7 ms·

I cant't see how this experiment is set up, can give any answers to what effects general basic income has on the society. A selection of only 2000 people seems

I cant't see how this experiment is set up, can give any answers to what effects general basic income has on the society. A selection of only 2000 people seems too small. 560 USD a month is not enough to get by in scandinavia either. If an experiment is going to prove that society wont't get ruined by general basic income, then an experiment has to be done on a much greater scale than this.

justaguyhere 8y ago
That is true, but they gotta start somewhere! Isn't it okay to start small and repeat it a few times, incorporating learnings from the previous round?
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  Doing such a small scale trial prevents any of the impact UBI would have on the job market, so anything learned may not be relevant. Removing 2000 people from the job market doesn't mean much.
- function_seven 8y ago
  It might not actually be okay. Quantity has a quality all its own. Whatever learnings produced from a small scale study may not actually apply to a large scale implementation. It’s possible you could “learn” the wrong lessons. A couple problems with these basic income experiments are that the participants know they are receiving their money for a limited time, which does not allow them to change their economic participation in meaningful ways. There is also the network effects to be considered. When only a tiny subset of the population is receiving basic income, the effects that you would like to study can’t be observed. I don’t know how those two issues can be controlled for. Basic Income seems like a system where you just have to dive in a cross your fingers.
  - justaguyhere 8y ago
    Fair enough. It is then a tough balancing act between the amount of resources (money especially) available for such experiments and the desired size of them to be actually useful. Finland is very small and very homogeneous, so it reduces the number of variables they need to think about. And they are rich enough to afford such experiments. Must be fun for those working on the such problems :)
  - mbfg 8y ago
    Fantastic point. These people were focused on getting a job, any job, so that when the 2 year period was over, they could survive. Which of course is a good thing, but really won't produce what the idealistic goals of basic income are. I doubt (m)any of the participants sat down and thought, now that i can survive forever, what can i do to change my life, build a company, chase a great idea, do something special.
  - daenz 8y ago
    >Basic Income seems like a system where you just have to dive in a cross your fingers. You do understand why people want to start small right? Because if the experiment fails on a large scale, the results are catastrophic to society. In my opinion, proponents of UBI had better find a way to conduct the experiment in a meaningful way on a smaller scale first if they expect to convince any rational person that it's worth pursuing on a larger scale. This idea of "well let's fundamentally change society in an irreversible way and hope it all works out" is absolutely a non-starter for me.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Its not irreversible. Just like you can start UBI whenever you want you can technically stop it too. Yea, people would modify their behavior to account for it and thus just eliminating it outright would cause a lot of transitional pains, but thats no different than if western governments tried eliminating retirement income, subsidized / free medicine, public infrastructure upkeep, etc.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - function_seven 8y ago
      Yeah, I do realize that and I agree with you. It may be the best idea ever, or an economic disaster. I don’t see how micro studies can figure out which.
FartyMcFarter 8y ago
I still don't understand how UBI will be paid for. If my calculations are correct, even 560 USD per month would require Finland to increase tax revenue by a third in order to fund it, if the UBI was provided to everyone in the country. That already seems hard enough. How realistic would it be to give even more?
- jrs95 8y ago
  Hypothetically let's say you raised taxes by a third across the board. Only people who's taxes went up by more than that 560 a month would be paying more than they received in UBI. So it's a little bit deceptive in terms of how much taxes would need to increase by. The tax increase and monthly UBI amount should be tuned together to have the desired redistributive effect.
  - FartyMcFarter 8y ago
    Good point. It would be interesting to see some studies on the expected tax increases to make this work in practice. There would still be the potential problem of people choosing not to work (affecting tax revenue), but this is much harder to predict of course.
    - Phenix88be 8y ago
      > There would still be the potential problem of people choosing not to work (affecting tax revenue), but this is much harder to predict of course. I know a lot a people who don't have a job, but do a shit tons of work. Think of all those retired people building stuff for the family. People who really don't want to do anything exist, some of them are mentally sick and need help, but I think every one want to do something (at some point in their life).
- doyoulikeworms 8y ago
  What if it was more like a negative income tax than UBI?
- maxerickson 8y ago
raptorraver 8y ago
Finnish here. On top of that 560 people got support for their rent expenses. Depending on the amount of rent one could get more than 1000€ per month. It’s not much but you can get by with it. What went wrong with the experiment was that it included only people who were registered as unemoloyed so we don’t know how it would have affected home moms, entrepreneuers, students etc.
- 13415 8y ago
