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Finland Basic Income Trial Left People 'Happier But Jobless' (bbc.com)
Giving jobless people in Finland a basic income for two years did not lead them to find work, researchers said. From a report: From January 2017 until December 2018, 2,000 unemployed Finns got a monthly flat payment of $685. The aim was to see if a guaranteed safety net would help people find jobs, and support them if they had to take insecure gig economy work. While employment levels did not improve, participants said they felt happier and less stressed. When it launched the pilot scheme back in 2017, Finland became the first European country to test out the idea of an unconditional basic income. It was run by the Social Insurance Institution (Kela), a Finnish government agency, and involved 2,000 randomly-selected people on unemployment benefits. It immediately attracted international interest - but these results have now raised questions about the effectiveness of such schemes.
Is there anything dumber in this world (that are still recognisable human) than socialists?
Yes. Trump supporters. Though the ones in the KKK and the nazis are hard to recognize as human.
More seriously, it was an experiment. Relax. Yes the outcome was fairly predictable but sometimes what seems obvious actually isn't correct. So you run an experiment to find out. It was possible we'd find out something unexpected. This sort of data is why I think people who talk nonsense about a "post scarcity society" are talking complete nonsense because most people don't want to work if they don't have to.
I'm in a well paying job that I'm not particularly fond of (though it's not terrible). I'd love to branch out and start my own business doing something I enjoy however that's a lot of risk, especially when I have a young son at home.
If I was guaranteed a small basic income that may give me the safety net I need to get something started.
But that's just my take. Every person would be different.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
So sorry, but this study does not support that position either.
That does not say that the participants were less likely to find work, nor that non-participants were more likely to find work.
If they are equally likely to find work and the program is administratively equally or less costly than tested unemployment benefits, then the program still has a net benefit if only due to the psychological aspects.
Reduced stress.... good
Happier... good
Don't have to find a shit job.... good
I should note that all of the people selected for the experiment were jobless at the start. Is it a surprise that they were jobless at the end? Some of them did find work in spite of being paid not to work.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yet, they back you up and help you because they want to get your movement and warp and distort it to their true goal.
I don't know if you noticed, but the political systems we have don't exist in a vacuum.
There is the old and dreadful monarchy trying to get back, its the natural human system and it sucks. All capitalism does is promise every greedy piece of lard on this planet the chance of being a king, but then yanks it, unless the system gets corrupted enough one gets to buy it which is what is happening.
The socialism you defend is a LOT weaker at holding back kings, which is why you always end up with one such as castro, mao, chavez etc..
So naturally, the megacorporations want you to replace capitalism by socialism, so it's easy to put a bullet on your head after you finished and become kings.
But i'm not saying capitalism is a perfect system, far from it, it is atrocious at times, just not as atrocious as the monarchy that want to come back, and a better system would be one that is better at keeping the kings at bay than capitalism, not one that just surrender to em like socialism does.
I can't believe UBI is a subject worth investigating. It's like people haven't ever met other people. It's the "give a man a fish" proverb gone backwards. If you give him a fish every day, he's never going to learn how to fish.
Well yes and it was given to people who are unable or unwilling to work now. Make it a decent sum and give it to working class people who are at least 25 and make a similar amount now. See if their investments, wealth, and income increase across the group over five years.
There isn't enough info, and I doubt a 2k test run will yield statistically detectable changes in crime and traffic rate.
(Aside: what if crime rates actually went up due to UBI?)
The biggest problem with 2k doing the test is; that's not enough people to tank the economy if this turns out to be economically important.
That said, I would say that happiness in life is ultimately the most important thing. Happiness is what makes life worth living; but if the economy collapsed because of UBI, I don't think people would be happy for long.
You can't experiment with UBI on 2000 people- you need to do it with a whole region, or country... I wouldn't want to be living in one of the first test places though in case it went wrong.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
People with some money, but not lots, tend to spend it on local goods and services rather than imported luxuries,
I often see people with some money, but not lots, walk around with an iPhone.
"We can't just generalize "people" because there are some which have virtually no chance of getting a job."
No but we can generalize currently unemployed people and know they have a higher probability of having a disadvantage in job seeking. A more useful test might have been to give a decent UBI to a group that makes a sum on par with that UBI. In 5-10 years are they living on the UBI, continuing to earn twice the income (and probably reach a higher tax bracket even if you don't tax the UBI itself but only count it for that purpose. Have they increased their wealth and earnings at a greater rate than the control group who doesn't have the UBI?
It's the same clueless problem again and again a UBI might organically eliminate the need for many social programs (it should be high enough that nobody qualifies for them) but it isn't charity or a gift to the poor.A UBI is to provide a stronger position for workers to negotiate. Lower the risk of opportunity exploitation and ultimately to provide a means to ensure workers have a fallback when the jobs go away. If you match the UBI dollar per dollar to earned income you provide double incentive to upward advancement and move millions of people into a taxable range. That will make taxation less top heavy and you'll be enabling the growth of massive investment wealth, the returns will generate more taxes, provide for retirement and stimulate the economy. That also leads to a substantially more solvent social retirement program like social security.
