Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
financial security makes people feel financially secure.
It's a fascinating study and i applaud Finland for this experiment. But i wonder if the psychology of these people will change as they get use to this basic income, and then, over time, they take it for granted and even forget it is there. In other words, will they return to a state of depression over time?
2k participants from a cherry-picked sample set is not a national level test.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
It wasn't even a proper UBI.
The people who received it had some marginal taxes reduced, not eliminated.
They had some beuracracy for claiming their benefit reduced, not eliminated.
The only representative experiment would be if they would offer:
- a living wage,
- until the end of their lives,
- for minimum wage workers.
The amount of people who quit their jobs should tell you if UBI is feasible at all, or not.
Whose to say it won't?
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
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.
Why? Seriously, what's the resulting benefit from unemployed people worrying about money?
I suspect that you think people cannot be motivated to find jobs unless they worry about money. Now as a Finn who if his taxes only paid for UBI would pay for at least two UBI recipients here, I'm inclined to think that people can be just as motivated and certainly more capable of finding jobs if what drives them is not desperation to survive but a desire to have more of the extras you can get with money once your basic needs are covered (basic in a First World country being food, a home, health care and internet access). Extras being things such as holiday travel, a bigger home, new car etc... Or simply put: Did you stop trying to get a raise once you could pay your rent and buy food? If not, why do you think unemployed people would be content with the minimum and not try to get more too? The idea of UBI is not to make people choose not to work. It's to ensure through a simple mechanism that everyone has the basics (It's sort of in the name UB...).
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. Giving away free money to 2,000 people is easy. Giving it to 100 Million people, not so much.
Giving a meaningful amount of money to a large percentage of the population is unsustainable. Period.
Interestingly, most welfare programs decrease total costs to the taxpayer.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
I would rather have my tax dollars pay for UBI than pay for prison.
None of those ever had UBIs, you dense clod.
UBI is just another welfare program, but on a bigger scale, and less efficient because the amounts are all the same, rather than optimized for each particular circumstance.
The problem is that any job under the UBI scheme would be heavily taxed, because that's where the UBI money is coming from.
That is not necessarily a problem.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but also a healthy respect for it being offered.
In other words, a reminder of who your benevolent overlords are, to whom you owe allegiance.
Have gnu, will travel.
> 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=
"Whether you stand or you lay, three thousands is the pay", "we fake we work, the government fakes it pays us". For everyone except dissidents, there was effectively a guarantee of employment. Even if you were drinking at work every day, you didn't get fired as long as you showed up. No one cared about the quality of work. There were also organized vacations, etc. Any consumer goods were at a permanent shortage, and even if you actually found them in a shop (after queues of truly epic length), many common items costed you ~1000 times the work time as for a worker in the western world. But basic food was obtainable, and no one starved.
Many shortages were intentional, sometimes due to cartoonish villainry on the part of the government. My grandpa was a sailor, and once his ship got held at the port's approach for two weeks because their cargo included a load of oranges, and the govt didn't want oranges to be available for Christmas -- they were supposed to be for New Year. The oranges spoiled. Orwell didn't invent this part -- many parts of 1984 were depictions of actual life in the soviet world.
So the population was held at sustenance level, with any luxuries (even such as toilet paper) being hard to obtain and a cause for celebration. But the sustenance level was kept -- if you were neither in the Party nor a dissident, you lived a poor but safe life, neither above nor below sustenance.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You have brought up some good reasons why past attempts of communism had failed. Unfortunately for the people who read the whole thing, this has nothing to do with UBI, nor does it rule out different implementations.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Why are people always so concerned with what 'others' are getting. It doesn't matter to you.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
My stress and worry increases as tax rates increase, but since I'm not getting UBI my happiness doesn't matter, does it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
It's still wealth redistribution at the bottom.
As such, there's no real incentive to achieve.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes, those tried to make things work before we were on the brink of having robots do everything for us.
Let's try it again once humans aren't actually needed for most kinds of manual labor.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Great. So why do I need a job? ... ...
To go to the cinema.
To have booze for the weekend.
To make a 2 weeks vacation trip to where it is warmer.
To have Christmass presents for your family or friends.