  It's hard for me to understand why this called a "basic income" experiment then. The central idea of basic income is that you get one fixed amount of income per month that needs to be sufficient for all expenses, including rent, and everybody gets the same sufficient amount of money no matter what he or she uses it for and no matter whether the person works or not. I'm writing "sufficient amount", because it is obvious that a basic income experiment that doesn't allow people to get by without working would not be basic income either, but a subsidy to the salary, as they already exist in many social welfare systems.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > I'm writing "sufficient amount", because it is obvious that a basic income experiment that doesn't allow people to get by without working would not be basic income either, but a subsidy to the salary, as they already exist in many social welfare systems. This is not "obvious" at all, and there's no reason why we couldn't start meeting people halfway, in a sense. Realistically, no amount of BI would allow people to "get by" in a highly-desirable urban location like SF or the Valley. It would probably be priced for areas with a more manageable cost of living, and even there most folks would be supplementing it with at least part-time or "gig" work.
    - GuB-42 8y ago
      > Realistically, no amount of BI would allow people to "get by" in a highly-desirable urban location. Isn't it part of the idea for a UBI? If you can't live where it is expensive, go find a better job or move out. UBI, at least my idea of it is far from easy, it is something to ensure your survival, but if you want confort, and choosing where you want to live is part of it, then you need to work. There is only so much money that can be allocated do welfare, and you can't give more to some people without taking it from others. It means that if you are already living on subsidies, chances are that your situation is going to get worse with UBI. OTOH, part timers in poor areas will be much better off since they will get full UBI + pay with low expenses. Maybe that's why UBI doesn't work. Not because it is an incitation to do nothing, but because it may be devastating to families who already live on subsidies. And if we don't remove existing subsidies, then there isn't enough money.
duchenne 8y ago
If you want a bigger scale experiment, you could have a look at the French RMI/RSA, it is not exactly a basic income, because it is given only to unemployed people. But, it is 550 euros/months, it has existed since 1988, and it is given under very loose conditions. It is now given to more than a million people. People that have recently lost their jobs receive another bigger help. It is unclear what is the outcome. Some people will say that it is helping poor people, others will say that it demotivates people to find a job and is contributing to French high unemployment rate. It is really unclear. edit: To receive RMI/RSA, one also need to be looking for a job, but it is not really enforced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_minimum_d%27insertion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_minimum_d%27insertion
- Rainymood 8y ago
  Unemployment benefits =/= basic income
  - bertil 8y ago
    Unemployment benefits (Chômage/Pôle Emploi) are only allocated to people actively looking for a job after they lost a previous job. They are typically 70-80% of your previous income and are granted for 2 years. It comes with monthly oversight and training program. Entrepreneurs are welcome to it and can ask to be given a lump sum and have dedicated training. RSA (Revenu de Soliarité Active) is given to anyone, based on their resources: young graduates without a first paying job, refugees waiting for immigration decision, people who haven’t found a job in more than two years, even unpaid members of religious orders. It comes with medical coverage (“universal” medical insurance is based on your status in France). Both are revoked when you find a job. It used to be possible that a part-time job would pay not much more than either stipend; because of that, both programs were described a possible “disincentives” by opponents (typically right-wing small-government, aka “Libéraux”). Even proponents saw a lot of edge-cases: people having to wait, seeing their hours cut or being fired soon after they changed status and struggling in the transition. To ease the transition, partial stipends were made possible.
- Phenix88be 8y ago
denzil_correa 8y ago
> A selection of only 2000 people seems too small The population of Finland is 5.503M. A sample size of 663 represents 6M population at 99% confidence levels. 2000 is more than a decent sample size. You may argue for the sample quality but the size seems beyond question here.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  I agree that the other critizism are much worse (too little money for a too short time). But while a sample size of 2000 is statistically enough, a study this small can't find the effects of giving a basic income to an entire country. Giving income to one person changes that person, giving income to everyone changes the entire economy. For an initial experiment this is actually fine. You first want to check that the effect on the individual is beneficial and people don't just stop contributing to society. But to draw useful conclusions you would need a second experiment that gives basic income at least to an entire community, preferably even an entire region, for a duration that allows people to forget about the "after".
  - cf498 8y ago
    >For an initial experiment this is actually fine. You first want to check that the effect on the individual is beneficial and people don't just stop contributing to society. Is it though? With the knowledge that it will be over in 2 years you get a different sort of behavior then if it actually functioned as a guaranteed support net. I would have found it much more interesting, if it supported people 10 year from retirement for those 10 years. They could just stop everything and dont have to care for after the project ends.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  It’s not about sample quality or size - it’s about the behavior of a group when condition change, but the conditions didn’t change. For example, under a proper UBI I’d quit my job and start a business. Under this time limited experiment I never would have. In a proper UBI environment I might scale down my living to fit in only the UBI so I won’t be dependent on a job. Under a 2 year experiment I don’t. There are some minor effects that don’t need universal+indefinite basic income to show up, but tbh those aren’t very interesting. It would have been a more interesting experiment to fund just 100 people for life, with the same money, even though that sample would have been smaller! But even with say 10k people funded for life, you wouldn’t see the most important effects on the job market, prices, rents...
skybrian 8y ago
I'm actually more interested in what happens with lower amounts that aren't enough to live on. On the margin, this should still have some good effects, and is more likely to be implemented.

