Deric Cheng

I think this was from a few years ago in...

I believe, Kenya or an African country where they had certain villages randomly selected to be given a universal basic income for a short period of time and certain villages were not selected.

And then using, frankly, very complicated systems to try to identify the differences in outcomes, accounting for the interplay between these two, between villages that are working within a single economy.

And so there are tools that allow people to

test some of these ideas, but they are challenging and require a lot of capital and require a lot of buy-in.

Yeah, I think that's similar to medical testing.

There is a series of ladders of trials that might be useful.

And I know that UBI, the space of UBI, has been doing this for almost a decade or two decades at this point, where they are progressively running larger and larger trials and trying to collect enough evidence to justify the next level up.

I think...

Sometimes opportunistically, a significant change in society will lead to a policy being passed for a period of time.

A great example of this is the child tax credit, which has been advocated for by organizations in the US for a decade or two decades.

And during COVID,

For a very short period of time, about one to two years, the child tax credit was just universally passed across the US.

And from that, they saw significant decreases in household poverty for many families, for many households with children, and many, many other beneficial impacts.

Of course, that was repealed a couple years later.

But from that, you get very, very significant evidence that this could be valuable in a certain way.

And so almost waiting for the right conditions to arise, as well as supporting the creation of those conditions by creating political support and creating investment towards researching the right types of ideas so that when the moment comes, that the policymakers or decision makers can be influenced with enough evidence to push them in the right direction, I think is the strategy.

strategy.

Of course.

One of the things I'm doing the most research on is taxation in an AI-driven economy and how that might need to be restructured.