Results of Finland’s basic income experiment 2017–2018

A two-year basic income experiment was carried out in Finland in 2017-2018. The evaluation study is now available. The basic income recipients were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain than the control group. They also had a more positive perception of their economic welfare. The interpretation of the employment effects of the experiment is complicated by the introduction of the activation model in 2018.

[Goldendinosaur]

I think we should do an experiment with a sample not containing only unemployed people. For instance I am 24 years old, never been unemployed, but always have been forced to work (jobs that do not suit my talent at all), however if I would receive a basic income, I would try to set up my own company (for which I have no time and funds) in sustainable design, contributing more significantly than I am doing now.

It's quite simple, we can think out the dynamics, we can even ask what people would do without giving them the money, and check if they would quit their job and if yes, what they would do after that.
There lies the big potential 'emergent' gain, the possibility that people will pursue work that lie more closely to their talent, increasing total economic efficiency of the country.
But these gains will come mainly from people that are currently working a normal job.
Not from people that are unemployed already, as this is a very different sample from society.

[dewaynethomas]

Very useful video, especially when I run into people who think these UBI experiments were failures. Thank you, and nice production on the video.

[Galaxia]

Oh my god give these characters bigger heads!

[madkatdude]

This is of course just my uneducated guess, but I reckon if we didn't have to worry anymore about bringing food on the table and paying rent, we would have a lot of time and energy to invest in more important stuff.

[calderarecords]

Sad when we need to supersede monetary distribution with something like a *Resource Based Economy*

[agustinbs]

This experiment is cute, but totally unrelated to an implementation at full scale, where basically the people will have to work to pay themselves the UBI, which is stupid.

At the moment (2022) there is no amount of rich people in a country from where you can extract the money flow dividends (not the capital) to pay the ubi to the lower class that will choose to not work. But if there is enough people in a UBI country that are willing to work regardless the UBI, then that just becomes a unemployment insurance.

True UBI might be possible in the future where the level of productivity and automation is in such high level than with only a very few percent of the population will be needed to run the productivity machinery that produces the basic stuff we need to live. But that is still decades away.

[dgm]

So if you give people money on a regular basis they feel happier, less stressed, less depressed and more confident... Wow... Would you ever expect such surprising results? 😝 The Finnish government paid so much money to get those results... I could have told them for free, if they had asked me!

[alexsandoval]

That's a very dry way of sidestepping the fact that it failed horribly