10 ms·

Basic incomes have always been an interesting idea, appealing to a lot of smart people from radically different economic-political camps. There are some potenti

by netcan 11y ago

Basic incomes have always been an interesting idea, appealing to a lot of smart people from radically different economic-political camps. There are some potential massive wins on long term unemployment that come from eliminating incentive issues, some answers to the "living wages" and other positive rights problems. Less bureaucratic micromanaging of people's lives. There's a reason it hold attention on HN, it's a real interesting idea. But….. Basic income is the type of idea that is very, very hard to implement within our current (possibly any) political systems. There is very little room for compromise, half measures and gradualism. It does not lend well to caveats exemptions, and design by committee. One of the big selling points is that basic income is funded largely by replacing different welfare state institutions: unemployment benefits, child benefits, housing subsidies, state housing, pensions… This allows (A) A big enough basic income (B) big savings on welfare institutions running costs, (C) the simplicity needed for a clean re-write of incentives. Where do the "efficiency savings" come from? Largely they come by cutting salaries associated with managing a welfare system. Can a government reduce public sector employment to that extent? The danger for any country implementing this is that once they get into the political procee, they will chop and compromise and water down the idea until it is just another item on the big list of ingredient in the social welfare soup €212.13 per month that you qualify for while keeping everything else that exists. Reforming the tax system and the welfare system as radically as required in a short time is a tall order. Maybe the Finnish can pull it off. They have a good track record. More broadly, I expect that this would have a high failure rate. The best chance (IMO) is for very a small country to try it first.

