I doubt that. More that the Russian population was fed up with the way their country was being run. And unlike then, internet access now is way more like crack than rock & roll and jeans ever was for their youth in the USSR days. The Kremlin takes it away at their peril.

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=...

That they've managed to make this work in the language as a whole and not just the GUI is quite wonderful!

More interesting is what would happen to wages and salaries. If someone's on a wage that's equal to what the BI will be, if it's introduced they could have their wage halved and still have a bigger income. And their boss will have halved their wages' bill.

A basic income would be revolutionary and I doubt anyone has a good idea on how an economy with one will behave.

Why will this study provide better data about how people will behave when given a basic income than the presumably huge amount of data available about how healthy people behave on a pension?

Working out how to plug a basic income into an economy, how to arrive at what it should be and how to transition an economy to include a basic income would be a better use resources.

But given these caveats, that probably exist similarly in other countries, it's a good field to study.

Of course, the social expectations on people on old-age pensions are quite different from the ones on the working-age population.

I think that's the same in the UK, too. In other countries you can work and still receive the state pension, but most seem to be means-tested...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_pension

Denmark apparently has the best pension scheme which includes a "public basic pension scheme"...

http://www.thelocal.dk/20141013/denmark-has-worlds-best-pens...

> Of course, the social expectations on people on old-age pensions are quite different from the ones on the working-age population.

Which is why I said 'healthy', who should be the subset who are studied.

Ie healthy old people (who are well off enough) might be expected to go on cruises etc. I wouldn't count their voluntary unemployment for much, when I was trying to forecast what effects a universal basic income had on the general population.

(On the other hand, I would count their voluntary employment for a lot.)

As with a pension, many of those receiving a BI will have other sources of income, so I think it is a good match. And if you look at my link about Denmark, you'll see that Denmark is to do away with forced retirement. Their pension starts at 65, while their forced retirement age was 70. "Current employment legislation allows companies to dismiss employees when they turn 70, but Frederiksen said the legislation should be changed to reflect the modern workforce."

So even in the country with supposedly the best pension scheme in the world, people still want to keep working beyond 65.

I don't see much point in small-scale tests of a BI. They'll tell us how a few receiving them will behave, but they won't tell us how businesses or the economy will behave when everyone's receiving them. And it's the latter we really should be wanting to understand.

I think it's safe to say we don't have a clue how things would pan out with a UBI, since none of the examples have been universal yet.

A few things are a given though:

1) Many people wouldn't consider the UBI to be enough to sustain their lifestyles so they'd continue to work.

2) Low-paid work that people don't like doing will have to become higher-paid work. (Or at least the total of its pay + the UBI will have to become higher. I'm assuming here there'd be no minimum wage.)

3) Higher-paid work which people like doing may become lower-paid or charity work, depending on the work.

4) Work that's not currently done because it's uneconomic may start to get done.

5) Most benefits currently provided could be done away with.

In other words, it'd transform society. Whether it'd be for the better or worse remains to be seen. It's by far the most interesting economic idea around at the moment though, so let's hope some country tries it soon!

No they wouldn't. They'd vote for an increase in UBI.

> No they wouldn't. They'd vote for an increase in UBI.

UBI isn't magic. If you raise UBI to high for the conditions in the economy to sustain, it drives inflation such that further increases to the nominal UBI level produce ever smaller increases to the real UBI level.

(And people who understand this, and those who have moral objections to UBI beyond a minimal level, and those who oppose the UBI entirely but weren't strong enough to prevent it from being passed -- they would all vote against the increase to the UBI, either always or past certain points. So, there's political limits to the ability to raise the UBI, as well as, even if not all completely independent of, the fundamental economic limits.)

In the end, even with a UBI, people who aren't happy living on what the UBI does (or can) provide are going to need to engage in economic activity to produce non-UBI income.

That people can vote for a government which enacts policies which have an unsustainable balance of spending vs revenue is true independently of the presence of absence of a UBI, and not any kind of argument against a UBI. And it also has inherent limited, as seen recently in Greece, by access of the government to credit.