Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
scottsantens.substack.com
scottsantens.substack.com
The results were that the one with unconditional payments had "better mental health".
Apparently they used a "validated five-item mental health screening instrument that identifies people at risk of mood and anxiety disorders", but realistically how much of this is just people prefer money with no strings attached. Seems pretty obvious. I'm sure a lot of things are linked to "poor mental health" like having to go to work, doing chores and basic maintenance to stay alive. Don't really know is this kind of observation has broader implications
Which I saw in my own family. My mother was never unemployed and never demanded anything from the state coffers, but she was afraid of the bureaucracy and the inscrutable power that it wielded over citizens' matters.
My former secretary is somewhat spooked by contact with the governmental structures as well.
The requirements were a nightmare. Your employer had to fill out regular forms, the office administering the program had to fill out regular forms, when they made mistakes they'd threaten to take away your housing (and the office frequently made mistakes). If you were employed there were perverse incentives... they would reduce your benefits my MORE than you earned so it only made sense to get a job if the pay would completely disqualify you from the program. It really was torture.
You've essentially described how employment works, and yes, it can be rather unpleasant.
So you think unemployed people are in better mental health than those with jobs?
I guess this is part of the reason why we need these studies: because people's default assumptions are often wildly off.
If the goal is to get people back to work, it might not make sense to optimize just for better mental health.
I'd like to see welfare systems and tax codes modified with a rule that no situation can cause more than a 50% marginal "tax". (Which would mean many cutoffs in the tax code would effectively be replaced with phaseouts even if Congress didn't specifically fix them.)
This is very much a problem in the US. I've lived it myself before I was making 6+ figures, and I've known many people that lived through it as well.
I had a higher quality of life working very part time minimum wage + benefits (SNAP, free healthcare, subsidized housing) than I did making 50k/year.
Most on welfare like that, you actually end up with a much worse quality of life the moment you make a little more money or find a better job and lose your benefits. There's far too big of a gap between "needs assistance" and "makes enough money to have the same or better quality of life as being on benefits" so for most, you just purposely work less or work lower paying jobs in order to keep collecting benefits because to do otherwise means you are worse off.
For someone who has subsidized housing, free healthcare, and SNAP, why would purposefully lose all of that, but still remain poor, just because now you work 40 hours/week instead of 20. Unless you can make a huge jump (say, go from minimum wage up to $75k+/year immediately), don't bother trying to get off welfare, it won't do you any good.
However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499.
What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around is to have benefits adjusted to get people to a baseline.
Say the poverty level is $1000 a month. You get $1000 - X, where X is how much you made in that month.
Most welfare systems have phased benefit reductions (there is a point where the benefit hits zero, which can be viewed as a hard cutoff, but it doesn't go "full benefit up to the line and then zero at the line" in most cases, though there are exceptions.
> If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499.
If the SNAP cutoff applicable to your situation was $501, then your actual benefit at $500 would be $24 (the minimum SNAP benefit), not $500. Because SNAP does a $0.30 per dollar of income clawback until the minimum benefit is reached, and then stays at the minimum benefit until the eligibility limit income is reached.
There is a cliff still, but its a lot smaller of a cliff (for SNAP alone) than you are painting.
And your system doesn't work. Working is almost never truly free, you have to spend some money to make money. And you don't have that time available to do other things that stretch the money you have.
There are corner cases where making more can leave you with less outside of welfare. Tripping into the next IRMAA bucket is one simple to understand one.
Are there any actual cases of making more earned income via a regular job worse than taking that extra dollar of pay? I'm guessing a few very rare corner-cases exist, but I can't immediately think of any. I imagine they would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the EITC or AMT type things.
And basically, as your income goes up, so does your Medicare premium.
That ensures that everybody gets prompt payouts and feels that there’s a safety net, but no complex means testing and bureaucracy. And the same net cost, although the timing of the payouts will shift a bit
School lunch programs have two phases, free, and reduced. Medicaid varies a bit by state, but transitions to Obamacare subsidies. Hitting the cutoff for medicaid can really hurt, though, if your employer doesn't provide healthcare benefits.
Or maybe they consider getting money you can live on without working to be a success. I know I would.
Having spent a bunch of time with people who have had persistent issues with stable income, a lot of them internalize it at various levels as them personally not being worth anything, because so many systems involved seem to be operating in bad faith.
Anything involving the US medical system, for instance - even as someone working in tech with good health insurance, so many of my interactions with doctors can be summarized as "the doctor makes a snap judgment in the first 30 seconds of interacting with you, and arguing with it results in them interacting in bad faith thereafter".
And that's not as bad as other machinery in the US. The advice I've heard around trying to use the limited social safety machinery in the US is "plan for it to be a fulltime job for multiple years to get on it, and expect to randomly be kicked off it repeatedly".
