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Finland's basic income trial falls flat
- convery 9y agoCue the "that's not real X, if we did it my way it'd have worked"..
- dguaraglia 9y agoThey should try the "unbridled capitalism" model, it seems to work great for the poor in our great US of A /s
- influx 9y agoAs compared to what?
- dguaraglia 9y agoFinland.
- hliyan 9y agoI'm reading the article and it seems to say that the government decided to not fund it further. But the headline "trial falls flat" seems to imply that somehow the trial returned a negative result. Am I missing something?
- lovich 9y agoIt seems that the article is drawing a conclusion without evidence. It states further down in the article that the full results will not be released until 2019. The trial could easily have not had positive, but its also just as possible that the program died due to political reasons. I'd like to see the statistics on the program as it'd be good to know if universal income is something that has no plausible chance of working, needs to be rolled out to more people to work, or if this is just basic politics killing a program
- da_chicken 9y agoNope, you're not missing anything. This is the exact same criticism made in the top comment on every site I've seen this story posted on (I think this is #4).
- AKifer 9y agoIn such a case, an intelligent person always tend to think that the program bore positive results but politicians were too afraid of the consequences so they cut is short. They would be too happy to show a negative result to the public would that be the case.
- dekhn 9y agoWhat you're missing is that most journalism is written with specific narratives intended to convince you of a particular world view. Learning to read around it is a critical skill. Most people don't have it, which is why propaganda (this article is) works so well.
- freedomben 9y agoThe article really doesn't address why the program wasn't continued. That seems like really important information. Perhaps it is unknown at this time why support is dropping, at which case it is good journalism not to speculate. However it would be great to know the why.
- majewsky 9y agoAFAIK the program was explicitly set up as a trial run to produce insight into how basic income affects people and communities. It's not wildly surprising that it ends without immediate replacement: When a clinical trial ends, patients don't get to keep the drugs either, even if they help them.
- ocfx 9y agoBecause nobody is going to opt into basic income temporarily.
- Glyptodon 9y agoMy biggest fear with basic income on a national scale is that it might get soaked up in bidding wars for limited rental housing and just end up being inflation soaked up by landlords.
- gumby 9y agoShouldn't that bring more housing stock into the market, reducing prices? Also: there are more participants than landlords: food, utilities, etc.
- Glyptodon 9y agoAgree there are more participants, I just think housing has supply issues in ways most other things don't. Land is limited, for example. And replacing buildings with higher density ones is... Frequently not easy.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoStudent allowance recently went up $50 per week in New Zealand. A lot of students also found their rent went up $50 per week at the same time.
- nradov 9y agoThat's pretty similar to what's been happening in Silicon Valley lately. According to investor Peter Thiel, the majority of capital invested in startups just flows to local landlords rather than funding real innovation. https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-capital-landlords-12759450.php https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
- conanbatt 9y agoHenry george explained it in san francisco in the late 1800's: any productivity gains will be captured by the landlords as long as the people are taxed for their work and the land is not taxed for the productivity gains. California is the most anti-georgist place ever: if you work in SF, you pay sales taxes that go to fund Bart that makes your own rent more expensive. State income tax has the same effect, the very own official economists of the state say it. And then you have property taxes benefits and mortgage benefits for landlords!
- Illotus 9y agoBasically it was a political decision to not continue. Researchers would have liked to continue with more resources: https://translate.google.fi/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=fi&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fyle.fi%2Fuutiset%2F3-10020346&edit-text= https://translate.google.fi/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=y&prev=...
- joe_the_user 9y agoIt doesn't sound like they picked people are random but rather unemployed people. So it doesn't seem a reasonable test of just giving some random group of people money but rather just something looked to everyone involved as a kind of welfare. Thus it doesn't seem like a fair. That's not saying I think this could work but that it's different from the experiment in India I remember where everyone in a village was given an income. One problem with universal income I would imagine is it would give landlord a strong incentive to immediate raise rents - IE, how could it not create inflation?
