Other recent discussions about Finlands basic income:
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Finland to end basic income trial after two years
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#12Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
Basic income for some is how you test whether all the claims you made are true. While I agree with everything you said, there are still many fundamental questions yet to be answered. Another reason it is not happening any time soon is that rolling it out in a country such as Finland would be WAY more expensive than the current wealthfare models in Scandinavian countries as they stand now. To roll it out for every cit…
>While I am still a big advocator for basic income in the developing world
How do they afford it ?
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#13Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
> The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular.
And partly because it's not clear a basic income is actually better in practice. It's a huge change to how society operates, so it's hard to predict what effects it will have. I think a conservative approach that starts with small trials makes more sense than dismantling a large government bureaucracy that employs lots of people.
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#14Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
Is it really true that much of the spending goes on bureaucracy? In the UK the depatment of work and pensions spent £167 billion in 2012, of which £6.4b was spend on departmental and operational delivery costs. Admittedly this is still a large amount, but it does allow targeted spending, which might have some advantages too.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-ben...
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#15Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
>I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic overhead.
That isn't true though. The "universal" part makes it completely different. The only reason we are talking about basic income is because of major shifts in the workforce. It is about a new alternative to jobs if automation supposedly takes them all away. This is different to the current system, which is designed for a small subset of people who do not have the ability to work.
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#16Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
Bureaucracy is also some type of basic income.
Disrupting bureaucracy means also higher unemployment, because that means, that those people have either to find another job or the will live on welfare as well.
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#17Basic income is an admittance that hundreds of millions of people are no longer necessary. Governments and corporations will not pay billions of dollars per year to people who do nothing. It will result in a strange situation where companies like Apple will be giving people money so that they can buy the iPhones they make.
Eventually, these people will somehow have to disappear. This means there will also be less demand for the robots to make things. This would then end with a small population with robots occupying the planet.
Welfare is essentially a way to kill a human's soul. If the choice is to go out slowly like this, then I would say "it is better to die on your feet, then live on your knees".
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#18Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
> The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular. And partly because it's not clear a basic income is actually better in practice. It's a huge change to how society operates, so it's hard to predict what effects it will have. I think a conservative approach that starts with small trials makes more sense than dismantling a large governmen…
Some things simply aren't achievable with a conservative, incremental approach. Imagine yourself having a container ship and needing a cargo plane. You won't reach the skies by trying a pilot program with one engine and half a wing bolted to your hull.
Maybe universal basic income is one of those things where, to escape the local optimum and reach a global optimum, you have to start from scratch and go all in.
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#19Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
> The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular.
Don't oil-rich countries like Kuwait, Brunei and Saudi Arabia have basic income?
Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years
#20Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet. Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic o…
The currency of politicians is jobs and dismantling the inefficient bureaucracy is damn f*ing expensive.
Will we eventually find the ability to introduce a new political currency that has more spending power than jobs?