The Finnish Basic Income Experiment Revisited

To summarise the experiment: For two years, the Finnish government deposited €560 into the bank accounts of two thousand Finns. Participants had to be unemployed as of the beginning of 2017 when the trial run was initially rolled out; otherwise, selection was completely random. At the end, they were asked to report on how the bonus monthly income had affected their lives according to a series of metrics. These metrics included wellbeing, confidence, life satisfaction, and trust in government — all of which went up. Advocates of UBI have seized on these results as evidence of the policy’s benefits. Skeptics have pointed out that establishing the connection between satisfaction and free money is hardly a sociological breakthrough. “When you are secure and free, you feel better,” said journalist Tuomas Muraja, who was one of the participants. But one hardly needs to spend €27,000,000 to confirm such a truism.

The most controversial aspect of the experiment, and the one that led so many to call it a failure, centred on the question of employment. One of the expectations behind the whole project was that, given a non-trivial bump in income with no strings attached, unemployed people would be more energised and motivated to find a job that suited them. In the first year, 18% of participants did find work, but this was about the same rate as the control group. By the end of the following year, 27% were employed, a modestly higher rate than the control group.

One of the most widespread fears surrounding the implementation of a truly universal basic income policy states that, deprived of economic incentives to get a job, people would become fat, lazy, and passive. Weirdly, the Finnish experiment is sometimes upheld as evidence in favour of this view, even though it actually brought about a marginal increase in employment. This increase may not have been all that statistically meaningful, but it should at least allay concerns that UBI has an overwhelmingly negative affect on employment.

Broadly speaking, the entire experiment does seem to me to have been a failure, not because it didn’t prove the value of UBI but because it didn’t prove the value of anything much. Finland is a notoriously expensive country, with median incomes hovering around €3,000 per month. This means that the €560 participants received was more like an allowance than a meaningful income replacement, which is the whole point of UBI. The policy would ultimately be about allowing people to live happy, meaningful, and dignified lives without recourse to drudgery. Based on the spike in happiness reported by participants, I think that, on this question at least, the jury is in.

Related posts:

People react negatively to criticism. Be it mild or full-blown, criticism is usually viewed as negative feedback. This should not be so and you should not always expend time and energy reacting badly…

The Voyager spacecraft is the Farthest Object from Earth, it was launch by NASA with Titan III centaur Rocket, Voyager 1 is zipping through space at 38,000 mph, is currently 11.7 billion miles from…

Each of us I hope once wanted to get or give someone who loves a perfect gift about what he dreamed of his whole life. So now in our time social medias as TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, and others still…