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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

This article makes it seem like we did not know this already. There has been numerous experiments on UBI and pretty much everyone showed that it was working and in fact saving money. One of the biggest examples are the Mincome results [1] which showed significant reduction in hospitilization by 8.5% and only very minor reduction in working hours (mostly women using the money to have more time to care for their children) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

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This article makes it seem like we did not know this already.

Having multiple repeated studies that replicate the same outcomes is a good thing.

Indeed. However I wish we could celebrate that replication a little more instead of selling everything as the hottest new finding since sliced bread.

To be fair, sliced bread replicated really well.

We don’t “know” something just because one study showed it.

But mincome actually did show a reduction in working hours, which is hard to spin as “improve employment”.

It says "mostly women using the money to have more time to care for their children". I call this improvement, if not in "employment" (an abstract concept) then in "quality of life" (a real thing)

This might also be interpretd as anti-feminist, since this will increase the non-adjusted gender pay gap.

I know people who absolutely despise their job. More money isn't necessarily better.

We men better use more time to take care of children to compensate for that (and get better relationsships with our children).

That doesn't resolve the concern laid out by the parent commenter at all.

It certainly does. If men was at home with their children as much as women, the part of the non-adjusted gender pay gap that is due to women being home more with children would disappear.

I would say both of those things are pretty abstract.

“The basic income is claimed to produce a range of health and social benefits, but it is important to underscore that none of the income maintenance experiments, including Mincome, produced direct evidence of a causal relation between income support and health outcomes.“

Are there any ways to produce direct evidence of this causal relation (or any causal relation)?

Yes. Do what Mincome did and randomly assign the incomes to people.

> that it was working and in fact saving money.

You need to define what you mean by UBI before making such claim. It might save money if it means a single benefit paid to everyone who does not work. This has existed in some form in some countries for a long time (e.g. France [1]). Results are debatable because there are several parameters to take into account and several parameters to play with when implementing such scheme. Certainly, "improved employment" is very tricky to achieve, if it is possible at all.

If UBI means handing money to everyone, then it is not a realistic prospect not least because it is un-affordable (the ooposite of saving money...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_de_solidarit%C3%A9_acti...

The one in Finland, one of the biggest ever conducted, was a failure.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/nordic-welfare-news/heikki-h...

TL;DR: Flawed non-UBI experiment was inconclusive.

Well, hold on, from that link,

"The Finnish experiment was about partial basic income targeting able-bodied people without work, it was not about universal basic income."

And further down,

"However, the Finnish government introduced a new activation policy into the Finnish unemployment system at the beginning of 2018 – that is, during the second year of the experiment – which contaminated the control group."

And,

"It is also important to note that labour markets did not pick up before early 2018. That means there could be more visible effects in 2018, but if that is the case, we cannot really know if that was related to basic income."

Finally,

"Firstly, the experiment did not include a baseline survey. We do not know if people’s subjective assessments changed after they started to receive basic income."

Basically they didn't even do a UBI experiment, their control was messed up, they didn't compare before/after, they had a poor survey response, etc.

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