One of the most interesting questions that people consider, when thinking about basic income, is whether or not people would still &quot;want&quot; to work if they were being given enough money to get by. That is a question which has a lot of opinions but not a lot of data behind.<p>One way to study this might be to take a population which is on welfare, and for some of them replace their welfare with &#x27;one string attached&#x27; basic income. The string is that if they take the BI they cannot also take welfare. However any money they earn by working doesn&#x27;t affect how much BI they receive, it&#x27;s a constant. Then compare them against other people in the study who were left on welfare.<p>The goal would be to see how many BI recipents returned to work versus welfare recipients over 1, 2, and 5 year time spans. Trying to get a sample set in the 100 - 200 people range could be very expensive but it would help establish some data with which to analyze the question of whether or not people will work or not while getting basic income.