Not sure if you’re just trolling at this point, but I’ll engage in good faith.

Assuming you googled “old age risk aversion,” the link you shared is the first result. But *literally the next result* is an empirical…

Not sure if you’re just trolling at this point, but I’ll engage in good faith.

Assuming you googled “old age risk aversion,” the link you shared is the first result. But *literally the next result* is an empirical study showing that risk aversion *decreases* with age, for *exactly* the reason I specified. Read before commenting. And even the link you shared finds that most of the change in risk-taking is not a change in risk-preferences, but strategic! You are working overtime to avoid paying attention to some of the only empirical data in existence that allows ideas about UBI to be tested and explored; why the aversion to falsifiability?

I’m not saying that old people are uber-risk-takers. I’m just saying that your closedness to considering lessons learned from existing programs is an argument in bad faith, it’s just a plain unwillingness to learn. No, retirees aren’t exactly like intended UBI recipients. But then again, most UBI recipients wouldn’t be like the average UBI recipient. For every 0.2% extra who become entrepreneurs, maybe 10% stop working altogether. Or maybe entrepreneurship actually falls: the studies we have focus on people who had limited periods of guaranteed income, which could have given them strong incentives to make investments that would pay off. Maybe a permanent UBI destroys those incentives. Hard to say. I tend to think UBI probably could boost entrepreneurship, but the effect is probably small.

Again, you’re deceiving with the numbers. A shift from 1% to 1.2% is not large. Even your basic multiplication by U.S. population is deceptive: all extant studies focus on people in the labor force, which is a smaller population. Entrepreneurship among those not in the labor force is almost certainly even lower. And, again, keep in mind that we could get 200,000 new business starts (not a very big number in the grand scheme of things), but maybe we get a decline in people willing to work for those businesses of 1,000,000 due to UBI. Are we better off? Hard to say!

Academics make up a large share of entrepreneurs, especially in the highest-yielding sectors like tech, medicine, biotech, etc. Again, these attempts to write off the available evidence instead of learn from it are incredibly annoying.

The point of critiquing the number of people employed in small businesses is to note your recurrently cavalier approach to the information you like, alongside stubborn inflexibility towards information you dislike.

Finally, (1) I’m not a techno-optimist. The problem we face is that robots don’t replace enough jobs, not that they replace too many. Productivity growth is *very low* right now. There’s no reason to think UBI will suddenly great an automation boom. (2) Again, you mistake the definition of market income. UBI *is not a component* of market income.