Are Universal Basic Income Simulations Worth Running?

Joon Sung Park calls universal basic income simulations good ones to run. He poses them as a way to show where the policy worked and where it did not, in place of a five-year study. The company is already delivering value, and a small part of him remains the researcher, drawn to questions that are societal and generational.

Thomas Schelling, a behavior economist in the 70s and 80s and one of his research heroes, applied simulation to racial segregation, the generational topic of that era, to understand its causal mechanisms. Climate change sits on the same scale. It is hard because of coordination, not only the physics. Many actors with competing incentives each optimize for their own goals, and the equilibrium they generate when they clash is nearly impossible to navigate. In his framing, simulating the clash over and over to see the outcome of a given policy is potentially powerful. If AGI is here or imminent, pockets of the community have presented a few ideas, and universal basic income is one he offers only as a possibility, next to other ideas.