"Widerquist's book ... arguments about the usefulness of experiments and about how they should be carried out, but it will be essential reading for anyone planning an experiment. It is an important contribution to the Citizen's Basic Income literature." (Citizen's Income newsletter, Issue 2, 2019)
Part one: UBI, available tests, testing problems, and past experiments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Universal Basic Income and its more testable sibling, the Negative Income Tax
Chapter 3: Available testing techniques
Chapter 4: Testing difficulties
Chapter 5: The practical impossibility of testing UBI
Chapter 6: BIG experiments of the 1970s and the public reaction to them
Chapter 7: New experimental findings 2009-2013
Part Two: The place of experiments in the political economy of UBI
Chapter 8: Why UBI experiments cannot resolve much of the public disagreement about UBI
Chapter 9: The political economy of the decision to have a UBI experiment
Chapter 10: The chain of misunderstanding between experimenters and their nonspecialist audience
Chapter 11: Overcoming spin, sensationalism misunderstanding, and the streetlight effect
Part Three: From the debate to the test
Chapter 12: The bottom line
Chapter 13: Identifying important empirical claims in the UBI debate
Chapter 14: Claims that don’t need a test
Chapter 15: Claims that can’t be tested with available techniques
Chapter 16: Claims that can be tested but only partially, indirectly, or inconclusively
Chapter 17: From the dream test to good tests within feasible budgets
Karl Widerquist is Associate Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is an internationally recognized expert not only on Basic Income, which he has written about as an economist, philosopher, political theorist, and policy analyst, but also on Basic Income experiments. He has published several academic and non-academic articles on Basic Income experiments over the last 15 years and is the editor of the book series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee (Palgrave Macmillan). He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies and co-chair of BIEN for seven years.