And having the systems you interact with regularly very clearly act in bad faith, assuming by default you don't deserve things, does things to people's mental health.
What I think this does underscore the importance of not trying to make the program ensure personal accountability. That means we must find a way to ensure program accountability, and measure long-term results, without burdening the recipients with additional mental health burdens.
It could be IQ, cultural-specific, polarized against authority, much of which deserve monitoring.
I do not think it is a cost-effective way for working population to fund this "freestyle" living unless society gets something from the idles.
Otherwise, like a professor giving out highest grade of a student to rest of the class, that too shall normalizes ...." at the lowesr level.
It doesn't seem so confounding to me. If you were unemployed and needing assistance, do you think you would be happier or less happy having someone require you to report if you've got a job yet and they can take the income away?
Is this an example of an article being resubmitted (by the same user?) or otherwise boosted back onto the front page?
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2025-035.pdf
It would be better if they made it mandatory for everyone to respond to follow-up surveys, as the response rate differed enough to be called out as a study limitation.
One interesting thing to note is that the study didn’t find that basic income support increased the chances of becoming employed, or receiving basic income support reduced crime. I am also not sure how to extrapolate study results from Finnish people to people in other cultures.
Well the article points out similar (and sometimes even stronger) effects on mental health for experiments in Malawi and Germany. So seems that it does extrapolate.
You observe further differences in program outcomes when you notice that providing basic income support in both Finland and Germany did not reduce crime, but there was some evidence of crime reduction in other places under similar programs. So I don’t take the mental health improvement results for granted, especially since, at least in the Finland case, it’s unclear what will happen when you increase the sample of respondents, ie is the effect going to increase, or decrease, or become negligible altogether.
I also think these studies need to report on societal benefits like crime reduction, graduation rates, or gainful employment activity as well. Maybe you cannot ensure that individual effects such as mental health status might improve across countries under such programs. But maybe by pulling enough levers, you can ensure that crime reduction is always a guarantee regardless of type of place.
Consider also that there’s an unnecessary assumption that giving people more money is a meaningful benefit. What if you tested against different options, like creating more community programs, third places, or apprentice programs which guarantee jobs with a certain income. UBI is a useful tool under some circumstances, but assuming that it will improve individual outcomes across the board is unfounded. I still do think that a thoughtful and robust UBI program might ensure more stable local communities and economies, regardless of its benefits or lack thereof for an individual receiving it. In short, these studies are measuring the wrong outcomes to make their case.
If you read the article, what does it mean “better mental health”? It means nothing, the “researchers” just came up with some made up metric that justifies their -probable- initial intended outcome according to their political ideology.
I couldn’t care less of the “mood” of people receiving my taxpayer money to stay home without finding a job. If I’m forced (by threat of violence from the state, mind you) to work more hours to give my money to these people, the minimum I expect, is for the metrics to show that my money, served to speed up these people finding a new job and stop living on my money.
All other metrics are irrelevant.
I, for one, am happy to pay taxes to fund this.
I've never understood the argument that people would choose to live like that. It doesn't make any sense.
There are plenty of complaints on HN how increased buerocratic burdens/tasks, in particular when they seem pointless or unrelated, leads to low job satisfaction, burn out and mental health issues. But somehow when it comes to the unemployed the same thing does not apply?
I certainly can relate that the more tasks pile up the more stressed I become (and being unemployed certainly can feel stressful). Adding some pointless administrative tasks that don't help with my actual goals can often be enough to push me over the edge so I just want to quit.
Sales taxes ramp up the cost of living.
That's an unnecessary quip as that's not the point of checks.
It's not surprising that if unemployed people receive benefits with no strings attached their "mental health" is better since it removes pressure to find a job.
> It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out—that created these dramatic improvements in psychological well-being.
It not about trusting people with the money they are given.
The usual checks are because people are expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits are only meant to help them while they can't and are looking for a job. It is not meant to enable a life-style, which is what unconditionality can lead to.
> the conditions we attach to welfare aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences. They are active harms. They create stress, anxiety, and psychological damage that persists even when the financial support is adequate.
Oh dear... This reads like a parody at that point.
An useful measurement would be to see which group, if any, found a job quicker. A finding that conditionality does not speed things up would be noteworthy and helpful, a finding that people feel better when they get money every month unconditionally isn't.
NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers. 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pressure.
>>expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits
This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
>> not meant to enable a life-style
An income of €560 per month, about $20/day, is hardly a lifestyle; it is enough to stay out of the gutter. This is only giving to people who do not have savings a sliver of the resources available to people sufficiently fortunate enough to have education and savings to fall back on.
