Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure

Well, in the context of the experiment the people would have been able to garner state support through a bit more complex social security / social services schemes so it's not entirely about that they have more resources available, but also how they were given those resources and how many needless strings were attached to those.

I agree on principle to your point, but it's not as blatant as if the people had been living in abject poverty and then given money beyond their current financial means.

You could line up knowledgeable opponents and proponents, and you would probably find their reasons vary wildly. They also come from all over the political map.

But I agree with you. It seems odd to me that people are worried about an income harming people on average, or even affecting employment. We already have plenty of people with passive incomes, and they don't generally become depressed bums. They're called rich people.

It's kind of significant, yeah. As a general rule, people on income support in Australia and the UK tend to be harassed, stressed and moderately unhappy people despite the free money.

There's a lot of evidence from looking at lottery winners and people with significant disabilities that suggests that people have some base level of happiness they trend towards.

Happy fun people who have catastrophic accidents and end up paraplegics are really unhappy for about 6 months and then start rolling with it and end up being happy fun people who make light of their situation and enjoy life despite the wheelchair.

Debbie downers who win the lottery are super-happy for about 6 months and then become rich unhappy people.

A persistent long term increase in net happiness is a notable result. Maybe not earth-shattering, but certainly not necessarily to be expected either.

It depends on how it is implemented and the numbers involved.

One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.

This allows one to get get enough for the bare necessities (shelter, food) "for free", but if you want to have a life that's more than just subsistence living, you would have to work--but you get to keep a lot of that upfront.

If you want a 'fancy' life, then you'll have to work more, and there would be personal income taxes. Presumably there would be corporate and sales taxes as well.

I don't know enough about the math to know if it is practical.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-are...

When you think about the money spent on nursing homes, daycare, juvenile justice or even kids who extend college due to the need to work, society pays a big bill directly or indirectly.

My family does well, but we realized that expenses like daycare, summer camps, etc made it such that having one of us take a sabbatical would only cost a few hundred bucks a month, and be a better outcome for our family. Not many folks have that luxury, and imo we are all worse off for it.

art, volunteering, social programs and plenty other activities are way more useful for civilization as a whole than almost any random job on the market. as soon as businesses start losing workers as they realize they don't need to do shitty unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table - market will finally put the right price on lots of these jobs and start paying for it adequately.

- How much does this actually happen? - Is the job market over or under satisfied? - Does what people end up doing somehow turn out valuable to society, even if not in a way we know how to assign monetary value?

There are so many unknowns. Great that somebody are actually trying it out and getting us some data.

UBI might give people the opportunity to explore their interests but ultimately wouldn't you end up in the same place? Torn between a desire to make "art" which suddenly everyone else is also trying to make and follow their passion, or get paid substantially more for UI Development?

If there was UBI, I'd have stopped working for them altogether.

People like to point out that techies would feel more comfortable building start ups, and that’s probably true. But for people with low skills and low opportunity costs to doing nothing (of which there are many more people), I don’t see a reason why they would work relatively shitty jobs for low income. Who is going to work minimum wage to be a janitor to get basically no substantial benefit. Maybe you think people deserve better wages then- but then uh oh, it’s even harder to justify not doing things in China wherever possible.

UBI benefits society when it’s given to a person with a high ability to to positively impact society (let’s say skilled workers and parents). And that’s before considering any effect on prices or whatever.

The question is, can we make the economy work while providing everyone with these basic needs. If too many people stop working, either the people that are working will be reduced to a similar sustenance level, or it won't even be enough to cover the basic needs of all anymore. If the people that are working don't get more they will think "why should I be the one working?", and then the problem exacerbates.

In this experiment, the unemployment numbers didn't rise, but the participants knew it was supposed to be a temporary measure. So this doesn't really look at long-term sustainability.

it's quite idiotic argument, but i've personally met people who discard the whole idea of UBI based on it alone.

Many say that it made people happier, but since when has it been the job of the government to guarantee happiness?

We would do well to remember that many politicians simply use this as a way to get elected. It strikes me as buying votes, writ large.