To buy a book.
To go out eating instead of eating at home
And so on
Are you retarded?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Perhaps not, but why is that a problem if it is a convenient side effect? Particularly given the positive impact that feeling more secure and happy about life in general is liable to end up having on their productivity?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Participants were no more and NO LESS likely to look for work than those receiving traditional unemployment benefits. So the incentivisation designed into traditional welfare systems has zero effect, but has a high cost to administer. So we should remove it, because it makes no difference and society would be just as productive, plus happier, without it.
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).
If you don't support people with basic food you'll end up paying even more taxes to support sticking way more people in prison. USA has 2 million inmates, who cost between $30000 - $60000 each to house per year depending on what state you live on.
If you let people starve to save money, some of them will turn to crime to survive. You'll end up paying a lot more in increased taxes for prisons, police etc. Your community becomes more militarized, and you end up with beggars everywhere, street crime etc. So you end up having to pay more in both taxes, and have to spend more on personal security that you would other wise.
TL;DR: starving the poor is a foolish way of "saving money".
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.
Costs. We spend about $600 billion a year on income security (welfare, unemployment insurance, etc) at the Federal level. There are about 217 million people between the ages of 18 and 65 - UBI recipients. Give each of them $630 per month (the equivalent to 560 Euros - as in this experiment), and we'd spend around $1.6 trillion - an increase of 173% in income security spending. We just added another $1 trillion to the national debt, every year.
Is making sure everyone feels good about themselves (with dubious benefits from that) worth blowing another $1 trillion annually in spending?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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".
With iron-clad reasoning and command of the facts such as this, you can tell the world is in very good hands.
The article is both meaningless and misleading.
Of course people with a safety net are happier and feel more secure. Anybody who needs to do a study to find that out is brain-dead.
BUT... this is NOT the first national-level UBI system to be tested. Their neighbors in 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. And it was a decent, living-wage amount, too. A Swedish employee of our company said, "Man, you people work HARD. I like that. Back home, if someone doesn't want to work, they just don't. They get a check from the government anyway."
As a result, over a period of about 20 years, Sweden's per-capita GDP went from 4th in the world to 14th.
This illustrates that a short-term "test" is probably insufficient for a real measure of the program.
And lest anyone doubt it was cause-effect, in the 90s they realized that their system was causing productivity issues, so they cut it way back. Over time (about another 20 years) their per-capita GDP went right back up where it was in the early 70s.
Lesson learned. Or it should be, anyway. All other trials of similar systems have resulted in a conclusion of "unsustainable".
Agree with Bill.
Plus, offshoring of manufacturing and so on not only leads to trade deficits, but a notable secondary effect is loss of jobs in the same industries at home.
For some reasons most economists don't talk about that one very much, but it's very important.
It doesn't matter how cheap your goods are, if you don't have a job to pay for them. Yes, employment is booming now, but part of that is because many manufacturing jobs have been brought back home.
If you know the money is part of a study and that it can and will go away some day, your incentive to keep working is different.
Did the participants know the study could end at any time? How was this knowledge controlled for?
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.
Broken window fallacy?
No sig today...
How are the benefits dubious? The study concluded that UBI did *NOT* discourage people from working.
The fact that it did not appear to encourage people to work any more than they already did is irrelevant... while there is otherwise a very well known correlation between a person's sense of well being and satisfaction with their life and work with their productivity... so given that there was no decrease in employment, I'd say that the benefits are obvious, not dubious.
Indirect, perhaps... but definitely very obvious.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
That's simply not true. France has created the RMI more than 30 years ago (1988), which is basically equivalent to an universal income, except it was not only for 2000 people but for anyone aged 25+ (1.3 million people benefited from it in France in 2010). It's been replaced by the RSA in 2009 and is now at 559,74 €, identical to Finland's universal basic income (more if you're in a relationship or you've children). The difference with the RMI is that the RSA now forces people to actively seek work, which has always been the goal in the first place.
We've had 70 or so years of not letting the poor starve and we've seen unparalleled improvements in technology, lifespan and standard of living as people who could've died young are now creating things. I don't understand why these morons want to throw that away.