8 ms·

The experiment was terribly flawed in that it only addressed the unemployed, and it didn't affect the existing unemployment system for them, making incentives p

The experiment was terribly flawed in that it only addressed the unemployed, and it didn't affect the existing unemployment system for them, making incentives perverse for all taking part. The UBI was offered tax-free on top. It represents nothing like real life UBI and needs to be redesigned as a test.

ornornor 6y ago
Why can’t we ever design one such experiment right? It’s as if we were giving ammunition to those opposed to it by conducting trials that have flaws! Would it really be so hard to run a proper test that follows all the best practices and isn’t biased/flawed so that we could once and for all point at it and say “we can conclusively say UBI is/isn’t viable based on this experiment”? I mean if a country goes all the way to overcoming political and opinion opposition along with securing funding to actually run such a trial, why not go all the way and do it right?
- diekdnk 6y ago
  The test was conducted by a popular right wing party "Kokoomus", which is heavily opposed to the system. This might affect the design of the test
  - swebs 6y ago
    >According to its 2006-adopted platform, the National Coalition Party's policy is based on "freedom, responsibility and democracy, equality of opportunity, education, supportiveness, tolerance and caring".[9] The party is described by literature as a liberal[2] and conservative[3] as well as a liberal-conservative[4] party in the centre-right[8] with catch-all party characteristics.[29] The non-profit Democratic Society described it as "the heir to both liberal and conservative strains of right-of-centre thought" that is becoming increasingly liberal compared to its official stance of conservatism.[6] >Specifically, it contains elements of cultural and economic liberalism and social reformism.[30] For example, it supports multiculturalism, work-based immigration, gay rights and same sex marriage.[6][31][32][33] Although formerly considered to have been critical of the Nordic welfare model and campaigning for strict doctrines of economic liberalism, in the 1970s the party shifted to supporting more social liberalism, such as increased social security and a welfare state, justified by increased individual liberty.[34] They've really pivoted on that issue in the past few decades.
  - pasiaj 6y ago
    "Kokoomus ... is heavily opposed to the system" There is no "system". There is an endless number of possible implementations of UBI on a spectrum that ranges from communist to libertarian. One of the main UBI stalwarts in Finland is the pinnacle capitalist ideolog and banker Björn Whalroos, who wants UBI to replace ALL other welfare-state programs, including universal health care. On the other end of the spectrum are proposals for UBI with a purpose to solve issues caused by globalization, patch-work employment, etc. Kokoomus has strong proponents of UBI and if I recall correctly, the party approved a resolution for studying UBI 13 years ago in their 2007 national convention.
- luckylion 6y ago
  A "real" test would be much harder, and to be actually useful, it would also have to contain a way to finance itself, i.e. by testing it not on a selected group of people, but on a region and adding additional taxes for everyone in the region large enough to offset the payments. If you're only testing the outcome, but not the income, you're essentially allowing "free energy" people to plug their magic machines into a wall socket while you test the energy output of their machines. Much fewer people will agree to run that test (as it'll negatively affect their bottom line), and I do believe that proponents of UBI will also be more hesitant to run it, as it might prove that adding e.g. 20% to income tax will motivate tax payers to migrate away from UBI zones.
  - TotempaaltJ 6y ago
    AFAIK one component of UBI is that you throw out (most of?) the other welfare benefits you might get. By saving money on that, you could potentially offset or even compensate for the required added income tax.
    - jfindley 6y ago
      This sort of thing gets mentioned a lot, but in practice doesn't work. The amount of money spent on welfare benefits[0], plus the cost of the administration, ends up several orders of magnitude less money than UBI wage x Population size. This is the key problem with UBI: making it actually universal costs an unsustainably huge sum of money, and making it not universal just means you've re-invented welfare benefits, but worse. 0: Doesn't really matter which country you choose the results will be the same
