
Free Money Didn’t Help People Find Jobs, Finland Says - moopling
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-08/finland-finds-basic-income-failed-to-boost-employment
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merricksb
Discussed previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19114834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19114834)

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perfunctory
I find this title a good example of framing. From the article:

"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"

So you can say "free money didn't help people find jobs", or you could say
"free money didn't discourage people to seek jobs". The connotation is a bit
different.

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SiempreViernes
It's even better than that! The title the authors of the study put on their
press release is: "Preliminary results of the basic income experiment: self-
perceived wellbeing improved, during the first year no effects on
employment"[0]

So not only does Bloomberg frame it like the doomsday prediction that everyone
would turn into idlers never happened, the significant increase in mental
health is just quietly sidestepped.

[0]: [https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-
archive/-/asset_publisher/lN...](https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-
archive/-/asset_publisher/lN08GY2nIrZo/content/preliminary-results-of-the-
basic-income-experiment-self-perceived-wellbeing-improved-during-the-first-
year-no-effects-on-employment)

~~~
VvR-Ox
THAT is exactly the problem:

OUR SYSTEM doesn't care how happy you are, as long as you're productive enough
for some people to get rich.

No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer poverty.

OUR SOCIETY values power and wealth (at least here in the west, I heard about
other countries who don't do this so dedicated). If you're poor, sick or have
no job than there is even people who'd argue for mercy killing you as not
being strong enough for our good society.

I think the report about this experiment shows how far away we moved from
humanity.

~~~
SeaSeaRider
_“No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer
poverty.”_

What on earth is this comment. Where do you live in “the west”? Western
societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that most people
are looked after (nothing is perfect). Your rhetoric is baffling.

~~~
VvR-Ox
I live in Europe and see how things go down the sewer here. Why can't you?

As a child people had enough money for a good end of life and now they crawl
around and collect food and other stuff from waste containers.

Also statistics clearly shows this development. Look at stuff like this
([https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-richest-
people-own-as-much-as-poorest-50-per-cent-oxfam-report)) and tell me what you
think about that please.

What's baffling about that, can you further explain it to me?

> Western societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that
> most people are looked after

Do you live in Disneyland?

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eloisant
Well that's missing the point.

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't have to work.

~~~
bedane
Agreed

And it did help improve well-being! I'd say it's a success

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hpaavola
"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."

They were selected from a group of people who received a form of unemployment
benefit called "työmarkkinatuki". 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.

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hannob
This whole study is a tragedy.

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.

The other results look quite promising, but I tried looking into the data and
unfortunately it's very weak. They made only questionaires and the return
rates were very low, so it doesn't say much. They had really stupid mistakes
in the report (confusing p-values and chi^2 values, wrong additions), all
seems really sloppy.

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.

~~~
Svoka
why do you think it failed? IMO - it succeeded. In face of skeptics who told
that people won't do anything, people on UBI still found jobs as often as
those who didn't have it.

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davidgf
_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.”_

It did help people be healthier and happier though, but the headline only
points out that they're still unemployed. We must be doing something really
wrong as a society when we treat jobs as an end, rather than a means.

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kofisarfo
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/contributions (in place of "finding a job"). 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/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't yet do. During that transition period of
creative destruction what you really don'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 "continuing research".

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rajeshmr
Try it in developing countries. You can see vastly different outcomes, and
generally the quality of life will increase in these places. It's an irony
that the countries that need this the most don't have the funding, and the
countries that do have the funding, report it isn't working.

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shearnie
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.

Money given to the unemployed is not UBI, it's the dole.

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

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x10yy
Perhaps the participants in the study were carefully selected to get the
desired outcome.

I can't imaging that this is true in the general case.

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Cthulhu_
Another commenter pointed it out; these were people that already were
unemployed for two years. Which can mean a number of things, but for one,
having a gap of two years in your CV will make potential employers raise an
eyebrow.

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skocznymroczny
Can anyone explain to me, with basic income, why wouldn't I want to sit at
home all day and play videogames?

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NeedMoreTea
Can someone explain to me, with varying job wages, why I wouldn't just take a
low effort shelf stacking or cleaning job?

Is it obvious yet?

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easshvsh
Because those jobs are boring and require a lot of physical effort.

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NeedMoreTea
Sitting at home playing games all day, or being unemployed are boring. Same
for many different jobs that people do.

The physical effort is trivial, I shelf stacked for a year as a teen Saturday
job. Not intellectually fulfilling perhaps, but a pretty sociable job. Helping
a relative out on his fruit and plant growing smallholding was _far_ more
energetic.

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SeaSeaRider
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.

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KaiserPro
no, but it makes people happy.

Now, obviously that's a bit against the capitalist grain and all that, but
think of it this way:

the Luddite rebellion, and mass unrest happened in the UK because people's
livelihoods were taken away. Either through automation, or enclosure.

This left thousands upon thousands of people with little left to lose forced
to crime in order to eat.

This is expensive for wider society, you need to spend money of security,
courts, jail, insurance public damages.

Paying money to make them happy, so that they don't _have_ to turn to crime,
or a radical dictator candidate is a price worth paying.

~~~
pikzel
But as someone else has to pay for their free money, the perceived happiness
needs to be quantified.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's one thing that keeps getting omitted in these things. I don't believe
that current unemployment benefits are just as expensive as "just" giving
everyone the same amount of money.

Plus if it has to be a minimal living income - like minimum wage once was
supposed to be - it would have to be higher to cover rent, food, and other
mandatory expenses in most places. Or is the idea to adjust it according to
where people live? That will just open it up to a lot of fraud attempts.

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dingaling
Current unemployment benefits have significant administrative overhead such as
eligibility testing, forms to send and receive, staff who meet with the
individuals each week to ensure that they are achieving their required job
application targets, additional staff to handle appeals, paper by the ream,
printer toner, heating & office space... and only then can the money be
disbursed.

UBI in contrast just moves money to bank accounts.

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SeaSeaRider
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.

