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The problem I have with studies like this one is that they only measure the effects of getting a stipend during a limited amount of time with a limited amount of people. It's not universal and it's not basic.

From a non-scientific view point, of course giving people free money makes them feel better.

But from an experimental perspective, they aren't getting the 'full package' of UBI. The participants aren't seeing increased taxes and they aren't seeing inflation from this. Chances are, their landlord doesn't know about this extra money and hasn't raised their rent.

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Oh, this study was very useful, no matter how the guardian is trying to frame it. There was no clear indication that basic income encourages people to find jobs. You can scratch that one off the list.

Other than that, there's absolutely nothing surprising. You give people a money and they feel better. That's like... not exactly new information. And yeah, it will change their choices somewhat, which again is no big find.

There was a pretty big and important hypothesis that the study was trying to pin down: is UBI profitable? Do you give 500 EUR and get more back? The question is very reasonable and there was quite a bit of clamor for exactly this kind of pilot study to get details. Quite a few mechanisms could potentially get us there - for example people could focus on training for a better position. Or simply having more time to look for jobs they'd find better matches. And so on.

And the answer is: there is no trace of that.

Sure, we do need better studies, longer durations, higher amounts, more people. It's definitely something that's worth studying. But the gold standard so far, the linked study, found nothing in this direction. That's a big negative, and well worth noting - not hiding it into a bunch of "people feel better with more money" like this article is trying to do.

In Utopia for Realists, a book full off UBI case studies, this question is addressed multiple times and yes, UBI is a money saver for governments.

From an income redistribution standpoint giving $500 and mostly getting less back can make sense. If you give $500 to 10 people and get zero back, but one of those people earns a billion dollars per year, it could be still be fine. Either way, it's an important datapoint. It should be an intentional decision to do it as wealth redistribution if that's the way we want to go, rather than pretending it's something it isn't.

It's hard to get any conclusion from this article. There is this:

> The researchers also noted a mild positive effect on employment

> Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.

And, of course, the often neglected (and that appears as a negative on the numbers):

> Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours

But actually nothing of substance on either direction.

Do you have a better article?

It's a negative result. What isn't there matters - in particular, no info on there being some form of monetary ROI.

I don't have other sources at hand - just memories from when the study was published and there was quite a lot of discussion.

Hum... I've searched the study, and it looks like results are still scheduled to be published this year. Granted that it was a quick search, but I get no source for the claim that the result was negative.

Besides, UBI being cheaper to administer than current social security, failure in finding any difference is a reason to adopt it, not to keep the status quo.

UBI is definitely not cheaper that current social security. "To administer" maybe, but the total cost is probably orders of magnitude more, and doesn't even solve the problem: certain demographics will still need extra.

> UBI is definitely not cheaper that current social security.

If you count taxing a person to give the money back to the same person as a cost, it's certainly not.

If it improved people’s lives and had no obvious drawbacks, do we really need anything else to call it a success? Why is something only a success if it makes the stock market go up, or some capitalist richer? I cannot strongly stress enough how profoundly I do not care about either of those things. Making people’s lives better is an end unto itself.

I cannot strongly stress how amused and annoyed I am by you completely ignoring that this money has to come from somewhere. Goddamn kids.

Of course giving people money makes them happy. Problem is that money represents resources, there's a limited amount of those going around, and printing money doesn't do anything except devalue the value of a dollar.

It's a functional problem, not a distribution problem.

I cannot strongly stress how amused and annoyed I am by you defending the interests of people with more money than you and your entire family have ever made or ever will make.

You're right. Our current system requires us to use money to represent limited resources and those resources are not infinite. Congratulations.

However the idea here that some people just have to suffer and be catastrophically disadvantaged so that an (increasingly smaller and squeezed) middle class can enjoy the fruits of their hard labor as the money continues to concentrate at the top is absurd.

Try thinking outside of the box for a moment. The current system is fundamentally broken but I guess as long as you've got yours it suits your needs.

