Y Combinator announced last month that they’d be launching a study on a Universal Basic Income — pushing the Silicon Valley-based group of investors and entrepreneurs into space traditionally guarded by stodgy university bureaucrats and policy wonks in DC.
It’s not totally unheard of for a non-university to do research — Bell Labs pretty much built the 21st Century and think tanks have existed for a while — but this is still a great development. Social science research is notoriously rare outside of the bizarro-world of the DC Beltway and the topsy-turvy, politicized world of academia. And even here, academia has the upper hand. A report released by the Cato Institute is going to get less respect than a report released by Stanford.
This provides a major opportunity to break the university’s stranglehold on quality social science research. As things currently stand, if you are an intellectual who wants to do research on a social science topic, you’re pretty much stuck doing a post-doc and competing for dwindling research positions at universities. If you aren’t lucky here, you go to a think tank. A quality research project like this can open up untold opportunity for intellectuals doing research outside of the university. Instead of being stuck in the overly-bureaucratic world of academia, a quality intellectual can be an intellectual entrepreneur, innovating not only in ideas but also in intellectual institutions. Y Combinator’s success at creating startups provides all the rapport needed for such a venture — no 200+ year history of a university needed to back up its legitimacy.
This is definitely just the beginning of such projects.