Free Money Didn’t Help People Find Jobs, Finland Says

Discussed previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19114834" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19114834</a>

I find this title a good example of framing. From the article:<p>&quot;On the basis of an analysis of register data on an annual level, we can say that during the first year of the experiment the recipients of a basic income were no better or worse than the control group at finding employment in the open labor market&quot;<p>So you can say &quot;free money didn&#x27;t help people find jobs&quot;, or you could say &quot;free money didn&#x27;t discourage people to seek jobs&quot;. The connotation is a bit different.

Well that&#x27;s missing the point.<p>Basic income is not supposed to help them find jobs that can sustain them so they no longer need it, but make it optional. Stop make it mandatory to have a well paying job to be able to afford rent and food. Which, by the way, only applies to middle and lower classes anyway because people from higher classes can live off their investments and don&#x27;t have to work.

&quot;The Nordic social welfare champion spent the last two years handing out 560 euros ($635) per month to a randomly selected group of 2,000 jobless people aged between 25 and 58.&quot;<p>They were selected from a group of people who received a form of unemployment benefit called &quot;työmarkkinatuki&quot;. Without going into too much details, it meant that almost all of them had been unemployed for at least two years. And that means that huge chunk of them (I would guess that overwhelming majority) are basically unemployable because they have some limitations (physical of mental) or they do not have any education.

This whole study is a tragedy.<p>They made a study on a basic income, it cost huge amounts of money, and it was build to fail by declaring a stupid goal.<p>The other results look quite promising, but I tried looking into the data and unfortunately it&#x27;s very weak. They made only questionaires and the return rates were very low, so it doesn&#x27;t say much. They had really stupid mistakes in the report (confusing p-values and chi^2 values, wrong additions), all seems really sloppy.<p>In sum they made a study on a stupid goal, and the real results are not very meaningful due to poor methodological quality of the stury.

<i>The recipients did however report “less stress symptoms as well as less difficulties to concentrate and less health problems than the control group,” said Minna Ylikanno, lead researcher at Kela. “They were also more confident in their future and in their ability to influence societal issues.”</i><p>It did help people be healthier and happier though, but the headline only points out that they&#x27;re still unemployed. We must be doing something really wrong as a society when we treat jobs as an end, rather than a means.

My understanding was that as automation eats jobs people will need money to live whilst they pursue self-actualisation, creative living and community-based work&#x2F;contributions (in place of &quot;finding a job&quot;). If the reporting is correct in that the aim was to see how people would respond given the current state of affairs - get a haircut, get a job - then maybe the aim was misguided? Better mental-health, for example, and contributions to common&#x2F;public good (freed from the scourge of having a job and job-seeking obligations) might be what matter most as the jobs people tend to do are replaced with jobs that they can&#x27;t yet do. During that transition period of creative destruction what you really don&#x27;t want is civil unrest (or opioid abuse), right? Perhaps this should have formed a greater part the metric. Of course, how you go about raising taxes in this new world might prove an even more thorny question which relegates the former to &quot;continuing research&quot;.

Try it in developing countries. You can see vastly different outcomes, and generally the quality of life will increase in these places. It&#x27;s an irony that the countries that need this the most don&#x27;t have the funding, and the countries that do have the funding, report it isn&#x27;t working.

It would be more interesting to find what they did with their time before and after. And also the impact of UBI to the already employed. How their vocational prospects have changed.<p>Money given to the unemployed is not UBI, it&#x27;s the dole.

But are there jobs available in Finland? 560 euros is not much in Finland; I don&#x27;t expect people to willingly stay home and live off this amount.

Perhaps the participants in the study were carefully selected to get the desired outcome.<p>I can&#x27;t imaging that this is true in the general case.

Can anyone explain to me, with basic income, why wouldn&#x27;t I want to sit at home all day and play videogames?

Basic Income is a completed unworkable pipedream, a revival of the “utopianism” of 100 years ago, when society thought that everything could be fixed if we just introduce “x solution”. But we live in complex changing times, so they need for “simple” solutions will always be appealing. For examples, see the current political situation in the USA and Europe.

no, but it makes people happy.<p>Now, obviously that&#x27;s a bit against the capitalist grain and all that, but think of it this way:<p>the Luddite rebellion, and mass unrest happened in the UK because people&#x27;s livelihoods were taken away. Either through automation, or enclosure.<p>This left thousands upon thousands of people with little left to lose forced to crime in order to eat.<p>This is expensive for wider society, you need to spend money of security, courts, jail, insurance public damages.<p>Paying money to make them happy, so that they don&#x27;t _have_ to turn to crime, or a radical dictator candidate is a price worth paying.

Commenta saying “it wasn’t real basic income” remind me people who say “it wasn’t real communism” whenever their utopia fails in mass starvation and murdet.