I was born in communist Romania. Thank you very much, but I had one socialist system in my life, I really don't want another. Every single one that humanity tried was either suboptimal, dystopian or straight up humanitarian catastrophe. But sure, I guess they weren't "real" socialism, so let's try and try and try again. sigh.

Somebody in my country once said something like: "If you're not communist at 20, you have no heart. If you're still communist at 30, you have no brain". So I guess I should be more patient. But well... I am a bit irritated by people saying things with conviction while not knowing enough history to cross the road.

It's disingenuous to suggest that the thing I am advocating for is the system as it existed in communist Romania. I am not.

Just as I do not advocate for the current economic system in the way it exists. However I know that our current system's goal isn't to provide for the people, and the failings of our current system are extreme.

My biggest point is that I'm not saying everyone should be provided a luxury yacht by the state. It's impractical and nobody needs a luxury yacht to be happy or live.

But I know that people do need things like a place to sleep, food to eat, and access to healthcare to be happy and live. And if you slip in to a situation where you lack any one of those things, getting out of it can be that much more difficult.

I think we have an obligation to each other as humans to try and provide for each other. I guess that it's an unpopular belief.

What history, literally two comments up I was saying how the standards defense is that "it was not _real_ communism, let's try again and this time we'll get it right". groan

The goal of the system isn't to provide for people. That's the core fallacy that doomed pretty much any socialist system ever. Systems are shit - all of them. More you rely on one, more fucked you are.

What you want is to let people to provide for themselves.

Because yes, they can and they want to. And trying to say that they need a "system" to provide for them... ugh. It's offensive in so many ways. People are not children - children are children.

Now, this being said, things are quite complicated. There are commons problems, which are very hard to solve by the free market. You do, unfortunately, need some system for those, with the inherent shittyness. But as a rule, the smaller it is the better. More you try to do centralized, worse results you get. Even the modern great success stories in social democracy (western countries, northern europe etc) - they either have a catch (like natural resources) or did most of their growth on a small system, and now are spending their success as social benefits.

And yes, you do want a social safety net, for general principles. You don't want old people dying in ditches because an investment firm went bust with their pensions. But that's about it - safety net has nothing to do with treating perfectly healthy adults like they're disabled or children. They are the ones _paying_ for the safety net. Somebody has to.

This bizarre sort of doublethink when it comes to organization is just so baffling. You seem to believe that private institutions can be as big as they want and will always run fine, but public institutions are always shit. Why? You say that people have to be left to take care of themselves- you show me a person who is truly taking care of himself without being a part of some larger organization or community and I’ll show you a naked hermit shivering in the woods. Look, I live in the United States, where we are utterly incapable of building something like high speed rail or dealing in an organized way with a pandemic, and it’s exactly this kind of thinking that got us here. There is no fundamental difference between a public and private organization, except that one is run somewhat democratically and the other is a private fiefdom. And we all have a duty to look out for each other, not just ourselves. That’s how civilization keeps itself going.

I'm not particularly sure what your point is. I don't love big private organizations. I'd prefer a world with medium sized companies that fail fast. But I don't hate them, not a lot - they have two big things that separate them from governments: you can always go to another, usually just by crossing the street and going into a different shop. And they can't shoot you or throw you in jail.

> There was no clear indication that basic income encourages people to find jobs. You can scratch that one off the list.

You clearly didn't read the study or even the guardian article. There was clear evidence that basic income encourages people to find jobs in many cases, just not conclusively in every case (which no proponent of UBI argues).

> There was a pretty big and important hypothesis that the study was trying to pin down: is UBI profitable? Do you give 500 EUR and get more back?

That wasn't even close to the hypothesis that they were trying to disprove. You made this up off the top of your head. They were trying to develop a simpler, less bureaucratic welfare system that didn't have the pitfalls of the existing system while measuring dependent's wellbeing.

> And the answer is: there is no trace of that.

Again, not true. There was plenty of evidence that a UBI (as enacted in this study) could have positive economic effects, just not in every single case, and not conclusively.

Pretty much the only conclusive result from this study was that the dependents had a better sense of well being on average from the control group. That's it. I have no idea where you got these made up factoids from, I cant find any kind of review or analysis that shares your opinions or statements.