It shows many of the differences in poverty are not due to any kind of merit/demerit, but simply lack of funds.
>>An useful measurement would be
Yes, that would be a DIFFERENT useful measurement. But to ignore the mental health aspects is to ignore real harms to both the people themselves and to the larger society, such as reduced isolation and crime, healthier communities, etc. Much of this was addressed by other experiments later in the article, which you either failed to read or intentionally ignored.
The entire point of the studies and article wasn't your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)", but the effects of payments vs bureaucracy.
The actual evidence is massively piling up that eliminating a patriarchal bureaucracy, means testing, and all this other govt overhead and simply giving everyone just-above-poverty-level income, will dramatically improve society, and it will be far more effective than all the layers of bureaucracy which not only add overhead, cost to the taxpayer, but also actual harm.
My sides.
There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.
> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:
"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."
That's unemployment benefits.
Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".
> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",
It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.
Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.
A lot of people think that a supermarket with self-check out would probably be empty within the day, with people trucking off their goods in every which direction. Maybe in some places that's actually still how it works. This supposes that morality is mostly extrinsic (low trust society).
Throughout quite a bit of the West, Europe , Finland we're dealing with high trust societies these days. In these countries, all said and done self checkout is actually netto cheaper to run than manned checkout, and that includes shrinkage. (Above some point) every penny spent on checkout counter operators is wasted. So -at least in Finland-, morality is mostly intrinsic (high trust society).
If you tell this story to a person from a low trust society, they'll think you're pulling their leg. Every man, woman, and child to themselves, right?
Meanwhile, in high trust societies like Finland, it's just Tuesday: 'Bleep... bleep'.
Now when it comes to people with intrinsic morality: Making them go through extra procedures might actually slow them down; Hiring extra people to keep an eye on them can go negative yield.
There's more to be said on this, but the key intuition is that much of western thinking on morality is still calibrated on extrinsic morality, while many westerners are now actually being raised with intrinsic morality. It's a slow cultural change.
+ see also: Dan Pink: Drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
That is true, but it leaves out the question of who's morals we are discussing. If the recipient is not under any obligation, and yet gets a job, that morality is played out in them.
If the person is under obligation and gets a job as a result, their moral position is unknown but likely unchanged
Or perhaps we are talking about wanting other people to live out our morality?
Let's say someone does not get a job. Are they looking for one and being unsuccessful or are they just cashing their benefits?
Checks are needed in practice unless it can be shown they are not (what I suggested in my previous comments).
as far as I understand this entire conversation around ubi, that ideal isn’t the issue. Proponents rather hold that you cannot scale this to a society without the cost exceeding the benefit. The bureaucratic machine to sustain these rules inevitably becomes soulless, expensive, inefficient, and counter productive. Is the argument.
It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s that, at scale, we can’t. Is the argument :)
I don’t think your statement on morals is necessarily incompatible with the practical considerations offered by others. It’s a different conversation.
In the richest most affluent society in the history of the planet.
In a society where it is organized so a handful of people control more than 50% of the society's wealth, and it is also organized so the minimum wage has stripped is no longer even sufficient to work FULL TIME and get above the poverty line. In a society where a family owns the largest employer in the country and sits on $Billions of wealth while they pay so little that a substantial number of their employees qualify for food assistance.
Who is freeloading, the billionaire owners taking massive tax breaks and paying less than their office workers, or the minimum-wage laborer who must "take" government assistance in addition to his pay merely in order to not starve?
A society can rightly be judged by how it treats it's lowest members.
A moral affluent society would organize itself so every single person has a minimum of food, housing, healthcare, and education, even if a few were freeloading.
Instead, you attempt to justify refusing to feed and house people because a few might freeload. Or, if not refusing, to implement massive government bureaucracies, which 1) are both costly and 2) are proven to make worse outcomes and 3) are even more easily defrauded, merely to make sure all the lowly workers who cannot get a leg up are suitably shamed and monitored, lest they receive just a little too much.
And do not start on how some will waste UBI it on alcohol or drugs. The rich also waste their lives in the same way.
While you stand on your moral high-horse, you argue for the most immoral actions.
Well, except you have to contribute a lot more of your time to support the billionaire lifestyle than the benefits one.
The legal difference is who owns some bits of paper but there is no physical difference in the work you do.
If not, why not? Those checks are just there because you are expected to earn a profit for the company.
Many jobs _do_ have someone constantly looking over your shoulder to ensure that you're doing to job adequately. These jobs are often low-trust environments often staffed by low-trust individuals.
In terms of the unemployed, are they mostly high-trust or low-trust? That's what should determine the terms and conditions of the program, not whether they "like" the program or not.
As in you, the currently employed person.