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Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1]

[1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...

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Finland's experiment was not actually a UBI experiment. I mean, originally it was going to be a really big basic income trial... but by the time they finalized it, they’d chickened out and made it basically a tweak to their existing unemployment benefit for a tiny sample of people who were already on unemployment.

Additionally, Finland had to release a response to the article you linked because of misleading reporting by US media: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN...

So officially there are no results since the experiment is not over. But whatever the results end up being, they won’t say anything about actual UBI one way or the other.

I don’t know anything about the program but it doesn’t sound like it was really UBI at all from this description in the article. If it was a) only available to unemployed and b) only a pilot with 2,000 people then I guess it’s easy to ignore it as a data point. Though maybe that paragraph is poorly worded and it was actually more extensive?

>>> “Finland was considered the first European country to pay a monthly check of $685 to its unemployed between ages 25 and 58. It was considered a pilot program — serving 2,000 randomly selected jobless people — that its founders hoped to expand.”

Edit Additionally Googling for Finland UBI experiment yields countless articles claiming it was neither a failure, nor proper UBI

From a guardian article: "Olli Kangas, an expert involved in the trial, told the Finnish public broadcaster YLE: “Two years is too short a period to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a big experiment. We should have had extra time and more money to achieve reliable results.”" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/23/finland-to-end...

Further: "The scheme – ... – is strictly speaking not a universal basic income (UBI) trial, because the payments are made to a restricted group and are not enough to live on."

I'm still hopeful. Also, what other plan is there to deal with wealth distribution and automation dissolving jobs?

There's really no indication of whether it was a lack of success or not.

If it showed worse health and/or employment outcomes for recipients, that'd be a data point. But the fact that a government cancelled it without any explanation really doesn't say much, except that it's subject to politics.

How long did the experiment last?

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