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Finland Is Killing Its Basic Income Experiment (businessinsider.com)
tomhath shares a report: Since the beginning of last year, 2000 Finns are getting money from the government each month -- and they are not expected to do anything in return. The participants, aged 25-58, are all unemployed, and were selected at random by Kela, Finland's social-security institution. Instead of unemployment benefits, the participants now receive $690 per month, tax free. Should they find a job during the two-year trial, they still get to keep the money. While the project is praised internationally for being at the cutting edge of social welfare, back in Finland, decision makers are quietly pulling the brakes, making a U-turn that is taking the project in a whole new direction. "Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income," Kela researcher Miska Simanainen told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.
TFA is misleading.
It was never a universal basic income, because it was never universal. Only unemployed people got it.
And it was less generous than the previous unemployment benefits, the idea being to "encourage" people into work.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is /., so no one RTFA, but itâ(TM)s the Finnish parliament that stopped it for political reasons in December, only one year into the two year experiment, not because it failed. We wonâ(TM)t know what happened in the study until 2019.
It's also worth noting that it isn't generally isn't the nature of experiments to try one experiment to test an idea one time, and then abandon it. If an idea has any merit, you might try a few different methods and repeat the experiment a few times, see the results, and use information gathered from those results to perform a new experiment.
I say this because I'm sure a lot of people will say, "See? Universal Basic Income failed. People should just give up on the idea." The first design of an airplane didn't fly, but that doesn't necessarily mean airplanes can't work. The first iteration of a social program might be a disaster, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's time to give up.
In any case, we're getting ahead of ourselves because the study hasn't published the results. We don't know yet how successful the experiment was.
And I say all of this as someone who has a lot of doubts about the idea of Universal Basic Income. But I've been wrong before, and no doubt I'll be proven wrong again, about something or other (though maybe not this).
How many % of the population are actually waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Sales cashiers are being automated away through self-checkout. McDonalds staff are being automated away through ordering booths and robotic burger flippers. Drivers are forseeably going to be automated away through self-drvinf vehicles. Call centers have voice-recognition AI, web pages have customer query chat bots, trash collection can be easily roboticised once self driving vehicles happen. Factories are already automated. The numbers of available jobs in industries which require either manual labor or scriptable interations is falling and will continue to do so.
What type of magical "automation" is coming that is going to massively replace jobs? People keep talking about "automation", but is there some magic technology coming that is going to automate out waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Not paying attention, are you? Waiters and trash collectors are already losing jobs to automation. It's not a 100% replacement, but automation is cutting the numbers of workers in those (and many other) industries down.
Just look at checkout lines at stores - most of the ones around here have less manned lanes open because they're pushing the "self checkout" lanes - which are automated with video and weight sensors - which let a single employee run 4-12 "lanes" at a time. Even your examples of waiters and trash collectors suffer from this: Several national restaurant chains are moving to have a tablet-like device on the tables from which you can place orders and pay your bill. Doing this reduces the time waiters need to spend at your table, and results in more tables served with less employees. In the last 20 years, most garbage trucks have moved to a system where a driver uses a robotic arm to pick up and dump trash cans. Compare this to how it used to be, with 3-4 workers riding the truck with the driver to do the job that one robot arm does now.
That's called communism, and yes, there are have been many problems with it every time it's been attempted. Fraud is one, but the biggest is that you've removed the reward for working harder than your neighbor and you've given an incentive for lazy people to not work.
What are you talking about? There was not a single socialist or communist country with UBI ever.
In socialism and communism people were forced into labour, unemployment figures were neglectable and everybody was "dragged along" at the work place, whether they were drunk and incapable or not. It was the worst case scenario for the productivity and for those who weren't willing or capable of doing the work they had chosen or were chosen for. The people who didn't meet expectations were constantly cautioned and 'educated', and it was hard and took serious efforts to change workplace, especially if you weren't in line with the party.
UBI is the opposite of that concept. The only similarity is that less people had to live on the street and people were less afraid of their future, after that the similarities end. UBI has never tried in any country so far.
It was never a universal basic income, because it was never universal. Only unemployed people got it.
Just did a search on this page for the word "universal" - your comment is the first place it shows up. In TFA they clearly denote the difference:
And it was less generous than the previous unemployment benefits, the idea being to "encourage" people into work
nothing in TFA indicates what you claim.
So.. why did you make this post? Knee-jerk reaction to a headline? I am genuinely curious.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Sweden , Danemark seem to work because these were very rich capitalist countries before they became solcialist. Still corporate taxes are very low. Anyway, one day money runs out and then you will be saying that this was no real socialism. Venezuela was also greate example of working socialism before it stopped to be good example.
The article and the current Finnish Government may say that, but that's not what is actually happening. They are not trying anything else.
The current Finnish Government is a right-wing coalition that does ideology-based policy making to a point where they ignore all potential negative consequences, criticism and even studies done AT THEIR REQUEST, if they happen to contradict what the Government has already decided they'll do.
Specifically with this issue they don't want universal income or anything that could be perceived as a hand out. Instead they want unemployed people to work for unemployment benefits (wait...what?...yes, exactly)
They're pursuing a very traditional conservative, right-wing economic and political agenda familiar to anyone who knows about what Margaret Thatcher did in the UK, and the GOP has done in the United States for a few decades now.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
"Work" is essentially an act of labor that few people want to do, but something society needs to be done. So, we put a value on it.
Want a paycheck? Go out and work for it. Prove your valuable by doing what's need in an economy, NOT by what YOU want. Because frankly, people don't give a shit what you want; it's not in their immediate self-interests to care.
Life is not for the lazy.