
Finland Will End Its Experiment with Universal Basic Income - dbattaglia
http://time.com/5252049/finland-to-end-universal-basic-income/
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thisisit
Discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874921)

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jasonkostempski
What good is an experiment applied to a small group of people and only for a
limited time? The people that get it aren't going to adjust their long term
behavior and the local economy certainly isn't going to change in response.

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jerf
Well, we have no alternative. We can't afford an experiment that funds a ton
of people and lasts for a long time. No matter how abundantly confident the
people of HN may be that BI is the way to go, one of the fundamental lessons
of science over the past couple of centuries is that your "abundant
confidence" doesn't count for squat in the real world.

If BI can't prove itself out in a smaller environment, we on no account can
afford to risk our entire economy on it.

That said, I'm not saying this was necessarily a viable test of the idea. On
the other hand, if it really is a great idea that is going to save
civilization, it really ought to have the characteristic that it is still a
good idea that is an improvement on the status quo even when applied in the
small, such that everybody wants to continue the experiment and expand it, not
shut it down. The slow drip of failed BI experiments, even if they didn't
"really test BI", is becoming non-trivial evidence against the idea. An idea
that only works if we wake up one day and transition the entire national
economy at once, or worse, even the entire global economy (which the
combination of "open borders" and BI could require, if "open borders" includes
handing out BI to everyone who crosses the border), is a non-starter. Even if
in some abstract sense it would work, we can't ever attain enough confidence
in the plan to make it a rational choice.

There are certainly things that have the curve that if done a bit make things
worse, but make things better if done wholeheartedly. However, there's a lot
more things that people _think_ have that curve but actually make things worse
the more they are done. It is impossible to tell the two apart from here, and
the abundance of bad ideas should give one pause before making a huge
commitment. The twentieth century is strewn with the wreckage of economies
that made that mistake, and the twenty-first century hasn't stopped, either.
We can really only consider interventions that work in the small for our
changes in the large. (And always keeping an eye out for the interventions
that worked in the small but failed in the large!)

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NetMonkey
Simply select 2000 18 year olds and give them BI for life. That isn't all that
expensive even in worst case and would actually show if BI could work.

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AJ007
Pretty sure you can find 2000 18 year olds with a trust fund or part of a
Native American Indian tribe that distributes gaming revenue.

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pyre
"Coming from a rich family" or "part of a Native American tribe" is not a wide
enough distribution of people to draw conclusions. Any failures / successes
could be down to the environment and may not be able to be extrapolated to the
rest of society at large.

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Can_Not
On the other hand, if you're wondering if people who after the end of
highschool, are able to finish college without having to get a minimum wage
job to pay rent and for college, are doing better in life after college (and
what measured amount better), the data already exists and there are far more
than 2000 subjects.

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simonh
I'm not convinced these big bang experiments, in the context of a wider
economy not organised around the concept, are that useful.

For me one of this big advantages of BI is not enabling more people to 'drop
out' of the productive economy and become artist such. It's actually the way
in which it subsidises low income jobs. One of the big problems we have at the
moment is low paying work being squeezed out of the economy through automation
and increases in the minimum wage. A basic Income enables more people dropping
out of the labour force to get back into it, because with a BI low paying jobs
become a more viable way to earn a living. This gets people out of the poverty
trap and also makes businesses dependent on low wage work more viable. It
could be a real shot in the arm for the employment sectors that the most
vulnerable people in our economy depend on.

On that basis, rather than pick a few thousand people to give a large BI to,
why not start by providing a very modest BI to everybody. Fund it by equally
modest tax increases, so it's revenue neutral. You could start with on the
order of a hundred bucks (quid, whatever) a month. If a BI is going to have a
beneficial effect, then even at this level it ought to do some measurable
good.

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mozumder
If this was an experiment, what were the results? What was being measured?

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arnvald
According to the article, it will end in January 2019 (the government decided
not to fund extending it), so results can be expected in a year or so.

