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ebw on 30 June 2017
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Mr Puggsly said:
ebw said:
I'm sorry that this happened to your family, but anecdotal evidence from a handful of people who are socially and genetically correlated is not convincing enough to draw such a conclusion. Here is a much larger pool of anecdotes:

 

http://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/basic-income-finland-23062017/

 

However, I wouldn't be too quick to draw the opposite conclusion since this trial was only for 5 months and your anecdotes are much more longitudinal than this. But I strongly believe that humans are ambitious for many different reasons, and that ambition can thrive without a motivation so drastic as the threat of death (for instance, mate selection can be a powerful motivator). I could equally well imagine cases where any ambition is killed by stress over losing one's coverage, who can say for sure without more analysis?

Any US examples?

Perhaps the people of Finland are culturally different than some of the US. The US is more diverse and a lot bigger, different problems.

For example, the immigrants of Europe tend to have unique problems not being addressed.

There was a Wikipedia article with a couple of leads (and absolutely, culture is an important variable).  It mentions that a handful of cities ran pilot programs on negative income tax (with thousands of families in aggregate) during the 1960s to early 1980s.  There is some meta-analysis in this article (PDF download): https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/conference/30/conf30a.pdf

More recently, Y Combinator has formally announced its intention to introduce a multi-year basic income pilot in Oakland, CA:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/31/y-combinator-announces-basic-income-pilot-experiment-in-oakland/.

However, I don't see information about any progress on it since that blog post from last year.  I hope the experiment goes forward as it can provide valuable data: they chose Oakland specifically for its socioeconomic diversity (and close proximity to Y Combinator).