      - dogma1138 6y ago
        It’s also important to note that the direct and indirect benefits of traditional welfare are also considerably higher than even the highest suggested UBI allowances. For example in the UK housing benefits would be greatly dependent on where you live in some London councils housing benefits can be as high as £400 per week, this alone is more than the highest proposed UBI allowances that aim to match the tax free allowance (currently at £12.5K). UBI with removal of all other benefits could easily mean that the people that need it the most would be getting less and sometimes much less.
- swebs 6y ago
  In science, evidence determines your viewpoints. In politics, its the other way around. If the results of an experiment support your views, then it was a great experiment and proof that you were right all along. If the results of an experiment contradict your views, then you can fully scrutinize every aspect of the test to come up with reasons why it got such a wrong result.
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    I don't think science is free from those flaws either. Science advances one death at a time.
    - swebs 6y ago
      There are certainly plenty of fields that have a these problems and are vulnerable to be politically driven. I'd say the further toward the "soft" sciences you go, the more you're able to manipulate results to fit certain viewpoints. 538 has a nice little demo showing off the problem. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/
      - KittenInABox 6y ago
        Is CS a soft science? There’s a ton of massaging in machine learning IME.
        swebs 6y ago
        Yes, some branches definitely. Especially human-computer interaction. Other branches like discrete math or algorithm analysis are impossible to fudge. Machine learning is somewhere in the middle.
      - travisporter 6y ago
        Awesome site! Sadly p hacking is also a problem in many fields not just the soft sciences. It’s a bit of a dig at science but is it a fundamental flaw of the scientific method?
- notahacker 6y ago
  Doing the test properly means that the subsidy has to be paid for by much higher taxes on the study group only [as opposed to general government revenue raised mainly from taxes on the control group] and that the subsidy has to be credibly promised for life, not just for a year or two. For obvious reasons, this is politically different to achieve.
- mbar84 6y ago
  A real test would have to - pick participants at random (regardless of employment status) - give money to all the participants - make all participants pay higher taxes to finance For this to be realistic, the participants would not have a choice whether or not to participate. So yeah, I can't for the life of me think why we "can't ever design such experiment right".
  - ornornor 6y ago
    > So yeah, I can't for the life of me think why we "can't ever design such experiment right". Your sarcasm undermines your point.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  A real world would have to include everybody in the economy or you will not disprove the objection that it will just create inflation on necessities. It's the problem with economic experimentation. There is only one actual economy and there is no real way to A-B.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
The biggest problems with such UBI experiments is the limited time of the experiment. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOR 2 YEARS, i'd be happier than before, and use that money to pay off loans, buy a new car, go for a vacation, etc., and keep my curent job. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. Most countries have lottery systems made up in a way, that you can opt for a bulk sum or get monthly payouts from the lottery... i'm sure, that we could find people, who get monthly sums somewhere in the interesting rage, to check how they're doing now.... but usually, looking at loterry winners does not show results in favour of giving people "free money".
- mercer 6y ago
