Finland's Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Unemployed people derive significant psychological benefits from receiving a fixed amount of financial support from the state, according to a landmark experiment into basic income in Finland that highlights the disadvantages of the country's existing means-tested system.

Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.

Comments

Study proves...

[Anonymous Coward]

financial security makes people feel financially secure.

Re:Study proves...

[ChatHuant]

financial security makes people feel financially secure.

But the study also shows UBI doesn't make people stop working. This, IMHO, is the most important result of this study because it removes one of the biggest objections to UBI. As an added bonus, if UBI is work neutral but increases happiness and reduces stress, it will also improve general health (hence reducing load on health services) and reduce criminality - with the corresponding savings in social and police work.

It seems to me the case for UBI is becoming stronger by the day.

Re:Study proves...

[Excelcia]

Does the study prove that the people who are footing the bill for it feel financially secure? Are they happier?

Less worry

[Anonymous Coward]

An unemployed person SHOULD be worried about money.

"were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit" So UBI will cause people to act like they are getting money for not working.

Re:Less worry

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather have my tax dollars pay for UBI than pay for prison.

Re: Less worry

[Smidge204]

> Why? Seriously, what's the resulting benefit from unemployed people worrying about money?

Because if they're not desperate, they can't be exploited! How can I underpay and overwork my employees if they have the financial security to quit on the spot! Or worse... take their time finding a job that's right for them! They might even try to start their own business and compete with me!

All I'd have left to keep the proletariat in check is employer-provided health insurance, and they're trying to rob me of that, too!
=Smidge=

Re: Less worry

[ChatHuant]

And if you're unwilling to work, the only way you survive is on the charity of others.

There are quite a few things wrong with this statement.

First, the assumption that poverty's unique cause is "being a lazy fuck", when all it takes is "willingness to work". Unfortunately this is absolutely wrong - and pretty much invalidates the rest of your argument. There are lots of cases where willingness is not enough. You need to be of the right age, be relatively healthy, have no major handicaps, have the skills that happen to be in demand, and live in an area where jobs are available and pay enough to live. Just willingness won't help if you're too young or too old, if you're sick, if you simply don't have the capability to do some jobs. Not everybody can lift heavy loads, for example, or be a coder or a musician, or whatever. And, with technology automating more and more jobs, many people will simply be left behind - no matter how willing they are to work, the available jobs won't lift them out of poverty. This becomes more and more of an issue - and brings us to the second fault with your statement.

Your second wrong assumption is that charity is the only way to survive. It's not. When pushed too hard, when too many people become impoverished, they will not "STARVE" quietly in a corner. Instead, they'll turn to the other way to survive: they'll take what they need from the people who have it in surplus - via theft, revolt, revolution. The resulting social upheaval will impact everybody - even you.

Re:Less worry

[Cipheron]

Your argument isn't evidence-based. The counter-evidence to your point is presented in the article summary: recipients of the UBI were no less likely to work than those on unemployment benefits with a you-must-look-for-work component. Your point: already debunked by the study in question. Go get better evidence if you think you know better. If you think this study is wrong, all the more reason to have more studies to prove that. So far, no UBI study backs up your point.

The main thing here is that giving UBI is significantly less-expensive than hiring the army of petty bureaucrats needed to police the poor to make sure they're looking for work. Making them jump through hoops doesn't in fact make them more likely to get a job, so that component is actually a waste of time and taxpayers money (paying a basic allowance isn't a waste of taxpayers money BTW because the alternative is to house much of the poor in prison, which costs about 10 times as much as just giving people basic food and housing and letting them take care of themselves).

Re: Less worry

[Cipheron]

There's also the fact that low-income people spend almost every cent they receive. In terms of GDP growth, that's a good job-creator. A dollar isn't just a dollar: every time that dollar is spent that's GDP that's created. Google "fiscal multipliers". $1 in food stamps was found to create about $1.75 in extra GDP. That's because if you give $1 to a poor person who wouldn't have had that money otherwise, then they spend all of it, and it creates jobs as it's spent and passed around. It makes the most economic sense to increase taxes in areas with a LOW fiscal multiplier and spend them on areas with a HIGH fiscal multiplier. It just happens that money earned by the ultra-rich has a very low fiscal multiplier and giving money to the ultra-poor has a very high fiscal multiplier. So, you can justify taking money out at the top of the wealth pyramid and injecting it at the bottom on a purely rational self-interest basis for the working and middle-class, without even appealing to any ethical or emotional sentiment. If you told a computer "maximize GDP" it would increased taxes on the rich and give the money to those who otherwise wouldn't have money to spend.

Not a national level test

[Keruo]

2k participants from a cherry-picked sample set is not a national level test.

Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security

[Edward Nardella]

Whose to say it won't?

Get over having to work.

[Anonymous Coward]

As automation improves and less work is needed, we need to get over this ancient idea that one must work to make a living. Work is necessary for our mental health, but meaningful work - work that we find interesting and engaging - is what makes us happy.

And it funny how many people have a problem with lower class people not having to work, but a someone who inherited billions and site back and does nothing and collects dividends from their investments in say student loan lenders is A-OK: they still aren't working.

