sustainable. Which is fairly irrelevant when it’s just being paid for by basically an endowment.
If a $X billion endowment works, thats really useful information to know that this was able to support the people and be sustainable.
We can come up with money to do something like this via various means, but we also don’t know the outcome.
What if this endowment doesnt even work? What if it works for less than they expected? What if it does work but exceeds people’s expectations.
Its all really useful information.
Edit: just an example, but what if health care costs drop 20% because of this. That then let’s us know that at least the idea of being able to support your basic needs actually does lower Healthcare costs by some amount. Thats an amount that could help fund it in the future. It’ll be different because each country is different, but its another real data point.
They’re splitting any cargo that washes up equally between all people.
