Saturday, February 11, 2017

Kate McFarland — US: eBay founder’s firm to donate up to $493,000 to basic income pilot

Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investment firm” created by eBay founded Pierre Omidyar, announced on February 7 that it will donate up to $493,000 to the New York based charity organization GiveDirectly. The funds will be used to support GiveDirectly’s major basic income experiment in Kenya.
In the largest and longest-running basic income trial to date, GiveDirectly will provide unconditional cash transfers to the residents of 200 villages in rural Kenya (about 26,000 people in total). The residents of 40 of these villages (about 6,000 people) will receive monthly payments for 12 years. At about $0.75 per day, the amount of the basic income is roughly half of the average income in rural Kenya....

2 comments:

Dan Lynch said...

I don't understand the fixation with pilot programs for basic income.

Plenty of pilot programs have already been done. The data is out there.

Pilot programs cannot shed much light on the macro effects of basic income. The macro effects of a pilot basic income are insignificant, but the macro effects of a national basic income may be huge.

My take is that these pilot programs are just the politicians' way of pretending to do something.

Peter Pan said...

Trial balloons. If it does not get shot down, that will be seen as a green light to proceed.