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One of those moments where I bemoan my lack of access to closed scientific research. =)

The abstract suggests that it is looking at means tested and conditional benefits, including programs to "guarantee a minimum income": that should not be confused with a basic income, despite the similarity in terminology.

In the literature when people refer to a guaranteed minimum income they're referring to the government supplementing a person's income up to some predefined level. This makes it significantly cheaper than a basic income, because people who "don't need it" aren't receiving the income; but a really nasty side effect of that, as with nearly all welfare programs, is that it creates incredibly steep effective marginal tax rates. The simplest design--looking at someone's income, and filling it up until it hits the desired minimum--in fact leads to a 100% marginal tax rate, because a dollar earned from work is a dollar lost in benefits.

This means there's absolutely no incentive to work before you've made the minimum; contrast it to the unconditional basic income, where even someone who's only capable of producing half the value of the basic income is fully incentivized to do that work. So you avoid the deadly (literally!) welfare trap where the government actively punishes you for finding work.



I don't know if you are in the US or not but our local city library can get journals on inter-library loan. Stanford used to have an affordable non-student library card fee but it has since gone through the roof. That said you can often do the legal part of what Aaron Schwartz did which is use the WiFi in a college library and get access to their journal subscription but this only works well if you already know what articles you want. And Google Scholar can be good for that but not as good before 1999 sadly.

I recognize the difference between BI and GMI as strategies but just so you know they are often both talked about in the same papers as they are both approaches to putting capital to work effectively amongst the poorest.




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