Wouldn't it be wonderful that instead of taking that job in corporate America that just continues to damage society in order to make a living and pay student loans, we can actually do something that helps society?

I knew quite a few law grads that dreamed of working for environmental causes only to end up at ExxonMobile because they got to pay those loans. Or wanting to help people who got screwed over by Wall Street only to have to work for them.

Or graduate with that CS degree wanting to be a FOSS dev only to have to sell your soul to facebook because the loans to go to Stanford are killing you.

This live to work attitude in the US is just twisted. And one day, you wake up old fat and sick and cast to the curb because your employer doesn't want you anymore. Oh, entrepreneurship is no easy street. For every successful person out there, there are many who failed and lost it all and now are working a second job cleaning bathrooms are WalMart - thanks to the new banking laws that makes failure a lifelong burden.

UBI will actually boost the economy because it will allow more people to take risks and increase the chances of new organizations that will hire people - increasing the tax base for cool social programs like this and single payer healthcare. Which is another topic: Let's change it so that medical care isn't a luxury like it is in the USA.

Re:This is just noise

[Rick Schumann]

Sure, and you know what? Two generations of that 'experiment' and you'd have a generation of entitled useless wastes of oxygen who do not know what 'work' is, and whine and cry about how their UBI payments aren't enough. They'd be fat, lazy, stupid, uneducated, drunk and/or stoned all the time, and generally insufferable to be around. That's what happens to humans when they don't have to work to survive. Just look at trust fund kids and how useless they tend to turn out.

Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those ever had UBIs, you dense clod.

Um.... evidence?

[rsilvergun]

I mean, why is it that when Donald Trump got rich he kept doing business deals? It's been shown that if he just stuck the money his dad gave him in an index fund it would have outperformed his business deals by a sizeable margin and with less risk.

Why is it only poor people getting financial security that ends all drive to do anything else? I mean, nobody ever calls the Job Creators out for that behavior because they don't do it. It's almost as if yes, you can motivate people with starvation but, no, you don't need to.

Uh Oh, where've I heard that before

[SuperKendall]

It was too expensive because they didn't do it right.

Yeah, just like REAL socialism or communism has never ben tried either!

Nice to have another one to add to the list.

Re:Finland's UBI experiment shows deadbeats are ha

[gweihir]

Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants . . .

Whether people receiving UBI are more or less happy is irrelevant.

It very much is not. Takes 2 braincells to rub together to see that and you are obviously lacking. People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.

The burden of proof is on the proposers

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who are proposing the radical program are the people who must explain why they are correct to take resources from people at the point of a gun in order to redistribute them.

Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security

[Immerman]

How do you figure? Getting a trickle of free money doesn't remove your incentive to achieve. Would you really just stop working if you started getting a $1000 UBI check every month?

Of course not, not unless you're a complete slacker with low standards. So long as contributing to society lets you improve your standard of living substantially, most people will do so. What removes the incentive to achieve is a system where working harder either has no effect, or actually causes a reduction in your standard of living - the current so-called "welfare cliff" that is faced by virtually anyone trying to get out of poverty in a wealthy nation.

Re:Finland's UBI experiment shows deadbeats are ha

[ShanghaiBill]

People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.

If you give away a trillion dollars, of course the people receiving it will be happy and spend it.

But the people paying the taxes to fund it will be less happy and have less to spend.

We had a trade deficit of $621B last year. That is the gap between what America consumes and what we produce. "More spending" is the last thing we need especially when much of it is going to Asia. We will just have less investment and even bigger deficits. Incentives to be productive would do a lot more good than incentives to consume more.

Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security

[ChatHuant]

Nonsense. Your education might have been based on family ties, you never got a good job based on it, if you lacked the education.

You're so full of it, I can't even believe. I spent the first half of my life in a former communist country for chrissake, and you show up with this nonsense.

Look - the better the jobs, the more the political clout mattered. In particular, you couldn't get a leadership job without being a party member in good standing. Yes, many skilled people did play the political game as a necessary step in the search for a good job, and make no mistake: it was the political activity that got them the jobs - that they were any good was not a requirement, but at most a bonus. In some cases, it was even a point of suspicion.

Here's an immediate counter-example to your "never get a good job if you lacked the education": Romania's Elena Ceausescu. Her highest education level was primary school - when she tried to go to night school she got expelled for cheating. Despite being an absolute intellectual nullity, she got a job as a research scientist at ICECHIM (the National Institute for Chemical Research) - a really good position for somebody in the field of chemistry. She even got a PhD and got elected to the Romanian Academy - her title (that she never got tired of repeating) ended up being "Academician Doctor Engineer".

Re:Finland's UBI experiment shows deadbeats are ha

[djinn6]

Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s. For practical purposes it was a UBI: if you were not working, you simply got a check from the government, basically no questions asked.

That's not UBI. The "U" means universal, which means you receive it even if you work.

The fake UBI that you described doesn't give anything to working people, which results in perverse incentives. Be a lazy bum and everything's good, but if you put in some effort, the system stops helping you. It actively discourages people from working.