Don't we already know how that works? Folks on a pension; folks in a state that provides stipends (e.g. Alaska); folks who are independently wealthy. Their behavior has been studied repeatedly, I imagine.

In fact I'm confused why this keeps being 'tried' like its some new idea.

Alaska is highly underrated in terms of UBI experiments.

Australia too

It's only about $1600 a year in a state with high living expenses. I don't see how that will tell you much about a full-on UBI program.

Used to be higher. Lots of historical data.

No, it didn't. It peaked at $1900 for 2000, which if we take into account inflation is about $3000, which is still a 1/4th of the $12000 most proposals put forward. There'sno point in exaggerating these things, is tehre?

1982 $1,000.00 1983 $386.15 1984 $331.29 1985 $404.00 1986 $556.26 1987 $708.19 1988 $826.93 1989 $873.16 1990 $952.63 1991 $931.34 1992 $915.84 1993 $949.46 1994 $983.90 1995 $990.30 1996 $1,130.68 1997 $1,296.54 1998 $1,540.88 1999 $1,769.84 2000 $1,963.86 2001 $1,850.28 2002 $1,540.76 2003 $1,107.56 2004 $919.84 2005 $845.76 2006 $1,106.96 2007 $1,654.00 2008 $2,069.00 2009 $1,305.00 2010 $1,281.00 2011 $1,174.00 2012 $878.00 2013 $900.00 2014 $1,884.00 2015 $2,072.00 2016 $1,022.00 2017 $1,100.00 2018 $1,600.00 2019 $1,606.00

Huh. I thought it was 10K at some time. Foo.

I've seen this behavior in companies before: the measurements will continue until the desired result is obtained.

We needed it. Truth is, we didn't know a bunch of important things before this study. In particular, we didn't know if people were going to work more or less. Quite a lot of people were hoping for "more" (or at least better), me included. It was a long shot, but if it turned out to be true it would have been a game changer. Turns out it's not.

why were you hoping that people would work more?

Because current unemployment support works on the idea that people must be scared by poverty into getting a new job, and so being unemployed is ultimately a state society tries to punish you out off.

If simply giving people money left them more successful at getting a new job, there would really not be any point in all the CV theatre a jobseeker routinely needs to perform.

There's such thing as poverty trap. You need money to survive so you get a low paying job, you can't afford to quit it so you keep at it, 10 years pass and you're still there. UBI was supposed to short-circuit this. But at least in that particular study we didn't see a lot of it happening - even though 1-2 years should be enough time to change things.

And that was not obvious from studies of pensioners etc?

We already know how society looks like if a small portion does not need to work. But how will it be if no one needs to work?

An interesting case is Saudi Arabia that pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization

Also housewives, disability recipients, unemployed young adults still living at home, retirees.

We've got several demographics that have their basic needs covered without working. Not all are directly comparable with working peers, but surely some likely outcomes could be predicted.

There was some studies in USA in the 70s which spurred som controversy due to an increased divorce rate. Ostensibly due to more housewives using the financial safety to beak free.

An interesting datapoint since you mentioned that group.

Yes. Another fine example of, "when you incentivize doing something, people are more likely to do it."

> The problem I have with studies like this one is that they only measure the effects of getting a stipend during a limited amount of time with a limited amount of people. It's not universal and it's not basic.

You have to start somewhere before being "universal" and "basic".

this study does not represent a step forward, however.

It does because it counters one of the top conservative arguments against UBI (or any safety net at all for that matter) because participants _increased_ their days of work compared to unemployment insurance. Too many people are of the "you work or you should die" mentality in the developed world. This makes some sense in some situations but not anymore either. Considering the hilariously stupid things that count as employment today, the concept of "work" must evolve for us to have an honest conversation on what the point of all these programs are for in the 21st century and beyond.