mtgx 11y ago
I agree those are all huge hurdles and it's incredibly risky, too, as it could be catastrophic if doesn't work, and you would have to cut all of those jobs, and then you also have to revert all the social programs back back. It could turn into a decade of pain for that society. However, I think this pilot will at least tell us if a basic income works from the point of view of whether it can be sustainable on itself and whether 90% of the working people will quit working or not. Right now we have no clue whether something like that would happen or not, and it's probably the riskiest thing about a basic income - having 9 out of 10 people sit around and do nothing while the other 1 out of 10 have to support them. If the outcome for that is a positive one and most people continue to get jobs, then we can start making a well thought-out plan on how to do the transition with the minimum damage possible to the society (until the transition is complete and then there's a net positive from the basic income for everyone).
draugadrotten 11y ago
> The best chance (IMO) is for very a small country to try it first. How about a city? "The city of Utrecht announced that it would give no-strings-attached money to some of its residents, other Dutch cities are getting on board for social experiments with “basic income,” a regular and unconditional stipend to cover living costs." http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-residents-a-no-strings-attached-basic-income/ http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-resid...
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  Well, it's conditional on living in Utrecht. I worry that these trials being conducted in certain regions and cities that are part of a larger economic area will end up being used to argue against BI due to the strange incentives that are created. One way I could see this going is that a large chunk of people who are on welfare today will move to the city to get a better deal. At the end of the trial, the numbers will show that productivity for the city as a whole declined. But that may not be representative of what would have happened if the whole country/EU/whatever had done it. (This is just one example of how this could be spun in the media. I'm sure there will be many perverse incentives created that will cause inefficiency that can be pointed to as a case that BI "does not work").
cmdkeen 11y ago
Cutting the jobs is very doable, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of public sector employees over the past 5 years. The concerns I have are: a) a ratchet effect along the lines of state pensions where the basic income keeps being put up in populist moves but is never reduced b) that specific entitlements (with their administrative burden) either continue to exist or again get created by politicians in "something must be done" mode. Specifically things like disability benefits, state pensions, child benefits are all likely to still stick around Finally many of the lessons we've seen in the where welfare reform has been attempted over the past 5 years is that it is the detail which gets you. Young healthy people are not the majority recipients, it is questions over how to support the partially disabled, children of separated parents with joint custody etc. Giving a new entitlement is easy as it is something that wasn't there before. Taking it away is incredibly hard politically.
- pluma 11y ago
  I don't see how child benefits and state pensions need to exist if you have lifelong BI. Sure, you could convert state pensions in the public sector into a voluntary retirement fund but the basic idea behind pensions is that the government gives you money in old age so you can afford not to continue to work -- this is entirely solved by BI. Likewise, child benefits are intended to be spent to accommodate the child, exactly like the child's BI. Of course good luck convincing prospective pensioners that their pensions are not going to be. Disclaimer: I have only a vague idea of what the welfare and pension systems are like in the US.
  - cmdkeen 11y ago
    The difference is that a basic income is supposed to persuade non retirement age people to continue to work, hence "basic". A state pension is supposed to be enough to enable every retired citizen to be able to live without working with a sufficient sense of dignity even without any other form of pension. It is almost always higher than the equivalent unemployment benefit. Now it could be combined (as Finland currently does) with a mandatory pension scheme system in order to provide retired people with an additional income source, but then you're getting beyond a basic income only. See - it's hard! There might be a more utopian concept of paying everyone enough that they don't need to work at all, but that isn't what is meant by this Finish scheme and what is meant by "basic income" normally.
krrrh 11y ago
This is so true. Milton Friedman's negative income tax proposal was implemented in the 70s as the watered down earned income tax credit. Welfare reform didn't occur in any meaningful way until the late nineties.
fulafel 11y ago
> Where do the "efficiency savings" come from? Largely they come by cutting salaries associated with managing a welfare system I think this is a misunderstanding. Those programs generally have low bureucratic overheads percentage-wise to begin with. Some of the main benefits are 1) reducing welfare traps (accepting work doesn't cut your beneifits) and 2) encouraging independent behaviour by decreasing the stressful and dehumanizing busywork of continually reproving in various forms your entitlement to the benefits (and resulting economic uncertainty, mistakes derailing your finances)
- netcan 11y ago
  >> Those programs generally have low bureucratic overheads What makes you say that? I have tried to look into this before and failed. But, from the way these things are structured I assume they have high overhead. The anti abuse/fraud work alone… What makes you say that? I have tried to look into this before and failed. But, from the way these things are structured I assume they have high overhead. The anti abuse/fraud work alone…
  - troels 11y ago
    What kind of fraud do you anticipate?
    - jpatokal 11y ago
      I believe he's referring to fraud in the current system: inspectors working full-time to catch people claiming welfare while working odd jobs, processes to verify that people are entitled to various benefits that they're claiming, etc.
  - fulafel 11y ago
    Here's a reference describing the US situation http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federal-low-income-spending-goes-for-overhead-and-bureaucrats-is http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federa... (Also note that basic income proposals usually don't propose replacing all forms of means tested income transfers, including Finland's plan)
djrobstep 11y ago
Why would you want it to replace other institutions? Why not simply add it to the mix? Politically, the way to make it happen would be to campaign for a small one to be introduced. This would get the infrastructure in place. Then ramp it up gradually over time.
- prawn 11y ago
  Because in replacing various forms of welfare, you quickly find the budget for it.
nsajko 11y ago
Equal basic income for every citizen would still be a net win.
Matumio 11y ago