justaguyhere 8y ago

That is true, but they gotta start somewhere! Isn't it okay to start small and repeat it a few times, incorporating learnings from the previous round?

boomboomsubban 8y ago
Doing such a small scale trial prevents any of the impact UBI would have on the job market, so anything learned may not be relevant. Removing 2000 people from the job market doesn't mean much.
function_seven 8y ago
It might not actually be okay. Quantity has a quality all its own. Whatever learnings produced from a small scale study may not actually apply to a large scale implementation. It’s possible you could “learn” the wrong lessons. A couple problems with these basic income experiments are that the participants know they are receiving their money for a limited time, which does not allow them to change their economic participation in meaningful ways. There is also the network effects to be considered. When only a tiny subset of the population is receiving basic income, the effects that you would like to study can’t be observed. I don’t know how those two issues can be controlled for. Basic Income seems like a system where you just have to dive in a cross your fingers.
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  Fair enough. It is then a tough balancing act between the amount of resources (money especially) available for such experiments and the desired size of them to be actually useful. Finland is very small and very homogeneous, so it reduces the number of variables they need to think about. And they are rich enough to afford such experiments. Must be fun for those working on the such problems :)
- mbfg 8y ago
  Fantastic point. These people were focused on getting a job, any job, so that when the 2 year period was over, they could survive. Which of course is a good thing, but really won't produce what the idealistic goals of basic income are. I doubt (m)any of the participants sat down and thought, now that i can survive forever, what can i do to change my life, build a company, chase a great idea, do something special.
- daenz 8y ago
  >Basic Income seems like a system where you just have to dive in a cross your fingers. You do understand why people want to start small right? Because if the experiment fails on a large scale, the results are catastrophic to society. In my opinion, proponents of UBI had better find a way to conduct the experiment in a meaningful way on a smaller scale first if they expect to convince any rational person that it's worth pursuing on a larger scale. This idea of "well let's fundamentally change society in an irreversible way and hope it all works out" is absolutely a non-starter for me.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Its not irreversible. Just like you can start UBI whenever you want you can technically stop it too. Yea, people would modify their behavior to account for it and thus just eliminating it outright would cause a lot of transitional pains, but thats no different than if western governments tried eliminating retirement income, subsidized / free medicine, public infrastructure upkeep, etc.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - function_seven 8y ago
    Yeah, I do realize that and I agree with you. It may be the best idea ever, or an economic disaster. I don’t see how micro studies can figure out which.

FartyMcFarter 8y ago

I still don't understand how UBI will be paid for. If my calculations are correct, even 560 USD per month would require Finland to increase tax revenue by a third in order to fund it, if the UBI was provided to everyone in the country. That already seems hard enough. How realistic would it be to give even more?

jrs95 8y ago
Hypothetically let's say you raised taxes by a third across the board. Only people who's taxes went up by more than that 560 a month would be paying more than they received in UBI. So it's a little bit deceptive in terms of how much taxes would need to increase by. The tax increase and monthly UBI amount should be tuned together to have the desired redistributive effect.
- FartyMcFarter 8y ago
  Good point. It would be interesting to see some studies on the expected tax increases to make this work in practice. There would still be the potential problem of people choosing not to work (affecting tax revenue), but this is much harder to predict of course.
  - Phenix88be 8y ago
    > There would still be the potential problem of people choosing not to work (affecting tax revenue), but this is much harder to predict of course. I know a lot a people who don't have a job, but do a shit tons of work. Think of all those retired people building stuff for the family. People who really don't want to do anything exist, some of them are mentally sick and need help, but I think every one want to do something (at some point in their life).
doyoulikeworms 8y ago
What if it was more like a negative income tax than UBI?
maxerickson 8y ago

raptorraver 8y ago

Finnish here. On top of that 560 people got support for their rent expenses. Depending on the amount of rent one could get more than 1000€ per month. It’s not much but you can get by with it. What went wrong with the experiment was that it included only people who were registered as unemoloyed so we don’t know how it would have affected home moms, entrepreneuers, students etc.