  > If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. While I do think this might be what some people will do, I think that over time, as we get used to such a thing, this is not at all what most people will do. I've had periods of years in my life where I didn't have to think about money. After a short period of faffing off, I started doing all sorts of stuff. Some of it of direct value to society (volunteering) and some of it perhaps indirectly so (teaching myself new skills, working on 'products' that could be useful). I mean, even just spending time with others who themselves had it in short supply and valued my company could be considered 'useful to society'. What I do know is that all of this time spent was generally more useful than a number of years of inane bullshit I worked on for various companies (getting paid well, but not really feeling satisfied with the result). So many projects that just stopped because of some decision higher up. So much work poured into websites that offer no value to society either. And the stress and depressions that goes with it leading to me being a 'burden' on society by using my health care bux on mental health care. I'm not a rare case. Of course, this is anecdotal. But the assumption that people will just be lazy and offer nothing to society if they can is equally anecdotal, and honestly goes against everything I see in about 99% of the people around me. People want to be useful. People want to be valued and needed. People want to be creative. I consider it quite possible, or at least worth properly exploring, a society that provides in the basic needs regardless of whether you do pointless work for pointless company to allow you to spend your downtime on pointless consumption and entertainment (because no energy for anything else).
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Agreed, this kind of experiment is flawed in many ways. For me the argument for UBI is very simple: it's a simpler version of the status quo in most countries in terms of administrative overhead that offers more freedom to individuals. Those are two good things IMHO. It's precisely for this reason that it's controversial because conservatives on both side of the political spectrum consider the notion that people should do work (no matter how meaningless) part of their core values. Communism was all about workers and probably the closest we ever got to having UBI in some countries. Work ethos is very much a core value. So the notion of rewarding people for not working is controversial in communist circles. Most would consider communism a failed experiment from an economic point of view because it also included notions of central planning, equally (low) wages for everyone, and little differentiation in terms of skills & value of those skills. I.e. equating the two would be a mistake. Fiscal conservatives on the other hand argue for a small state and are perpetually worried about "who is paying for this". The argument for UBI and against both points of view is that we already have it in the sense that most countries provide healthcare, housing, foodstamps, and other benefits for basically everyone, including the homeless people, the elderly, children, and many others that in any case are not part of the working population. Also, in many countries, the working population is shrinking in the sense that unemployment statistics exclude whole parts of the population that are effectively not considered to be working and are therefore not actually unemployed (children, students, married women looking after children, medically disabled people, retired people, long term out of job people, the homeless, etc.). We take care of all these people already and that costs money. It actually is a rather large part of the current budget of whatever country you are in. Where these programs fall short, inevitably it causes a lot of problems and misery. Also the collective programs we have for doing this are a combination of very expensive and inefficient. E.g. some countries spent more on unemployment bureaucracy and programs than on the actual benefits. UBI is about acknowledging & formalizing the status quo that no matter what, you will have the means to take care of yourself at some minimum definable level. IMHO, it has the potential to vastly simplify things in the sense that it would remove the need for minimum wage, state pensions, etc. and the associated bureaucracy. So there's an upside in terms of less administrative overhead and vastly less complexity & risk for employers & citizens. The existing system of benefits could be redefined on top of a UBI and would likely get a more optional character. To the point where you could privatize this; which I imagine might be a popular topic in the US and other places with a strong libertarian minded population.