It should really be unconditional basic income (as it's called sometimes). The main risk I see is that conditions creep in, e.g. if it gets tested only on people who are currently on welfare. I think a low UBI can still have a small effect, and there is no need to go from zero to 1000€ per month in a single day. The amount can be adjusted by the usual political processes, and if it gets adjusted towards zero, well - then maybe the people who vote didn't actually want to grant this small amount of freedom to each other.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I love the idea -- you could even come up with a 30-40 year plan to reduce working hours to 20 hrs/week while gradually increasing a basic income. Perhaps we could end up in that Star Trek future we've all been hoping for. Implementation, however, looks tricky. I'm not at all sure it will roll out the way people think it's going to roll out. There's a lot of hand-waving about the effects, but it's mostly smoke and no fire. We really need some real-world data from various experiments to make better choices. There's also a vast difference between the slogan "basic income" and the actual details of how it would all work. But as you point out, aside from all of that, there's a very real political problem: we've created a large political caste that likes identifying some great misjustice and passing various social programs to fix them. These cost money. For existing programs, lots of folks have intricate ideas about how to tweak things so that they work even better. These take simple systems and make them opaque. In short, we might be able to create enough wealth over the next few decades such that we could see an incredible change in the living styles of most people -- but dang if I can see the political system actually letting that come to pass. Oddly enough, it's not because of direct opposition. It's the "embrace and extend" folks that could cause far more damage than anybody else.
surfmike 11y ago
The problem with a basic income is that for it to be close to enough to live off, it'd be very very expensive — way too expensive. Giving everyone in the US enough to be above the poverty line, say $12,000 (which is hardly enough to live off in many areas), would cost $3.8 trillion, which is what the entire US federal budget is now. So, people with disabilities and people who are unemployed would be left worse off, with an amount they can barely live off. Not exactly the situation we want after enacting our utopian basic income program. The only way around that would be to give people with disabilities and the unemployed more money. But then that means you can't eliminate the welfare institutions needed to identify them and cut them checks.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I need to sit down and go through your numbers, but something does not seem right. Are you assuming everyone gets $12000 regardless of age?
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    Isn't it unconditional basic income, as in everyone gets the same flat amount? The moment you add conditions and variables, you basically turn it into the complex mess that's the current welfare system.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      It can be unconditional and not apply to children and people collecting pensions. It would not create a huge mess by limiting it to people over 18 and under 65.
      - mason240 11y ago
        Wouldn't the simpler solution be to simply reduce the pensions by the amount of UBI? For example, a pensioner gettin $40k/year would get $25k under a $15k UBI. You would have to get them to agree to the renegotiation, so I suppose it's not a realistic solution.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
I think an important economic impact people forget for Basic Income is how it will liberate people to pursue vocations, invention and education. How I expect this to show in practise is an explosion of culture and learning and new tech (hardware and software) - ripe for secondary commerce. You're thinking of how it will shuffle money around, you aren't considering how it will shuffle opportunity around.
- pluma 11y ago
  This. I've seen people effectively emulate this lifestyle by living on student loans (that they then didn't actually use to pay tuition). Except in the end they'd have accrued a considerable amount of debt, of course. The benefits of BI can be summarized in that it eliminates the foundation of the hierarchy of needs from everyday considerations. Even minimum wage can't aspire to solve this (simply because at some point minimum wage becomes so high the jobs become unprofitable if they can be avoided -- also because minimum wage does nothing for those who don't collect a wage).
- 1123581321 11y ago
  This is just a glass-half-full way of admitting that a lot of people will quit their jobs and stop working. Unfortunately, we're not mining asteroids yet, so we need enough people to continue working regular jobs that there couldn't be a significant gain in short-term-unproductive pursuits.
  - lgieron 11y ago
    According to a study (don't have a link unfortunately), 56% of Danes say they would continue working their current jobs if then won millions on the lottery. In a society like that, basic income may very well work.
    - 1123581321 11y ago
      Unfortunately, there are still a few problems. One, we don't know how many would actually continue working. Two, 44% quitting is still far too many. Even 10% of currently working people would cause huge problems. On the other hand, any feasible BI program couldn't pay anything close to the annuity possible by winning a lottery, so a lot of Danes should still be 'stuck' trying to make their desired income level. I agree we may be able to count on the Scandinavian mindset to make social programs work that couldn't in a place like the United States, but even in Denmark, I don't think this particular program can deliver the desired benefits without giving out enough money to cause problems.
michaelt 11y ago
One of the big selling points is that basic income is funded largely by replacing different welfare state institutions ...which presumably means some people are going to receive less total income under basic income than they did before. And, of those people receiving less total income, some will be the very model of the worthy types people had in mind when they created those benefits. People in wheelchairs who can no longer afford the specially adapted vehicle they need to get to the shops. Hard-working parents losing their homes (in the city where all homes are expensive) because they can't afford the rent, even though they've only been out of work for a few weeks. Setting the basic income high enough to cover specially adapted vehicles and family homes in expensive cities would of course be an expensive affair.
- LesZedCB 11y ago
  I can't remember where I read it (probably reddit, check out /r/basicincome), but I believe many proponents of basic income suggest that it will replace institutions that provide income to people such as social security, but not benefits such as medical benefits as you described above, or benefits provided to soldiers, et al.
mc32 11y ago
Ate the savings the diff between the salaries bureaucrats had and the basic income they'd receive now that their positions are eliminated, given that some may not find full time employment after the cuts? My impression was that the savings were from reduced externalities and increased spending power by those on basic income.
throwaway7767 11y ago
> The danger for any country implementing this is that once they get into the political procee, they will chop and compromise and water down the idea until it is just another item on the big list of ingredient in the social welfare soup €212.13 per month that you qualify for while keeping everything else that exists. Exactly this. You can already see in the article this process is happening in Finland. At first it talks about basic income, then about how the income should be below a living wage (which at least waters down many of the benefits). It then ends with a suggestion that maybe it won't actually be a basic income, but a stipend for poor people. Stipends for the poor are hardly a revolutionary new idea being tested for the first time, and calling it a "basic income" is just wrong. I also am not sure that testing such a thing in only a part of an existing economic area is a valid indicator of how it would function over the whole. If only some people get the benefits it may create some perverse economic incentives.
surfmike 11y ago
Living in Scandinavia (Norway), once thing that's become clear to me is that the welfare system really requires you to work to capture most of the benefits. You won't get normal disability pay, unemployment payments, and maternity/paternity leave if you haven't been working and paying into the system. If you're income and asset poor, you'll get some minimal benefits, even housing. But these benefits are heavily means tested and much less generous than the regular system. Scandinavian countries have some of the highest workforce participation rates in the world, so I think they've structured the incentives right. They need to, to make they generous systems possible. It would be interesting to see Finland take a different path.