The test is "do people work less?" and even on this very limited test, the answer is no.
The article said no such thing. It said that some of the participants found work, and that they were not more likely to do so than the control group. While many people seem to be taking this for granted, the article never said that participants were just as likely to find work as the control group. The full results of the study will not be released until next year. My impression from the article was that they are admitting that they didn't get the results they wanted (more employment) but at least for now are avoiding the subject of just how much negative impact the experiment had on employment rates among the participants while attempting to refocus attention on other aspects like the participants' reported "happiness".
Regarding those who did get jobs: All the participants are well aware that this experiment won't last forever, so it makes sense to plan for what happens after it ends. How might that change under a true UBI, where they can count on receiving payments for the rest of their lives?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Trouble is, if you're using something like UBI to replace SS, or food stamps, etc....what happens with irresponsible people (and yes, there are a number of them today on these welfare programs), goes out 2-3 months in a row and blows their entire UBI income check on drugs, partying, etc.?
SO, no you have given this person money, they blow it and now have no money for food, shelter, etc.
Do you now give them MORE money or just let them starve on the street.
If you say the former...then, when does it stop?
These would not be isolated cases mind you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If it replaces Social Security it replaces Social Security so by definition those people would not get more money. For that to happen you would have to have both UBI and SS which would not be one replacing the other.
and btw in which country would SS cover people that spent all their money on drugs and partying? That's not how it works even here in socialist Scandinavia.
I always see these UBI tests doing something like "We'll give you(A) this amount(B) of money for some time(C)"
Where count(A) is smallish, (B) is relatively big, and (C) is limited to a few years. The problem with this is the number of people is too small to measure any impact on economy, the cost of universalizing the program would be impractical and nobody (sane) will take a long term decision based on something that will vanish some years down the road.
The real test I would like to see is this:
Everybody above 18 years included (A), minimal (B), long or permanent (C) duration. (B) could be as low as $1 a month, but increasing/changing with time. If everybody is included, the Universal part would finally be tested. If the amount of money is minimal, we would not have a huge risk of tanking the economy. If the period of payment is long enough, we would test the psychological impact on people of such scheme.
The cost of this test in the US would be something like:
250 million people above 18 years * $1 * 12 months ~ $54 billion dollars a year + overhead
Not small, but not unreasonable either
They starve to death and cease being a problem? If a person has the means to survive and chooses a drug-addled death instead, I don't see how that's anyone else's business. These sorts of programs are generally conceived to alleviate the gross inequalities of capitalism and bad luck, not make unfortunate adults into wards of the state who are denied the right to exercise free will. And I would imagine that begging would become *far* less effective (and thus appealing) when everyone knows that you had plenty of money for food and shelter but chose to blow it all on other things instead.
There's also already a range of voluntary boarding homes available for people incapable of taking care of themselves - an honest one would automatically deduct food and housing expenses from your monthly stipend on the day it was deposited and leave the rest of your money alone, or dole it out as a daily or weekly allowance to avoid major shortage problems toward the end of the month.
For kids - free meals at school is an extremely effective solution once they reach school age. Infants and toddlers are a trickier problem, but one that can fairly effectively be attacked from the opposite end of the age spectrum by making free birth control available to everyone - in my experience most junkies don't actually want kids, they just can't be bothered to avoid them. So, free IUDs or implants for women, and free Vasogel or similar for men (once it's approved) - you don't want to use something that they can easily mess up, nor anything permanent that they might choose to avoid. That also has the added benefit of largely preventing children from being born with drug-related problems.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You really should look into answers to your own questions as there is a great deal of accessible literature devoted to exactly this problem...unless of course you just want to bash UBI programs. If that is your intention, well done!
A UBI is not intended to fix drug addiction issues. If you want to address that problem, you should be looking at policies intended to do just that. The best policies I'm aware of are legalization of all recreational drugs and prescribing drugs as part of a universal healthcare system.
Most of the issues surrounding addiction are made much worse by current laws and enforcement strategies. The social costs to users and the people they victimize are almost completely eliminated through legalization by both prescribing and providing them with appropriate and safe drugs, including the very narcotics they are addicted to, as part of a treatment program.
Doesn't the US have an old age pension system? Aren't there a lot of parallels between such a system and a UBI? Isn't a pension system supported by tax dollars basically just a UBI for the elderly? Don't we see these systems as having an overwhelmingly positive effect?
I desperately want UBI rolled out as I see it massively increasing the efficiency of the work-force by removing the dead-weight... No. The negative weight. You know what I'm talking about: That guy who spends three quarters of his day wandering around talking to people and therefore wasting 1.5 equivalents of time.
"The closest to a real life test of the sort you're talking about was communal farms where everybody got an equal share of the harvest--regardless of how much effort they put in."
That's make sense on a society where labour makes a difference, but we are heading to a society were labour means shit and what really meets ends is ownership of increasingly labour-less means of production. A totally different scenario.