ornornor 6y ago

Why can’t we ever design one such experiment right? It’s as if we were giving ammunition to those opposed to it by conducting trials that have flaws! Would it really be so hard to run a proper test that follows all the best practices and isn’t biased/flawed so that we could once and for all point at it and say “we can conclusively say UBI is/isn’t viable based on this experiment”? I mean if a country goes all the way to overcoming political and opinion opposition along with securing funding to actually run such a trial, why not go all the way and do it right?

diekdnk 6y ago
The test was conducted by a popular right wing party "Kokoomus", which is heavily opposed to the system. This might affect the design of the test
- swebs 6y ago
  >According to its 2006-adopted platform, the National Coalition Party's policy is based on "freedom, responsibility and democracy, equality of opportunity, education, supportiveness, tolerance and caring".[9] The party is described by literature as a liberal[2] and conservative[3] as well as a liberal-conservative[4] party in the centre-right[8] with catch-all party characteristics.[29] The non-profit Democratic Society described it as "the heir to both liberal and conservative strains of right-of-centre thought" that is becoming increasingly liberal compared to its official stance of conservatism.[6] >Specifically, it contains elements of cultural and economic liberalism and social reformism.[30] For example, it supports multiculturalism, work-based immigration, gay rights and same sex marriage.[6][31][32][33] Although formerly considered to have been critical of the Nordic welfare model and campaigning for strict doctrines of economic liberalism, in the 1970s the party shifted to supporting more social liberalism, such as increased social security and a welfare state, justified by increased individual liberty.[34] They've really pivoted on that issue in the past few decades.
- pasiaj 6y ago
  "Kokoomus ... is heavily opposed to the system" There is no "system". There is an endless number of possible implementations of UBI on a spectrum that ranges from communist to libertarian. One of the main UBI stalwarts in Finland is the pinnacle capitalist ideolog and banker Björn Whalroos, who wants UBI to replace ALL other welfare-state programs, including universal health care. On the other end of the spectrum are proposals for UBI with a purpose to solve issues caused by globalization, patch-work employment, etc. Kokoomus has strong proponents of UBI and if I recall correctly, the party approved a resolution for studying UBI 13 years ago in their 2007 national convention.
luckylion 6y ago
A "real" test would be much harder, and to be actually useful, it would also have to contain a way to finance itself, i.e. by testing it not on a selected group of people, but on a region and adding additional taxes for everyone in the region large enough to offset the payments. If you're only testing the outcome, but not the income, you're essentially allowing "free energy" people to plug their magic machines into a wall socket while you test the energy output of their machines. Much fewer people will agree to run that test (as it'll negatively affect their bottom line), and I do believe that proponents of UBI will also be more hesitant to run it, as it might prove that adding e.g. 20% to income tax will motivate tax payers to migrate away from UBI zones.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  AFAIK one component of UBI is that you throw out (most of?) the other welfare benefits you might get. By saving money on that, you could potentially offset or even compensate for the required added income tax.
  - jfindley 6y ago
    This sort of thing gets mentioned a lot, but in practice doesn't work. The amount of money spent on welfare benefits[0], plus the cost of the administration, ends up several orders of magnitude less money than UBI wage x Population size. This is the key problem with UBI: making it actually universal costs an unsustainably huge sum of money, and making it not universal just means you've re-invented welfare benefits, but worse. 0: Doesn't really matter which country you choose the results will be the same
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      It’s also important to note that the direct and indirect benefits of traditional welfare are also considerably higher than even the highest suggested UBI allowances. For example in the UK housing benefits would be greatly dependent on where you live in some London councils housing benefits can be as high as £400 per week, this alone is more than the highest proposed UBI allowances that aim to match the tax free allowance (currently at £12.5K). UBI with removal of all other benefits could easily mean that the people that need it the most would be getting less and sometimes much less.
swebs 6y ago
In science, evidence determines your viewpoints. In politics, its the other way around. If the results of an experiment support your views, then it was a great experiment and proof that you were right all along. If the results of an experiment contradict your views, then you can fully scrutinize every aspect of the test to come up with reasons why it got such a wrong result.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  I don't think science is free from those flaws either. Science advances one death at a time.
  - swebs 6y ago
    There are certainly plenty of fields that have a these problems and are vulnerable to be politically driven. I'd say the further toward the "soft" sciences you go, the more you're able to manipulate results to fit certain viewpoints. 538 has a nice little demo showing off the problem. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/
    - KittenInABox 6y ago
      Is CS a soft science? There’s a ton of massaging in machine learning IME.
      - swebs 6y ago
        Yes, some branches definitely. Especially human-computer interaction. Other branches like discrete math or algorithm analysis are impossible to fudge. Machine learning is somewhere in the middle.
    - travisporter 6y ago
      Awesome site! Sadly p hacking is also a problem in many fields not just the soft sciences. It’s a bit of a dig at science but is it a fundamental flaw of the scientific method?
notahacker 6y ago
Doing the test properly means that the subsidy has to be paid for by much higher taxes on the study group only [as opposed to general government revenue raised mainly from taxes on the control group] and that the subsidy has to be credibly promised for life, not just for a year or two. For obvious reasons, this is politically different to achieve.
mbar84 6y ago
A real test would have to - pick participants at random (regardless of employment status) - give money to all the participants - make all participants pay higher taxes to finance For this to be realistic, the participants would not have a choice whether or not to participate. So yeah, I can't for the life of me think why we "can't ever design such experiment right".
- ornornor 6y ago
  > So yeah, I can't for the life of me think why we "can't ever design such experiment right". Your sarcasm undermines your point.
dexterdog 6y ago
A real world would have to include everybody in the economy or you will not disprove the objection that it will just create inflation on necessities. It's the problem with economic experimentation. There is only one actual economy and there is no real way to A-B.

