Here's What a Sam Altman-Backed Basic Income Experiment Found
upstart writes:
Here's what a Sam Altman-backed basic income experiment found:
A recent study on basic income, backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, shows that giving low-income people guaranteed paydays with no strings attached can lead to their working slightly less, affording them more leisure time.
The study, which is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, examined the impact of guaranteed income on recipients' health, spending, employment, ability to relocate and other facets of their lives.
Altman first announced his desire to fund the study in a 2016 blog post on startup accelerator Y Combinator's site.
Some of the questions he set out to answer about how people behave when they're given free cash included, "Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled?" according to the post. Altman, whose OpenAI is behind generative text tool ChatGPT, which threatens to take away some jobs, said in the blog post that he thinks technology's elimination of "traditional jobs" could make universal basic income necessary in the future.
How much cash did participants get?
For OpenResearch's Unconditional Cash Study, 3,000 participants in Illinois and Texas received $1,000 monthly for three years beginning in 2020. The cash transfers represented a 40% boost in recipients' incomes. The cash recipients were within 300% of the federal poverty level, with average incomes of less than $29,000. A control group of 2,000 participants received $50 a month for their contributions.
Basic income recipients spent more money, the study found, with their extra dollars going toward essentials like rent, transportation and food.
Researchers also studied the free money's effect on how much recipients worked, and in what types of jobs. They found that recipients of the cash transfers worked 1.3 to 1.4 hours less each week compared with the control group. Instead of working during those hours, recipients used them for leisure time.
"We observed moderate decreases in labor supply," Eva Vivalt, assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto and one of the study's principal investigators, told CBS MoneyWatch. "From an economist's point of view, it's a moderate effect."
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