by netcan 11y ago

mtgx 11y ago

I agree those are all huge hurdles and it's incredibly risky, too, as it could be catastrophic if doesn't work, and you would have to cut all of those jobs, and then you also have to revert all the social programs back back. It could turn into a decade of pain for that society. However, I think this pilot will at least tell us if a basic income works from the point of view of whether it can be sustainable on itself and whether 90% of the working people will quit working or not. Right now we have no clue whether something like that would happen or not, and it's probably the riskiest thing about a basic income - having 9 out of 10 people sit around and do nothing while the other 1 out of 10 have to support them. If the outcome for that is a positive one and most people continue to get jobs, then we can start making a well thought-out plan on how to do the transition with the minimum damage possible to the society (until the transition is complete and then there's a net positive from the basic income for everyone).

draugadrotten 11y ago

> The best chance (IMO) is for very a small country to try it first. How about a city? "The city of Utrecht announced that it would give no-strings-attached money to some of its residents, other Dutch cities are getting on board for social experiments with “basic income,” a regular and unconditional stipend to cover living costs." http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-residents-a-no-strings-attached-basic-income/ http://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-resid...

throwaway7767 11y ago
Well, it's conditional on living in Utrecht. I worry that these trials being conducted in certain regions and cities that are part of a larger economic area will end up being used to argue against BI due to the strange incentives that are created. One way I could see this going is that a large chunk of people who are on welfare today will move to the city to get a better deal. At the end of the trial, the numbers will show that productivity for the city as a whole declined. But that may not be representative of what would have happened if the whole country/EU/whatever had done it. (This is just one example of how this could be spun in the media. I'm sure there will be many perverse incentives created that will cause inefficiency that can be pointed to as a case that BI "does not work").

cmdkeen 11y ago

Cutting the jobs is very doable, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of public sector employees over the past 5 years. The concerns I have are: a) a ratchet effect along the lines of state pensions where the basic income keeps being put up in populist moves but is never reduced b) that specific entitlements (with their administrative burden) either continue to exist or again get created by politicians in "something must be done" mode. Specifically things like disability benefits, state pensions, child benefits are all likely to still stick around Finally many of the lessons we've seen in the where welfare reform has been attempted over the past 5 years is that it is the detail which gets you. Young healthy people are not the majority recipients, it is questions over how to support the partially disabled, children of separated parents with joint custody etc. Giving a new entitlement is easy as it is something that wasn't there before. Taking it away is incredibly hard politically.

pluma 11y ago
I don't see how child benefits and state pensions need to exist if you have lifelong BI. Sure, you could convert state pensions in the public sector into a voluntary retirement fund but the basic idea behind pensions is that the government gives you money in old age so you can afford not to continue to work -- this is entirely solved by BI. Likewise, child benefits are intended to be spent to accommodate the child, exactly like the child's BI. Of course good luck convincing prospective pensioners that their pensions are not going to be. Disclaimer: I have only a vague idea of what the welfare and pension systems are like in the US.
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  The difference is that a basic income is supposed to persuade non retirement age people to continue to work, hence "basic". A state pension is supposed to be enough to enable every retired citizen to be able to live without working with a sufficient sense of dignity even without any other form of pension. It is almost always higher than the equivalent unemployment benefit. Now it could be combined (as Finland currently does) with a mandatory pension scheme system in order to provide retired people with an additional income source, but then you're getting beyond a basic income only. See - it's hard! There might be a more utopian concept of paying everyone enough that they don't need to work at all, but that isn't what is meant by this Finish scheme and what is meant by "basic income" normally.