ajsnigrutin 6y ago

The biggest problems with such UBI experiments is the limited time of the experiment. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOR 2 YEARS, i'd be happier than before, and use that money to pay off loans, buy a new car, go for a vacation, etc., and keep my curent job. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. Most countries have lottery systems made up in a way, that you can opt for a bulk sum or get monthly payouts from the lottery... i'm sure, that we could find people, who get monthly sums somewhere in the interesting rage, to check how they're doing now.... but usually, looking at loterry winners does not show results in favour of giving people "free money".

mercer 6y ago
> If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. While I do think this might be what some people will do, I think that over time, as we get used to such a thing, this is not at all what most people will do. I've had periods of years in my life where I didn't have to think about money. After a short period of faffing off, I started doing all sorts of stuff. Some of it of direct value to society (volunteering) and some of it perhaps indirectly so (teaching myself new skills, working on 'products' that could be useful). I mean, even just spending time with others who themselves had it in short supply and valued my company could be considered 'useful to society'. What I do know is that all of this time spent was generally more useful than a number of years of inane bullshit I worked on for various companies (getting paid well, but not really feeling satisfied with the result). So many projects that just stopped because of some decision higher up. So much work poured into websites that offer no value to society either. And the stress and depressions that goes with it leading to me being a 'burden' on society by using my health care bux on mental health care. I'm not a rare case. Of course, this is anecdotal. But the assumption that people will just be lazy and offer nothing to society if they can is equally anecdotal, and honestly goes against everything I see in about 99% of the people around me. People want to be useful. People want to be valued and needed. People want to be creative. I consider it quite possible, or at least worth properly exploring, a society that provides in the basic needs regardless of whether you do pointless work for pointless company to allow you to spend your downtime on pointless consumption and entertainment (because no energy for anything else).

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Agreed, this kind of experiment is flawed in many ways. For me the argument for UBI is very simple: it's a simpler version of the status quo in most countries in terms of administrative overhead that offers more freedom to individuals. Those are two good things IMHO. It's precisely for this reason that it's controversial because conservatives on both side of the political spectrum consider the notion that people should do work (no matter how meaningless) part of their core values. Communism was all about workers and probably the closest we ever got to having UBI in some countries. Work ethos is very much a core value. So the notion of rewarding people for not working is controversial in communist circles. Most would consider communism a failed experiment from an economic point of view because it also included notions of central planning, equally (low) wages for everyone, and little differentiation in terms of skills & value of those skills. I.e. equating the two would be a mistake. Fiscal conservatives on the other hand argue for a small state and are perpetually worried about "who is paying for this". The argument for UBI and against both points of view is that we already have it in the sense that most countries provide healthcare, housing, foodstamps, and other benefits for basically everyone, including the homeless people, the elderly, children, and many others that in any case are not part of the working population. Also, in many countries, the working population is shrinking in the sense that unemployment statistics exclude whole parts of the population that are effectively not considered to be working and are therefore not actually unemployed (children, students, married women looking after children, medically disabled people, retired people, long term out of job people, the homeless, etc.). We take care of all these people already and that costs money. It actually is a rather large part of the current budget of whatever country you are in. Where these programs fall short, inevitably it causes a lot of problems and misery. Also the collective programs we have for doing this are a combination of very expensive and inefficient. E.g. some countries spent more on unemployment bureaucracy and programs than on the actual benefits. UBI is about acknowledging & formalizing the status quo that no matter what, you will have the means to take care of yourself at some minimum definable level. IMHO, it has the potential to vastly simplify things in the sense that it would remove the need for minimum wage, state pensions, etc. and the associated bureaucracy. So there's an upside in terms of less administrative overhead and vastly less complexity & risk for employers & citizens. The existing system of benefits could be redefined on top of a UBI and would likely get a more optional character. To the point where you could privatize this; which I imagine might be a popular topic in the US and other places with a strong libertarian minded population.