Did they not have an identical cohort serving as a control to compare employment rates at the end of the trial?
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. not just giving it to the unemployed, but to everyone, with the hope that it would encourage people to find jobs better suited to them, and to allow people to take bigger risks.
(And one thing these trial do seem to show is that giving it out, and then removing it, is at least modestly disruptive.)
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.
UBI isn't too expensive to do small-scale trial, it's entire theory of operation (and the key criticisms raised, like the inflation-spiral one) is too dependent on universality and coordination with other policy changes to do a meaningful small-scale trial, as you can neither validate the claimed benefits nor refute the claimed drawbacks that way.
You can do a gradual ramp of benefits trial, but not a limited sample of population in an otherwise open environment with pre-existing policies generally applicable.
“Mr Simanainen says that while some individuals found work, they were no more likely to do so than a control group of people who weren't given the money.”
Note this means the headline is the opposite of the truth. And the quote is not to be found in the article. It’s how the author/editor chose to interpret a single individual’s statement, despite the overall finding being very different.
so the group who received the subsidy was already skewed by a previous selection process.
I don't see any mention of a control group in the experiment web site:
[0] https://www.kela.fi/web/en/basic-income-objectives-and-imple...