> most just watch TV and wait to die This may be true of older people who feel they may have already lived a full life, and it might be too late to start anything new. What about people who reach financial safety very early, and can afford to experiment and experience a lot more?

There's still perks to a job. It's Universal Basic Income, aka (IMO), basic compassion. You shouldn't be able to starve to death, but if you want a Mercedes and a nice house in the city, you're going to have to work for it, one way or another.

But are we talking about giving people "everything" though? The word "Basic" is in the thing's name, so it may be just enough to not die (or turn to crime).

One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.

$10K is enough, in many places, to pay rent and food, but not much else. So you won't have the worry / stress of being homeless, but if you want more than subsistence living, you will probably have to work.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-are...

A (very) modest ammount of health, housing, and food security is more like a foundation for an individual, rather than the entirety of their existence.

Easy solution: don't give them everything.

There's a lot of difference between "give people everything" and "make sure everyone has enough money for food and shelter". We're already doing the latter part, at least in the more civilized parts of the world. The argument for the U in UBI is that there's currently a whole lot of administration fees spent on determining who should get which handouts. If it's universal, all that management overhead disappears.

It's like retirement

Your view of retirement doesn't match the retired people around me.

How much of that is due to retirement coming for most people when they are old? I'm pretty sure that if I retire at, say, 67, I'll spend a lot more time watching TV than I would if I had retired at 27.

So what ?

Just consider the simplest thought experiment: levy a one-off extra tax of $0.01 on every tax payer and credit some random poor person. This is almost certainly a strict Pareto improvement, but it clearly doesn't scale.

In the U.S., this already happened in Alaska with the Alaska Permanent Fund. All residents of Alaska receive annually a portion of the proceeds from Alaska's oil revenue. Alaska tried to prevent internal migrants from receiving this by having the dividend be dependent on a person's years of residency in Alaska , but this was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Zobel v. Williams[2]. Now, anyone who has lived a whole year in Alaska is eligible to receive the dividend.

As such, a social safety net as generous as UBI will likely not be workable in the United States. Other states' unemployed residents would likely swarm the state with UBI. (Unless of course, if the Supreme Courts decides to reverse its decision in Zobel v. Williams.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/55/

"Under the plan, each adult resident receives one dividend unit for each year of residency subsequent to 1959, the first year of Alaska's statehood. Appellants, residents of Alaska since 1978, brought an action in an Alaska state court challenging the statutory dividend distribution plan as violative of, inter alia, their right to equal protection guarantees. ... the dividend statute creates fixed, permanent distinctions between an ever-increasing number of classes of concededly bona fide residents based on how long they have lived in the State."

Most countries which are not the Unites States don't have the power to make large scale systematic changes that this requires. It might not be possible even in the US, what with states shipping homeless people to other states and all.

People have been saying that since the industrial revolution. Yet here we are with millions employed doing bullshit jobs that don't need to exist.

Creating a death spiral because consumers buying things is the fuel which makes the entire economy run and grow, so when you fire them all and replace them with robots, your individual profit might temporarily rise but as we all do it, more and more fall out of the workplace and can no longer consume, hurting the economy based on consuming.

Basic income may come across as a luxury today, in a world where there can still be enough jobs for the number of people in the economy, but it very well may become a requirement to ensure that consumers exist to buy automatically produced and automatically served goods.

P.S. the taxes don't necessarily rise on the workers, but rather on the automators and producers. The amount of income and wealth in this country is not decreasing, rather, the amount of it going to workers and consumers is. Is it ideal to have the government redistribute it such that the engine stops running poorly and works well again? No, but the alternative is worse.

Currently in Germany for example there are a lot of people on long-term unemployment that have enough children and low demand for their skills that if they worked they would earn less. This in principle is one of the advantages of UBI. That if everybody gets it, you don't have to take it away as soon as somebody earns money. So everything you earn, will be beneficial to you.

Of course if UBI is set too high it might not be attractive to work for only a little more, but right now you have people that would earn less if they worked.