- gwern 9y agoI'm not familiar with this trial specifically, but my guess is that the reason for limiting it that way is to focus on the most plausible kind of welfare program in the group most likely to benefit in a large way (the unemployed) and get as much certainty out of the data as possible. They had limited money (only enough for 2000 people, apparently), so if they split it across a random set of people, or a specific village, they would get a much less precise answer (eg n=200 unemployed, n=1800 employed; or arguably, n=1, at the village level). And if you don't get a clear good result in the unemployed, why would you expect clear or good results in the employed? Clinical trials do a lot of screening of enrolled participants for similar reasons: you want the sickest or most likely to benefit, so you can see effects clearly, and you want to avoid participants with conditions that might override or obscure the benefits, like old age (a couple dropping dead on you at random might cover up a real benefit).
- majewsky 9y agoBut once you actually roll out UBI, everyone gets it. If you only concentrate on UBI's effects on unemployed people, you're missing a huge part of the picture.
- lucozade 9y agoWell yes, but Finland wasn't experimenting with basic income for philosophical reasons. They were experimenting because they have high unemployment and a complex, and expensive, welfare system. So what they wanted to understand was the effect a basic income had on those factors. The next stage of the experiment, that wasn't funded, was to extend the experiment to include the employed. Even there, I would expect they would still focus on low incomes as that's where you would expect to see an effect. To go beyond that, it's not clear what you'd learn without having a very large scale experiment i.e. one that materially affects the level of taxation. I can't imagine they'd be interested in that without seeing a significant, positive effect on the first two categories. And as a side point, I don't believe the idea was ever to test a UBI just a basic income. Unless you're intending to do away with all differentiated welfare, highly unlikely in a social democratic country, the universal bit is probably more harmful than beneficial.
- sp527 9y agoI wonder what the least fortunate people in villages in Africa and Asia would think about our desperate push to figure out UBI. A looming threat of declining living standards (and a decline that will still never leave us anywhere close to where they are now) has us so terrified, quaking in our privilege boots. Meanwhile easily 3B+ people have been left out in the cold and hardly anyone gives a shit. Every so often, I still find myself surprised by how unapologetically shameful humans can manage to be.
- TangoTrotFox 9y agoSo you are implicitly stating that you should not have substantial concern for yourself unless you're the least well off of a society?
- sp527 9y agoNo, it's a lot simpler. It can be reduced down to a question: How is humanity deciding who gets left behind?
- TangoTrotFox 9y agoAh, and so you are arguing that peoples success and failure is decided by other people? Who exactly are these other people? America went from a completely undeveloped and isolated backwoods to the most powerful nation in the world in just a couple of centuries because of these people? How about China? 60 years ago people were literally starving to death by the tens of millions in China and today they are one of the most powerful and rapidly growing nations in the world. Japan was obliterated in a war yet in a period of some 40 years reshaped itself into what was at one time the technological leader of the world. Is it because of those people again?
- sp527 9y agoWell now you're getting historical/philosophical. I subscribe to what the Durants argued in 'The Lessons of History'. There is an apparently irresolvable trade-off between freedom and equality and, historically speaking, the world has tended to vacillate between the two extremes, with inflection points typically demarcated by violent revolution. In order to get closer to a stable equilibrium, we would need to achieve a more progressive wealth redistribution paradigm than we have at present. A tremendous amount of wealth is being locked up by the global 0.1% in S&I. Yes it flows through the economy as capital, but we now know enough to appreciate that it mostly doesn't furthermore trickle down into increased wellbeing for probably anyone at or below the 90th percentile, at best. In other words, this system is highly inefficient when you measure it against one of the most meaningful criteria that we should (but do not) evaluate: statistical distribution of human wellbeing. I have a lot more thoughts on this. But, in short, an unqualified belief in the virtues of capitalism is certainly misguided.
- vortico 9y agoWhat post is this a [dupe] of?
- Asturaz 9y agoEveryone should read about how Finland is governance the country with new ideas and concepts, other countries do is just stupid and based on different bias, political views or just idiocy in some cases. https://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/julkaisut/design-for-government-humancentric-governance-through-experiments/ https://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/julkaisut/design-for-governm... The experiment of basic income was not intended to expand to the whole country it was a study, to gather data.