Pilot Projects evaluate a UBI’s feasibility.

One way to address both the knowledge gap and risk aversion in policy development is by introducing a temporary change to law or policy for the purpose of learning from it, through a “policy pilot.” Implemented with rigor, through the application of, “well-designed and well-implemented methods tailored to the questions being asked”13—rigorous policy pilots are a generative yet under-used tool for addressing informational deficits that stand in the way of developing effective law and policy.

The range of open questions in law and policy that can be addressed by pilots are wide-ranging. They include, for example, the question of how giving a universal basic income (“UBI”) to individuals impacts their well-being and employment. In 2017, the Finnish government began tracking the outcomes of 7,000 unemployed citizens, about a third to which it gave $600 a monthto address this question;14 several U.S. jurisdictions are planning their own tests.15 Also unknown is how the administration of patent law and issuance of quality patents best advance the Constitutional goal of “promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts.”16 Over the last decade, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) has run numerous pilots to address this question.17 As the D.C. Circuit has said, “there are some situations in which, ‘a month of experience will be worth a year of hearings.’”18 While experiments or pilots can address a variety of questions pertaining, e.g., to a policy’s feasibility or stakeholder reactions, when the question concerns whether the policy has caused an observed outcome, a controlled trial that provides the treatment to one part of population, withholds it from another, and then compares the difference in outcomes provides the best insight. Such rigorous experiments can be designed, in turn, with or without randomization, and to vary the rules or laws that apply or to approximate such changes. A pilot that limits to whom a rule or policy applies constrains the risk but not the learning. As Justice Brandeis famously dissented, “a single courageous state may . . . serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”19