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Finland to end basic income trial after two years

theguardian.com

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Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#21

Post by icantdrive55 »

PinguTS wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #6

Basic 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.

I would rather axe a dubious/unneeded bureaucratic job/jobs and put that money towards a helping out 10 people live on "welfare"?

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#22

Post by aquadrop »

MperorM wrote: post #9
jillesvangurp wrote: post #6

Basic 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…

Finland and Scandinavia (especially Norway) are great cases for basic income. Those families who are struggling to make ends meet do it because they can't start working or they will lose welfare. Basic income will allow them to enter workforce, gradually. You just need to start implementing basic income slowly, giving everybody time to adjust - start with €100, create system for it and debug it, then add another €100 each year until desired level.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#23

Post by 80386 »

198739834 wrote: post #17

Basic 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 dem…

Necessary for what? Maybe not optimizing iPhones. But somebody has to make the music that goes on the iPhones, and it's pretty hard to do that if you're working on their hardware full-time. There are already plenty of "necessary" people who consume the cultural output of the "unnecessary".

As for their eventual disappearance, they'll be neglected, but they won't be slaughtered -- if nothing else, that doesn't look good for the cameras. And if war breaks out in Elbonia between its "necessary" and its "unnecessary", Elbonia's enemies will probably provide military aid to the "unnecessary". It's worth remembering here that America lost in Vietnam.

That said, I think a lot of the support for basic income around here is connected to the demise of academia as a viable career track. Personally, I'd like UBI, but mostly because I'd use it to free up 40 hours a week (plus my commute, time outside of work invested in a career) for research in fields I'm interested in.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#24

Post by jeffreyrogers »

nitrogen wrote: post #18
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but you should bring a lot of evidence that it will actually work before you do something that disruptive. If the criteria for doing something is maybe it will work if we do it at a large enough scale than almost anything is permissible.

Edit: And with airplanes, or almost any engineering artifact, you start with a proof of concept and then build from there. We didn't go from container ships to cargo planes, we went from the idea that a person could fly to a very brief flight in a barely airworthy "airplane" that is nothing like a modern plane.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#25

Post by gregknicholson »

PinguTS wrote: post #16
jillesvangurp wrote: post #6

Basic 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.

> higher unemployment, because that means, that those people have either to find another job or the will live on welfare as well.

Remember, “welfare” means “health, happiness and good fortune”. Yet “living on welfare” has somehow come to mean being unable to afford shelter, food and decent access to society.

If you aren't faring well on it, it's not really “welfare”.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#26

Post by Simulacra »

I'm interested to see what the final report on this program will say. My only concern with UBI programs is that if a company, landlord, etc. knows someone is receiving an additional amount of money for free each month, then they can raise their prices by that much.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#27

Post by 198739834 »

80386 wrote: post #23
198739834 wrote: post #17

Basic 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 dem…

Necessary for what? Maybe not optimizing iPhones. But somebody has to make the music that goes on the iPhones, and it's pretty hard to do that if you're working on their hardware full-time. There are already plenty of "necessary" people who consume the cultural output of the "unnecessary". As for their eventual disappearance, they'll be neglected, but they won't be slaughtered -- if nothing else, that doesn't look go…

>Necessary for what?

For whatever the people who provide the money need.

>There are already plenty of "necessary" people who consume the cultural output of the "unnecessary".

I don't think the corporations/governments will just have a few hundred million people around to add some culture to the place.

>It's worth remembering here that America lost in Vietnam.

Yes but the infrastructure of modern society is extremely fragile. The occupying force (the governments/corporations) already have control of it at the start of the war. The only reason we have so many people is due to this infrastructure. If it was a war where the population was not as fully industrialized, it would be different.

That is not to say the robot owners will win the war, but lots of people would die before then.

>Personally, I'd like UBI, but mostly because I'd use it to free up 40 hours a week (plus my commute, time outside of work invested in a career) for research in fields I'm interested in.

That is what people think they will do, but it is not what they will do. It is not the utopia that they think it will be because there are fundamentals about human nature that mean we don't really just sit around thinking up theories and playing guitar. The people on welfare now do not have that life. They are mostly depressed and subdued, which is the point of welfare.

Humans in general need things like self-determination, the feeling of being valued, the ability to maybe have hobbies that cost more than a basic income. Getting a job won't be easy to make more money, as there will not be many jobs.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#28

Post by mantas »

aeroman wrote: post #14
jillesvangurp wrote: post #6

Basic 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...

This is one of the main oversights of UBI fans. E.g. disabled people definitely need more help.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#29

Post by MperorM »

hycaria wrote: post #12
MperorM wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

We pay for it :)

The west is so obscenely rich compared to most of the developing world that there simply is no excuse for us to not be helping out.

Give Directly, for example, is a highly rated charity on givewell, that focuses on giving both conditional and unconditional cash transfers to parts of the developing world.

Re: Finland to end basic income trial after two years

#30

Post by MperorM »

aquadrop wrote: post #22
MperorM wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Finland and Scandinavia (especially Norway) are great cases for basic income. Those families who are struggling to make ends meet do it because they can't start working or they will lose welfare. Basic income will allow them to enter workforce, gradually. You just need to start implementing basic income slowly, giving everybody time to adjust - start with €100, create system for it and debug it, then add another €100…

> Those families who are struggling to make ends meet do it because they can't start working or they will lose welfare.

Someone who has angst that is so extreme, they cannot leave their house without having a panic attack, is not out of a job because of a lack of incentive. I promise you, that person would prefer working a normal job if that were an option.

A mother of 3 young children is not on wealthfare because she has no incentive to work. she doesn't have a job because raising three young children and managing a house is fulltime work.

While it's still terrible that a huge amount of people are terribly disincentivized to work in the current system, the people who need the most care, are also the ones who would not be working after basic income either. These people would be receiving less than a living wage with no way of working afterwards either.

it is simply untrue to say that perverse incentives are the universal reason people don't have a job. We barely know if it is a reason as it stands right now.

There have been minimal trials in the west on basic income, and none of them have been here for long enough to measure anything meaningful.

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