The Silicon Valley firm, Y Combinator, announced this week that it is getting into the business of funding social science research, starting with a call for proposals to examine the effects of a guaranteed basic income. Y Combinator prepares would-be start-ups (mostly in IT) so that they can improve their chances of securing bigger funds from venture capital and angel investors. As Wired once put it, Y Combinator support is an incredibly valuable “geek version of the Good Housekeeping Seal.”

As a social-science researcher with a vested interest in Silicon Valley funding more social-science research, I’m happy to see the tech community interested in these kinds of questions. But I do worry that this call for proposals will lead to a problematic study. And by understanding these concerns, I think there’s an opportunity for liberals to better appreciate the much-misunderstood views of conservatives on social policy generally.

In a blog post Wednesday, Y Combinator president Sam Altman issued the "request for research":

"We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research.

We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work.

It’s true that we have systems in place to give people resources, but the bureaucracy and qualification requirements make it a very imperfect approximation of what most people mean when talking about a basic income. We have some examples of something close to a basic income in other countries, but we’d like to see how it would work in the U.S."

It’s a worthy impulse, to be sure, but I fear that from its inception, there may be an unconscious thumb on the scale for finding the benefits of such a program and missing the costs. Altman, admirably in my view, shows his cards a bit in the post, saying, “I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.” Even more tellingly, he writes,

"50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income. And I think that, combined with innovation driving down the cost of having a great life, by doing something like this we could eventually make real progress towards eliminating poverty."

I want to put aside quickly one argument I might raise with these contentions. While techno-pessimism has become ascendant over the past decade, many academic researchers and tech-types—Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, for instance—would contest the prediction that technology will hurt employment.

What I want to focus on here is the distinction between poverty reduction and opportunity promotion. Altman is correct that a guaranteed basic income could be designed to eliminate poverty. Giving people money will do that—in the narrow sense that when poverty is defined in terms of having too little income, more income will reduce poverty. As I’ve noted many times, the War on Poverty managed to substantially reduce poverty in the U.S., a fact obscured by the official poverty measure. Anytime a conservative says that poverty is no lower today than in the 1960s, that’s just wrong.

But despite our success in reducing poverty, upward mobility from the bottom ranks has failed to rise. This is only a contradiction if you believe that lack of income is the primary barrier to upward mobility. But there is little evidence for this. Susan Mayer’s classic, What Money Can’t Buy, a book I worked on a bit as an undergrad, presents a variety of empirical arguments to show that beyond a certain threshold of poverty, more income seems to have little effect on child outcomes.

People with low incomes differ from people with higher incomes in any number of ways (for better and for worse). But most importantly, many of them—many, not all—have fewer marketable skills or more-counterproductive habits or beliefs. Much of this disadvantage is itself caused by prior disadvantage. Children don’t choose their parents, their neighbors, or their teachers. But we can’t wish away these non-economic disadvantages, as if more income would negate or reverse them. Obviously, it’s an empirical question how important income is relative to other barriers to mobility. I’m not trying to assert a strong position here except to say that the case that income is of primary importance hasn’t been made.

Furthermore, antipoverty policy can both reduce immediate hardship while deterring upward mobility in the long run. Many of our antipoverty policies have disincentives for beneficiaries to work, marry, save, and invest in their skills. At the same time we’ve reduced the poverty rate, out-of-wedlock births have exploded. Male labor force participation has plummeted. Most liberals explain the former by pointing to the latter, but another explanation is that our not-very-lavish-but-sufficiently-generous safety net has made it possible for women to mother without the hassle of dealing with a husband who is insufficiently reliable, faithful or respectful. That has lowered expectations of men, who are no longer expected to support their children robustly and who therefore have less incentive to remain committed to work. Disability benefits, food stamps and other safety net benefits also reduce male work incentives. In this explanation, the safety net causes some women to have babies out of wedlock, causes some men to not have to support those babies, and causes both men and women to work and save less.

Like the question of income’s importance relative to other factors, the question of how strong opportunity-thwarting disincentives are in safety net programs is an empirical one that is far from settled. Again, I do not wish to assert an answer to either question. But Y Combinator’s proposed research is unlikely to allow us to adjudicate between the different positions either.

That’s because it is proposing a five-year project. Five years will likely be enough time for various benefits to show up in the study. Giving people money will almost certainly increase average utility levels, whatever recipients spend it on. But the long-term costs of a national guaranteed basic income scheme won’t show up. Study participants are unlikely to reduce their work or saving much or increase out-of-wedlock childbearing much knowing that the flow of guaranteed cash will stop in five years. The negative behavioral consequences of a guaranteed basic income—large or small—are unlikely to show up in the study.

Were the U.S. to implement a permanent program that supplied a life-long guaranteed annual basic income, the incentives would be quite different. Y Combinator’s project could end up showing substantial short-term benefits—poverty reduction—but miss these potential long-term costs. One such cost might be stalled or diminished upward mobility. Another might be slower economic growth, as work disincentives creep further up the skill ladder. Another might be an explosion in federal deficits if we choose to finance a basic income by borrowing money from the rest of the world instead of raising taxes. (Alternatively, much higher taxes at the top might also slow growth.)

These kinds of fears of long-term costs are what keep conservatives up at night in thinking about social policy. Liberals often seem to misunderstand that this is the nature of conservative objections to liberal policy proposals (at least among most intellectual conservatives). Obamacare triumphalists incessantly point to, for example, the millions of additional Americans with health coverage as evidence that conservative objections to the ACA were off-base. But the principled anti-Obamacare case has always been about long-terms costs—to American innovation, to economic growth, to federal budgets, to quality of care, and to promoting personal responsibility.

Similarly, some liberal analysts proclaim that a poverty rate above 0% is a “policy choice,” as if that ends the discussion. There’s a bit of the flavor of that in Altman’s “fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people” characterization. But the choice isn’t accept poverty today or oppose it. The choice is accept poverty today to potentially benefit more people—including the children of today’s poor—in the future or oppose poverty today and accept the potential long-term costs that may accrue.

Again, let me be clear: these are all (or mostly) empirical questions. But the study design that Y Combinator funds will almost surely be unable to adjudicate between possible answers. Worse, it may provide evidence of short-term benefits while missing the long-term costs that could result if we instituted a national basic income. Designing a study that could do otherwise would require a much bigger project—longer but also broader. Disincentives work, in part, by the spread of behavior when disincentives are geographically or socially concentrated.

Y Combinator can’t be faulted for not funding, say, a statewide basic income program over fifty years. The kind of research needed to answer the empirical questions posed here isn’t practical. That’s why we’ll keep arguing about social policy for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, sometimes we just have to try something out to see if it works or not. But conservatives don’t want to try out a national basic income. Hopefully, the liberal reader can at least understand why.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes