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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

It's even better than that! The title the authors of the study put on their press release is: "Preliminary results of the basic income experiment: self-perceived wellbeing improved, during the first year no effects on employment"[0]

So not only does Bloomberg frame it like the doomsday prediction that everyone would turn into idlers never happened, the significant increase in mental health is just quietly sidestepped.

[0]: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN...

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As an extension, I'd like to know whether the performance of the people that were employed (or became employed) during that experiment has improved to a measurable degree due to their increased happiness; I'm aware it can be very difficult to measure an will require long term study, but that would be a factor that would make both governments and businesses happy with providing a basic income.

You're right, that headline is awfully cynical! Who ever said that giving out free money helps people get a job? I think its proponents have a more utopian view and see it as a way to compensate for future trends in automation which could make many jobs obsolete.

THAT is exactly the problem:

OUR SYSTEM doesn't care how happy you are, as long as you're productive enough for some people to get rich.

No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer poverty.

OUR SOCIETY values power and wealth (at least here in the west, I heard about other countries who don't do this so dedicated). If you're poor, sick or have no job than there is even people who'd argue for mercy killing you as not being strong enough for our good society.

I think the report about this experiment shows how far away we moved from humanity.

“No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer poverty.”

What on earth is this comment. Where do you live in “the west”? Western societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that most people are looked after (nothing is perfect). Your rhetoric is baffling.

I live in Europe and see how things go down the sewer here. Why can't you?

As a child people had enough money for a good end of life and now they crawl around and collect food and other stuff from waste containers.

Also statistics clearly shows this development. Look at stuff like this (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...) and tell me what you think about that please.

What's baffling about that, can you further explain it to me?

> Western societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that most people are looked after

Do you live in Disneyland?

Maybe you should get out of your ivory castle, look around and show some empathy for your fellow human beings. There's people living on highway on-ramp embankments and Skid Row in LA almost doubled within the past decade. You don't seem to see that there's a lot of people hurting because they're broke from automation and productivity gains, like the rest of the neoliberal inequality denialists.

> If you're poor, sick or have no job than there is even people who'd argue for mercy killing you as not being strong enough for our good society.

Where do you meet people who argue for that? I Have never heard that outside of (very) dystopian novels.

Homeless people and people living on social wellfare are seen as a pest pretty much everywhere in western societies.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-containment-plan/

That's a top city in one of the most powerful / rich country in the world, you don't have to look very far to find other examples.

As someone from a small European country with huge social safety nets, this is quite insane to read.

But still, are people talking about mercy killing all of them? I might have to reclassify the meaning of dystopian, the books I read are only half as messed up as this..

Thank you for this article. People should open their eyes and at least read stuff like this to check with their self constructed reality.

Seems some of them live in a dome where you can't see all of this development. Nice for them - I could cry sometimes because it's so unfair.

Come to the SF Bay Area and drive around the highways or take a long-distance railway ride: there are hundreds to thousands of people living rough. It's like a diffuse favela, and most people don't care and a number of people actively hate people, and express violence, for them being poor. This is the result of Nixon and Reagan defunding JFK's community-based mental healthcare centers because they couldn't, or didn't want to, relate to people in different circumstances.

Ironically it was Nixon who came within days of a speech announcing UBI. He saw adequate welfare as a thoroughly Republican thing to provide. Only after he was lobbied with evidence based upon lies did he relent.

First link search turned up: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-i...

Well, it has to be a doomsday prediction, the elite has a very strong interest in keeping the common folks at work. A receding economy is bad, for the people in charge, and the only way to keep it from receding is to increasingly consume, which means increasingly produce.

Companies care about your (mental) health when it's in their direct interest (by paying for mindfulness seminars, ping pong tables, free snacks and other bs), but that's just a way to keep people in check.

You don't have to have a PhD in socio-economics to know that working less directly translates to improved well-being, but well-being isn't going to buy the new porsche and prove the other participants of the global rat race that you're definitely better than them.

"Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation “political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,” who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling- class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity” simply because political economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The “perfected denial of man” has thus taken charge of all human existence." - The society of spectacle

It's Bloomberg's libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism agenda pushing.

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