krrrh 11y ago

This is so true. Milton Friedman's negative income tax proposal was implemented in the 70s as the watered down earned income tax credit. Welfare reform didn't occur in any meaningful way until the late nineties.

fulafel 11y ago

> Where do the "efficiency savings" come from? Largely they come by cutting salaries associated with managing a welfare system I think this is a misunderstanding. Those programs generally have low bureucratic overheads percentage-wise to begin with. Some of the main benefits are 1) reducing welfare traps (accepting work doesn't cut your beneifits) and 2) encouraging independent behaviour by decreasing the stressful and dehumanizing busywork of continually reproving in various forms your entitlement to the benefits (and resulting economic uncertainty, mistakes derailing your finances)

netcan 11y ago
>> Those programs generally have low bureucratic overheads What makes you say that? I have tried to look into this before and failed. But, from the way these things are structured I assume they have high overhead. The anti abuse/fraud work alone… What makes you say that? I have tried to look into this before and failed. But, from the way these things are structured I assume they have high overhead. The anti abuse/fraud work alone…
- troels 11y ago
  What kind of fraud do you anticipate?
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    I believe he's referring to fraud in the current system: inspectors working full-time to catch people claiming welfare while working odd jobs, processes to verify that people are entitled to various benefits that they're claiming, etc.
- fulafel 11y ago
  Here's a reference describing the US situation http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federal-low-income-spending-goes-for-overhead-and-bureaucrats-is http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federa... (Also note that basic income proposals usually don't propose replacing all forms of means tested income transfers, including Finland's plan)

djrobstep 11y ago

Why would you want it to replace other institutions? Why not simply add it to the mix? Politically, the way to make it happen would be to campaign for a small one to be introduced. This would get the infrastructure in place. Then ramp it up gradually over time.

prawn 11y ago
Because in replacing various forms of welfare, you quickly find the budget for it.

nsajko 11y ago

Equal basic income for every citizen would still be a net win.

Matumio 11y ago

It should really be unconditional basic income (as it's called sometimes). The main risk I see is that conditions creep in, e.g. if it gets tested only on people who are currently on welfare. I think a low UBI can still have a small effect, and there is no need to go from zero to 1000€ per month in a single day. The amount can be adjusted by the usual political processes, and if it gets adjusted towards zero, well - then maybe the people who vote didn't actually want to grant this small amount of freedom to each other.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I love the idea -- you could even come up with a 30-40 year plan to reduce working hours to 20 hrs/week while gradually increasing a basic income. Perhaps we could end up in that Star Trek future we've all been hoping for. Implementation, however, looks tricky. I'm not at all sure it will roll out the way people think it's going to roll out. There's a lot of hand-waving about the effects, but it's mostly smoke and no fire. We really need some real-world data from various experiments to make better choices. There's also a vast difference between the slogan "basic income" and the actual details of how it would all work. But as you point out, aside from all of that, there's a very real political problem: we've created a large political caste that likes identifying some great misjustice and passing various social programs to fix them. These cost money. For existing programs, lots of folks have intricate ideas about how to tweak things so that they work even better. These take simple systems and make them opaque. In short, we might be able to create enough wealth over the next few decades such that we could see an incredible change in the living styles of most people -- but dang if I can see the political system actually letting that come to pass. Oddly enough, it's not because of direct opposition. It's the "embrace and extend" folks that could cause far more damage than anybody else.

surfmike 11y ago

The problem with a basic income is that for it to be close to enough to live off, it'd be very very expensive — way too expensive. Giving everyone in the US enough to be above the poverty line, say $12,000 (which is hardly enough to live off in many areas), would cost $3.8 trillion, which is what the entire US federal budget is now. So, people with disabilities and people who are unemployed would be left worse off, with an amount they can barely live off. Not exactly the situation we want after enacting our utopian basic income program. The only way around that would be to give people with disabilities and the unemployed more money. But then that means you can't eliminate the welfare institutions needed to identify them and cut them checks.

danieltillett 11y ago
I need to sit down and go through your numbers, but something does not seem right. Are you assuming everyone gets $12000 regardless of age?
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Isn't it unconditional basic income, as in everyone gets the same flat amount? The moment you add conditions and variables, you basically turn it into the complex mess that's the current welfare system.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    It can be unconditional and not apply to children and people collecting pensions. It would not create a huge mess by limiting it to people over 18 and under 65.
    - mason240 11y ago
      Wouldn't the simpler solution be to simply reduce the pensions by the amount of UBI? For example, a pensioner gettin $40k/year would get $25k under a $15k UBI. You would have to get them to agree to the renegotiation, so I suppose it's not a realistic solution.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

