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Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#121

Post by yason »

The experiment was probably staked with an agenda to show that UBI doesn't work, given the parties in the government and the massive bias in selecting the participants.

The sample of 2000 people were chosen from a group of unemployed people. I think the criteria for being randomly chosen was having been paid unemployment benefits during some range of dates.

So it's not representative of a real UBI at all: the point of UBI isn't to necessarily make things better for the unemployed but, rather, the large group of people who make very little money and barely get along.

Cashiers, cleaners, etc who can't live on their earnings, at least in big cities. Or self-employed one-person shops whose income stream is very choppy and who don't make much anyway. Real UBI would be universal so those who are working would get it too -- of course the UBI would increase your income and likely your tax percentage so it would mostly be taxed away from those who do earn a living.

The point of UBI is to cut down on bureucracy by removing various individual case-by-case subsidies (but bureaucrats would never vote for that) and make some base level of income predictable and reliable, mostly for people who make less than the lower middle class.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#122

Post by LarryDarrell »

zafka wrote: post #97
leereeves wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there aren't enough jobs for everyone because technology have taken over most. And yet the US has full employment. Could it be that Finland lacks jobs for some reason other than technology?

The US does not have full employment. The actual percentage of working age people who are employed is below peak levels. Also quite a few people are working part time.

Also, the unemployment rate communicates nothing about the dignity of a job. The 45 year old former factory worker who is now fighting for hours at a retail job counts as employed. He also counts as angry, depressed and ready to burn the system down.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#123

Post by dawhizkid »

As someone who wants to remain in the workforce, the absolute most frustrating thing about taking a break between jobs or wanting to bootstrap a company or start something new is not the lack of income during that time but that my healthcare in the US is tied to having a job.

Yes, I can buy individual insurance, but moving off and on new plans is incredibly time consuming, and if you have a certain prescription that you are on or have something that is covered by an employer plan but may not be covered by an individual on then it's highly risky to leave.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#124

Post by yingw787 »

I don't know how much I support basic income as a substitute for jobs. Jobs can suck, but basic income takes away the levers for poor people (anybody relying on one primary income stream for disposable income) to be useful to the rich and powerful, leaving them completely vulnerable to the games of the latter. Even if you mopped a rich person's floor and the rich person wanted to dispose of you, he'd likely have to replace you with another floor mopper; the coupling between rich and poor is still there. Without jobs, the poor are completely expendable. If things go well, there's no way the poor can keep paying attention to maintaining the system, and things can go bad. If things don't go well, the bottom can drop out. This is of course not discussing the other benefits of jobs (a feeling of dignity, a way to spend time, being around other people and a tie to society).

I'd rather support a system of federated capitalism where everybody owns and rents some amount of capital (financial, intellectual, social, etc.), along with a government that can provide for basic needs. Everyone has some nontrivial amount of power, and has to respect other people and their power.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#125

Post by awakeasleep »

jerf wrote: post #84
gyaniv wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The did. and the result showed that their employment chances were 'no more likely to do so than a control group of people who weren't given the money.' What they didn't do (although some wanted them to), is also check the system on already employed people and checked if that changed their likelihood of staying in a bad job/finding a better job or anything like that. Because that's the real idea behind basic income. n…

Increasingly I feel like all my philosophical problems with UBI are irrelevant in the face of the fact that apparently UBI is too expensive to even do a proper small-scale trial. If we can't afford that, we even moreso can't afford simply leaping to full scale. (And one thing these trial do seem to show is that giving it out, and then removing it, is at least modestly disruptive.)

I think most people struggle to understand how plastic money is in the context of a government that runs its own presses.

Everything is affordable in that situation. In a smaller country, if you do nothing else to manage it, it increases inflation.

In a 'reserver currency' country that inflation is spread out across the globe.

And that isn't even addressing things like how the USA could reinstitute the wealth and income taxes of the 40's, or charge market (rather than fire sale) rates for national resources (drilling on fed land, grazing on fed land), airwaves, or alter how we grant monopolies (patents) and many other untapped flows of public wealth to private entities.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#126

Post by refurb »

SirHound wrote: post #83
leereeves wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there aren't enough jobs for everyone because technology have taken over most. And yet the US has full employment. Could it be that Finland lacks jobs for some reason other than technology?

Someone working an hour a week counts as employed.

No, it doesn't count.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#128

Post by _rpd »

msluyter wrote: post #82
mises wrote: post #48

I still see some big issues with universal basic income, and would appreciate one of its supporters responding to some of them: Cost. $3.8 trillion by many estimates. That's nearly 20% of America's GDP. How is it possible to pull this much money out of the American economy without crashing it? Scope. I am of the opinion that one of the beauties of federalism is that policies can be tested first at the state level bef…

To your list of issues I'd add extraction by rentiers. My (perhaps naive) understanding is that rents tend to rise to a market equilibrium. Infuse the the aggregate market in an area with X dollars, and rents will rise to consume X. I'd be curious to hear counterarguments to that point.

I think this is a key concern. I don't think that there is a good counterargument, but the best that I've heard is that UBI will enable mass migration to rural areas or remote exburbs (including corporate sponsored - welcome to your new Google Home!). Of course some are happy to introduce rent controls or spark an inflationary death spiral with 'cost of living' adjustments.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#129

Post by psadri »

Handing out free money will most likely just cause inflation and defeat itself. The inflation will make the amount paid out in basic income insufficient to live on.

The alternate to basic income for the purpose of housing, health and food, is to provide a basic version of those resources at zero cost.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#130

Post by alekseypo »

mises wrote: post #48

I still see some big issues with universal basic income, and would appreciate one of its supporters responding to some of them: Cost. $3.8 trillion by many estimates. That's nearly 20% of America's GDP. How is it possible to pull this much money out of the American economy without crashing it? Scope. I am of the opinion that one of the beauties of federalism is that policies can be tested first at the state level bef…

There are a few interesting ideas about how it could financially function mentioned here:

https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/cont...

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