Results of Findland's basic income experiment | Hacker News Reader

Results of Findland's basic income experiment

stm.fi

68 pointsgrahameb21 comments

Better wellbeing is so important. Less health cost, less safety service costs (police for example), better performing people, less sick people at work, and so on.

It is unfortunate most countries today are reigned by short term money while happy people means long term profit.

Better reported wellbeing is not that important.

I would also report being happy if I think saying the opposite could cost me this nice additional income.

That's a rather pessimistic and evil stance to assume other people to have. At the same time: if that was someones incentive, wouldn't that also cause happiness or well-being to increase anyway?

My point is that reported data is generally very unreliable, since there’s all kind of incentives that bias the results.

As for that generating happiness, think of drugs for instance, that you personally want them doesn’t mean they’re good to you.

What makes it evil? That word is thrown around too easily. If there is an incentive, it has to be considered as a possible explanation

It is evil to assume everyone else is evil and the only difference between people is those who have been caught doing evil things and those who are hiding it well. It assumes there are no well-intentioned people or people who wouldn't feel the need to lie.

Why would you assume that I’m assuming everyone is evil?

I’m just assuming that people generally follow incentives and thus averages will reflect them. If you need any evidence for “People follow incentives”, we have full branches of studies built on that premise.

My guess would be that you’re assuming I think people would lie, and you find lying reprehensible (I don’t).

In any case, IMO the biggest problems here are that apples to apples comparisons are very hard to make, and long term effects are essentially unknowable.

So the additional income is "nice", but wouldn't that mean it is improving your wellbeing? Removing the extra income would reduce your happiness, would it not?

Not necessarily. That the additional income is “nice” means that you personally think it has improved your wellbeing, not that it has.

I might think that bacon makes me feel happier, until I need a bypass 10 years later.

Fair enough. Re-reading your comment now and I understand your point better.

While I fully support basic income, I don't feel a survey is very insightful.

I mean, we have to work with the tools we have got, but it's not like this was a blinded result. All survey participants would have been aware: 1) they did get money or not 2) the survey is being used for a study about potentially getting money in the future, if it shows positive impacts.

People are smart, they know what the "right answer" is to have this declared positive.

Maybe if the study was run 30 years people would forget the effects or something.

I don't think a short term study of basic income looking for survey results was ever going to give us insight into whether we should do it.

Again, I support basic income, but as a more efficient and fair redistribution tool with fewer malincentives and as a necessary tool to morally give people a minimum quality of life.

What was interesting was the increased work hours from the pool that got basic income. To me that is the only meaningful signal from this study.

Please correct "findland" to finland.

Came here to protect my neighbouring country's pride by saying that. Thanks for not making me the first and only one. :)

Hello fellow Baltic Sea inhabitant .

Oops - yes, please correct :)

In short, people with basic income work less, feel happier, produce less. Nothing too extraordinary.

"The response rate for the survey was 23% (31% for the basic income recipients and 20% for the control group), which is typical for surveys."

At least they should answer the study they were enrolled into :| This shows the recipients have little consideration for the tax-payers.

Did you read the article? The result was that recipients had a modest increase in employment compared to nonrecipients.

edit: to be clear, there was no effect either way in the first year of the test. The modest increase in the second year is complicated by something called "the activation module".

"In accordance with the preliminary plan for the evaluation, the employment effects of the basic income experiment were measured for the period from November 2017 to October 2018. The employment rate for basic income recipients improved slightly more during this period than for the control group. During the reference period, the basic income increased the number of days of employment by 6 days and the basic income recipients were employed for 78 days on average.

However, the interpretation of the effects of the experiment is made more complicated by the introduction of the activation model at the beginning of 2018, which meant more stringent entitlement criteria for unemployment benefits asymmetrically in both groups."

The result is plausible, I would also feel happier if I was on BI while the rest of society is not.

Maybe Im allowed to make a meta comment here. I would have anticipated more comments on this topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103251

Reply on news.ycombinator.com