I feel this experiment is better framed as means tested unemployment insurance bureaucracy vs an unconditional cash stipend. This strengthens my longtime argument that means testing is punishing to the less fortunate because it robs them of the resource most precious to all of us - time and energy. I took unemployment before when I was laid off and it was pretty laborious and took me several hours to go through the hoops to file in the first place and the confusion of how to confirm I actually applied for jobs didn't help.

And that's fair. But experimentally I would like to see the effects measured for a whole town, a city, or even a county.

This was done, as the Mincome experiment, in Dauphin, Manitoba in the early 1970s.

Did all of the basic income funding come from the population of Dauphin though, or was it subsidized by a larger tax base like that of Manitoba or Canada? For a useful experiment to be conducted, seems that the program should be funded entirely from the population that receives the benefit.

Large study in Kenya currently going on https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/

What are you studying in that case? "Income"? We could look at trust fund kids to see whether getting income without doing anything makes them want to work in otherwise not attractive jobs.

This wouldn’t be an experiment, It would be a case study. And it would a case study that could be highly influenced by other factors, such as family network, influence, culture etc.

As someone who's paid rent for several years, I've found that landlords don't need a reason to raise rent and prices tend to go up irrespective of wages.

Correct. An example would be to look around military bases or colleges that cater to the military. Rents are often on par with BAH (Basic Housing Allowance) and college's per credit hour is often near the $750 rate.

A key part of UBI is that the recipient can allocate the funds as they please.

If someone goes to a college that costs $500 per credit hour, can they spent the other $250 on whatever they want?

Another key part would be if a college charged 500$ per credit hour, can they now charge $750?

Its a free market. Folks imagine that prices will 'soak up' UBI magically. But the market doesn't work that way. In fact, when demand goes up and volume goes up, prices come down for most things.

Surely you realize that demand and volume for college has gone up in the US. Also, the US gives out unlimited "free" money to attend. (student loans) And "magically" the pice of college has in fact skyrocketed, or even "soaked up" the excess money.

Because colleges were in the 'money pipe', and could gatekeep. In a free market (which I guess colleges aren't) it would not work that way.

Would you have considered the pre-2007 housing market a part of the free market? Same exact thing happened there. "Free" money given out and the market figured out how to soak it up very quickly.

But with the UBI, the money isn't 'for' anything. Its just more money. It can be spent on donuts, or houses, or college, or hookers and blow. None of those markets has any 'claim' on the money. I doubt anybody will figure out a way to 'soak it up'

Agree to disagree. Giving people money will solve exactly zero problems.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary?

Its FUD that keeps the UBI from happening. Not logic, evidence nor sound economic principles. Old farts that can't let go of 1950's notions of how people should behave.

Did you read the link that created this thread? UBI won't solve anything. I hate to burst your bubble, but you're just ignoring facts. "Old farts" have nothing to do with it.

A single limited Finnish experiment of limited duration was loosely characterized. Not proving anything; not rational to deduce all that from 'an article'. No, this is more cherry-picking to support a preconceived notion - that the Protestant Work Ethic will always be the right answer to everything.

Read a dozen more articles, not from your bubble, and then get back to me.

Of course in Finland education is free, but yes the point of the UBI is that it is not constrained, and can be used to augment part-time work, etc, etc.

You can study the effect of taxes and benefits separately since they happen to different people. This won't prove anything about inflation, but there are other things people have been concerned about.

In particular, there are people who say that if you give people money with no strings attached they will just spend it on alcohol or drugs, and it's good to have evidence for a more nuanced view.

20 year study of an entire region

https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...

It's true. The incentive problem remains unanswered! Among others.

> From a non-scientific view point, of course giving people free money makes them feel better.

It does? My belief, though I have no facts to back it up, is that some of people (but not all) would feel bad taking charity. For some people knowing they are effectively taking from others bothers them.

I guess it depends on your view on charity, and taking from others.

I happen to think I’m owed quite a bit of rent from all the externalities pushed on to me to allow the owning class to live of rent alone while I do the value crating labor in exchange for the lowest price they can get away with in a saturated labor market.

And I hope most people who are getting the short end of that stick also realize how they are being screwed over by the current system.

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