13415 8y ago
It's hard for me to understand why this called a "basic income" experiment then. The central idea of basic income is that you get one fixed amount of income per month that needs to be sufficient for all expenses, including rent, and everybody gets the same sufficient amount of money no matter what he or she uses it for and no matter whether the person works or not. I'm writing "sufficient amount", because it is obvious that a basic income experiment that doesn't allow people to get by without working would not be basic income either, but a subsidy to the salary, as they already exist in many social welfare systems.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > I'm writing "sufficient amount", because it is obvious that a basic income experiment that doesn't allow people to get by without working would not be basic income either, but a subsidy to the salary, as they already exist in many social welfare systems. This is not "obvious" at all, and there's no reason why we couldn't start meeting people halfway, in a sense. Realistically, no amount of BI would allow people to "get by" in a highly-desirable urban location like SF or the Valley. It would probably be priced for areas with a more manageable cost of living, and even there most folks would be supplementing it with at least part-time or "gig" work.
  - GuB-42 8y ago
    > Realistically, no amount of BI would allow people to "get by" in a highly-desirable urban location. Isn't it part of the idea for a UBI? If you can't live where it is expensive, go find a better job or move out. UBI, at least my idea of it is far from easy, it is something to ensure your survival, but if you want confort, and choosing where you want to live is part of it, then you need to work. There is only so much money that can be allocated do welfare, and you can't give more to some people without taking it from others. It means that if you are already living on subsidies, chances are that your situation is going to get worse with UBI. OTOH, part timers in poor areas will be much better off since they will get full UBI + pay with low expenses. Maybe that's why UBI doesn't work. Not because it is an incitation to do nothing, but because it may be devastating to families who already live on subsidies. And if we don't remove existing subsidies, then there isn't enough money.

duchenne 8y ago

If you want a bigger scale experiment, you could have a look at the French RMI/RSA, it is not exactly a basic income, because it is given only to unemployed people. But, it is 550 euros/months, it has existed since 1988, and it is given under very loose conditions. It is now given to more than a million people. People that have recently lost their jobs receive another bigger help. It is unclear what is the outcome. Some people will say that it is helping poor people, others will say that it demotivates people to find a job and is contributing to French high unemployment rate. It is really unclear. edit: To receive RMI/RSA, one also need to be looking for a job, but it is not really enforced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_minimum_d%27insertion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_minimum_d%27insertion

Rainymood 8y ago
Unemployment benefits =/= basic income
- bertil 8y ago
  Unemployment benefits (Chômage/Pôle Emploi) are only allocated to people actively looking for a job after they lost a previous job. They are typically 70-80% of your previous income and are granted for 2 years. It comes with monthly oversight and training program. Entrepreneurs are welcome to it and can ask to be given a lump sum and have dedicated training. RSA (Revenu de Soliarité Active) is given to anyone, based on their resources: young graduates without a first paying job, refugees waiting for immigration decision, people who haven’t found a job in more than two years, even unpaid members of religious orders. It comes with medical coverage (“universal” medical insurance is based on your status in France). Both are revoked when you find a job. It used to be possible that a part-time job would pay not much more than either stipend; because of that, both programs were described a possible “disincentives” by opponents (typically right-wing small-government, aka “Libéraux”). Even proponents saw a lot of edge-cases: people having to wait, seeing their hours cut or being fired soon after they changed status and struggling in the transition. To ease the transition, partial stipends were made possible.
Phenix88be 8y ago

denzil_correa 8y ago

> A selection of only 2000 people seems too small The population of Finland is 5.503M. A sample size of 663 represents 6M population at 99% confidence levels. 2000 is more than a decent sample size. You may argue for the sample quality but the size seems beyond question here.

wongarsu 8y ago
I agree that the other critizism are much worse (too little money for a too short time). But while a sample size of 2000 is statistically enough, a study this small can't find the effects of giving a basic income to an entire country. Giving income to one person changes that person, giving income to everyone changes the entire economy. For an initial experiment this is actually fine. You first want to check that the effect on the individual is beneficial and people don't just stop contributing to society. But to draw useful conclusions you would need a second experiment that gives basic income at least to an entire community, preferably even an entire region, for a duration that allows people to forget about the "after".
- cf498 8y ago
  >For an initial experiment this is actually fine. You first want to check that the effect on the individual is beneficial and people don't just stop contributing to society. Is it though? With the knowledge that it will be over in 2 years you get a different sort of behavior then if it actually functioned as a guaranteed support net. I would have found it much more interesting, if it supported people 10 year from retirement for those 10 years. They could just stop everything and dont have to care for after the project ends.
alkonaut 8y ago
It’s not about sample quality or size - it’s about the behavior of a group when condition change, but the conditions didn’t change. For example, under a proper UBI I’d quit my job and start a business. Under this time limited experiment I never would have. In a proper UBI environment I might scale down my living to fit in only the UBI so I won’t be dependent on a job. Under a 2 year experiment I don’t. There are some minor effects that don’t need universal+indefinite basic income to show up, but tbh those aren’t very interesting. It would have been a more interesting experiment to fund just 100 people for life, with the same money, even though that sample would have been smaller! But even with say 10k people funded for life, you wouldn’t see the most important effects on the job market, prices, rents...

skybrian 8y ago

I'm actually more interested in what happens with lower amounts that aren't enough to live on. On the margin, this should still have some good effects, and is more likely to be implemented.