I think an important economic impact people forget for Basic Income is how it will liberate people to pursue vocations, invention and education. How I expect this to show in practise is an explosion of culture and learning and new tech (hardware and software) - ripe for secondary commerce. You're thinking of how it will shuffle money around, you aren't considering how it will shuffle opportunity around.

pluma 11y ago
This. I've seen people effectively emulate this lifestyle by living on student loans (that they then didn't actually use to pay tuition). Except in the end they'd have accrued a considerable amount of debt, of course. The benefits of BI can be summarized in that it eliminates the foundation of the hierarchy of needs from everyday considerations. Even minimum wage can't aspire to solve this (simply because at some point minimum wage becomes so high the jobs become unprofitable if they can be avoided -- also because minimum wage does nothing for those who don't collect a wage).
1123581321 11y ago
This is just a glass-half-full way of admitting that a lot of people will quit their jobs and stop working. Unfortunately, we're not mining asteroids yet, so we need enough people to continue working regular jobs that there couldn't be a significant gain in short-term-unproductive pursuits.
- lgieron 11y ago
  According to a study (don't have a link unfortunately), 56% of Danes say they would continue working their current jobs if then won millions on the lottery. In a society like that, basic income may very well work.
  - 1123581321 11y ago
    Unfortunately, there are still a few problems. One, we don't know how many would actually continue working. Two, 44% quitting is still far too many. Even 10% of currently working people would cause huge problems. On the other hand, any feasible BI program couldn't pay anything close to the annuity possible by winning a lottery, so a lot of Danes should still be 'stuck' trying to make their desired income level. I agree we may be able to count on the Scandinavian mindset to make social programs work that couldn't in a place like the United States, but even in Denmark, I don't think this particular program can deliver the desired benefits without giving out enough money to cause problems.

michaelt 11y ago

One of the big selling points is that basic income is funded largely by replacing different welfare state institutions ...which presumably means some people are going to receive less total income under basic income than they did before. And, of those people receiving less total income, some will be the very model of the worthy types people had in mind when they created those benefits. People in wheelchairs who can no longer afford the specially adapted vehicle they need to get to the shops. Hard-working parents losing their homes (in the city where all homes are expensive) because they can't afford the rent, even though they've only been out of work for a few weeks. Setting the basic income high enough to cover specially adapted vehicles and family homes in expensive cities would of course be an expensive affair.

LesZedCB 11y ago
I can't remember where I read it (probably reddit, check out /r/basicincome), but I believe many proponents of basic income suggest that it will replace institutions that provide income to people such as social security, but not benefits such as medical benefits as you described above, or benefits provided to soldiers, et al.

mc32 11y ago

Ate the savings the diff between the salaries bureaucrats had and the basic income they'd receive now that their positions are eliminated, given that some may not find full time employment after the cuts? My impression was that the savings were from reduced externalities and increased spending power by those on basic income.

throwaway7767 11y ago

> The danger for any country implementing this is that once they get into the political procee, they will chop and compromise and water down the idea until it is just another item on the big list of ingredient in the social welfare soup €212.13 per month that you qualify for while keeping everything else that exists. Exactly this. You can already see in the article this process is happening in Finland. At first it talks about basic income, then about how the income should be below a living wage (which at least waters down many of the benefits). It then ends with a suggestion that maybe it won't actually be a basic income, but a stipend for poor people. Stipends for the poor are hardly a revolutionary new idea being tested for the first time, and calling it a "basic income" is just wrong. I also am not sure that testing such a thing in only a part of an existing economic area is a valid indicator of how it would function over the whole. If only some people get the benefits it may create some perverse economic incentives.

surfmike 11y ago

Living in Scandinavia (Norway), once thing that's become clear to me is that the welfare system really requires you to work to capture most of the benefits. You won't get normal disability pay, unemployment payments, and maternity/paternity leave if you haven't been working and paying into the system. If you're income and asset poor, you'll get some minimal benefits, even housing. But these benefits are heavily means tested and much less generous than the regular system. Scandinavian countries have some of the highest workforce participation rates in the world, so I think they've structured the incentives right. They need to, to make they generous systems possible. It would be interesting to see Finland take a different path.