Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
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Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
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Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#2> and satisfy bureaucrats
That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks.
It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job.
> It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out—that created these dramatic improvements in psychological well-being.
It not about trusting people with the money they are given.
The usual checks are because people are expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits are only meant to help them while they can't and are looking for a job. It is not meant to enable a life-style, which is what unconditionality can lead to.
> the conditions we attach to welfare aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences. They are active harms. They create stress, anxiety, and psychological damage that persists even when the financial support is adequate.
Oh dear... This reads like a parody at that point.
An useful measurement would be to see which group, if any, found a job quicker. A finding that conditionality does not speed things up would be noteworthy and helpful, a finding that people feel better when they get money every month unconditionally isn't.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#3> and satisfy bureaucrats That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks. It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job. > It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out…
>>since it removes pressure to find a job.
NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers. 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pressure.
>>expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits
This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
>> not meant to enable a life-style
An income of €560 per month, about $20/day, is hardly a lifestyle; it is enough to stay out of the gutter. This is only giving to people who do not have savings a sliver of the resources available to people sufficiently fortunate enough to have education and savings to fall back on.
It shows many of the differences in poverty are not due to any kind of merit/demerit, but simply lack of funds.
>>An useful measurement would be
Yes, that would be a DIFFERENT useful measurement. But to ignore the mental health aspects is to ignore real harms to both the people themselves and to the larger society, such as reduced isolation and crime, healthier communities, etc. Much of this was addressed by other experiments later in the article, which you either failed to read or intentionally ignored.
The entire point of the studies and article wasn't your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)", but the effects of payments vs bureaucracy.
The actual evidence is massively piling up that eliminating a patriarchal bureaucracy, means testing, and all this other govt overhead and simply giving everyone just-above-poverty-level income, will dramatically improve society, and it will be far more effective than all the layers of bureaucracy which not only add overhead, cost to the taxpayer, but also actual harm.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#4> and satisfy bureaucrats That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks. It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job. > It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out…
Well, unemployment benefits are also meant to protect your job.
As in you, the currently employed person.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#5Need further breakdown on why those got happier without condition.
It could be IQ, cultural-specific, polarized against authority, much of which deserve monitoring.
I do not think it is a cost-effective way for working population to fund this "freestyle" living unless society gets something from the idles.
Otherwise, like a professor giving out highest grade of a student to rest of the class, that too shall normalizes ...." at the lowesr level.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#6Here’s the study, I think
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2025-035.pdf
It would be better if they made it mandatory for everyone to respond to follow-up surveys, as the response rate differed enough to be called out as a study limitation.
One interesting thing to note is that the study didn’t find that basic income support increased the chances of becoming employed, or receiving basic income support reduced crime. I am also not sure how to extrapolate study results from Finnish people to people in other cultures.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#7> and satisfy bureaucrats That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks. It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job. > It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out…
>>since it removes pressure to find a job. NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers . 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pres…
Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean.
There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.
> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:
"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."
That's unemployment benefits.
Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".
> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",
It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.
Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#8I wonder what is the difference between the two groups as far as the rate of finding employment. Might be that the act of looking for a job is stressful.
If the goal is to get people back to work, it might not make sense to optimize just for better mental health.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#9This makes sense to me.
Having spent a bunch of time with people who have had persistent issues with stable income, a lot of them internalize it at various levels as them personally not being worth anything, because so many systems involved seem to be operating in bad faith.
Anything involving the US medical system, for instance - even as someone working in tech with good health insurance, so many of my interactions with doctors can be summarized as "the doctor makes a snap judgment in the first 30 seconds of interacting with you, and arguing with it results in them interacting in bad faith thereafter".
And that's not as bad as other machinery in the US. The advice I've heard around trying to use the limited social safety machinery in the US is "plan for it to be a fulltime job for multiple years to get on it, and expect to randomly be kicked off it repeatedly".
And having the systems you interact with regularly very clearly act in bad faith, assuming by default you don't deserve things, does things to people's mental health.
Re: Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
#10From what I understand, two groups of unemployed persons got €560/mo. One group was required to look for work while the other wasn't. And one group was required to report to unemployment offices, and "satisfy bureaucrats".
The results were that the one with unconditional payments had "better mental health".
Apparently they used a "validated five-item mental health screening instrument that identifies people at risk of mood and anxiety disorders", but realistically how much of this is just people prefer money with no strings attached. Seems pretty obvious. I'm sure a lot of things are linked to "poor mental health" like having to go to work, doing chores and basic maintenance to stay alive. Don't really know is this kind of observation has broader implications