Finland's basic income trial boosts happiness but not employment

[UglyCasanova]

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1PX0NM?__twitter_impression=true

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finland's basic income scheme did not spur its unemployed recipients to work more to supplement their earnings as hoped but it did help their wellbeing, researchers said on Friday as the government announced the trial's initial findings.

The two-year trial, which ended a month ago, saw 2,000 Finns, chosen randomly from among the unemployed, become the first Europeans to be paid a regular monthly income by the state that was not reduced if they found work.


I kinda hoped it would work. At least it increased their happiness though, which should have gone without saying. If you give me a dollar I’m happier than I was when I didn’t have that dollar all things being equal.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Eating breakfast or dinner
Or snack lunch in the hall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all

 

[glenn1]

For any given set of unemployed people, I'm guessing you see consistent patterns at the macro level regardless of country, culture, or other factors. Some percentage of unemployed will be via choice and it's a short-term/transitory situation (i.e. between jobs). Another portion will be people seeking work but needing the right conditions to get a job (move to a different location, lowering their salary expectations, trying a different line of work). Some will need retraining to gain a suitable job or just get some education period (e.g. GED certificate). Some will need to change major factors about themselves to be employable (e.g. break a drug addiction, learn how to show up to work on time). Some will basically be lazy turds who basically don't want to work and would rather fake workman's comp and live on unemployment.

It would be interesting to see if the "basic income" plan showed different results depending on which 'segment' of the unemployed was in the program.

 

[zinfamous]

The final report is still a year away, but even the critics of the whole idea said that the 2 year time frame was just too short to get any meaningful response. The feds wouldn't let it run longer, despite requests.

 

[zinfamous]

For any given set of unemployed people, I'm guessing you see consistent patterns at the macro level regardless of country, culture, or other factors. Some percentage of unemployed will be via choice and it's a short-term/transitory situation (i.e. between jobs). Another portion will be people seeking work but needing the right conditions to get a job (move to a different location, lowering their salary expectations, trying a different line of work). Some will need retraining to gain a suitable job or just get some education period (e.g. GED certificate). Some will need to change major factors about themselves to be employable (e.g. break a drug addiction, learn how to show up to work on time). Some will basically be lazy turds who basically don't want to work and would rather fake workman's comp and live on unemployment.

It would be interesting to see if the "basic income" plan showed different results depending on which 'segment' of the unemployed was in the program.

It was a supposed random selection of participants, and so with the final report still being a year away as they crunch the numbers, I suspect that this kind of information will be parsed out.

 

[blackangst1]

The final report is still a year away, but even the critics of the whole idea said that the 2 year time frame was just too short to get any meaningful response. The feds wouldn't let it run longer, despite requests.

The Finnish experiment so far has yielded the same negative results the US's attempty in the 70's: https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/02...l-basic-income-weve-already-seen-doesnt-work/

In the 1970s, the government ran four random control experiments across six states to try the negative income tax, a similar policy proposal that was popular at the time. In each test, the work disincentive effect was disastrous. For every $1,000 in added benefits to a family, there was an average reduction in $660 of wages from work.

There are many reasons universal basic income proposals fail. The policy tends to direct resources to people who do not need them, while increasing dependency and decreasing work across the truly needy population.

 

[woolfe9998]

The point of basic income isn't to get people to work. It's to address the problem of technology taking away jobs in the long run. I doubt even half the eligible population will be employed in 100 years. AI and robots will take those jobs.

It may or may not be the right time just yet for basic income. But it's inevitable.

 

[glenn1]

The point of basic income isn't to get people to work. It's to address the problem of technology taking away jobs in the long run. I doubt even half the eligible population will be employed in 100 years. AI and robots will take those jobs.

It may or may not be the right time just yet for basic income. But it's inevitable.

History has shown that some advancement will come along that blunts the employment effects of automating earlier innovations. Jobs making autos soaked up jobs displaced by automated looms, computers and internet soaked up jobs lost in autos, big data and blockchain is soaking up jobs lost as PCs become a mature industry with lowered growth. The cycle will continue in the future as well.

 

[JSt0rm]

boosts happiness? Cant have that now!

 

[woolfe9998]

History has shown that some advancement will come along that blunts the employment effects of automating earlier innovations. Jobs making autos soaked up jobs displaced by automated looms, computers and internet soaked up jobs lost in autos, big data and blockchain is soaking up jobs lost as PCs become a mature industry with lowered growth. The cycle will continue in the future as well.

History has shown this happens sometimes. We've lost millions of manufacturing jobs to robotics alone already. They've been "replaced" if at all generally by lower paying jobs.

It's tough to see how you get an equivalent number of jobs for engineers and technicians who design and maintain machines to replace the millions of retail jobs gradually being phased out by automated checkout stands. If there was an equivalent number of jobs, then the machines wouldn't make economic sense. Their entire point is to eliminate the need for human labor and cut costs/maximize profits.

Same goes for home services jobs being replaced by increasingly sophisticated robot cleaners. Same economic logic: why hire someone to clean your house for $50 a week when you can pay $500 for a robot to do it every day for years? And customer service jobs being replaced by increasingly sophisticated computer chat boxes. Again, why pay someone to do it?

In 100 years there will be little to no need for physical labor, or for many lower level white collar jobs. Not everyone can be trained for cognition intensive work. We could do it in the early to mid 20th century because back then we had lots of smart people who didn't go to college. So we expanded college opportunities and trained a smarter work force. But we're at the limit now. This is one place where some democrats are wrong - not everyone is suited to college.

In the future if your IQ is average or below, you can pretty much forget finding work.

 

[Jaskalas]

Finland's basic income trial boosts happiness but not employment

Is the goal of food stamps to make people go out and grow their own food?
No.

Heaven forbid if the people receive enough to live on that they don't need to slave themselves over 2-3 part time jobs they'd never touch otherwise. Or if parents actually had an hour or two to spend with their kids. Imagine if the goal of sustenance wasn't to keep people as slaves. Imagine if people only worked overtime if they CHOOSE to. Does that sound awful to you?

Get back to us when people demonstrate what happens on today's equivalent of $1,000/mo with a large population and they KNOW it isn't temporary. Where they actually believe it'll be there tomorrow. So they have time to set expectations and trust it enough to actually change their plans. Sustenance is not about forcing people to work. It's about providing for them when they cannot, or should not.

In some circles it might help people get an education, so it'd be possible to find gainful employment, but honestly it's going to take a HELL of lot more money, or a radical change in education before that'd ever happen. College is for the rich. Basic Income isn't going to change that. And only training to meet qualifications is going to help people find decent jobs.

So really, the OP took the one premise and tried to apply it to something else entirely. Apples to Oranges.
It's broken logic.

 

[Moonbeam]

History has shown that some advancement will come along that blunts the employment effects of automating earlier innovations. Jobs making autos soaked up jobs displaced by automated looms, computers and internet soaked up jobs lost in autos, big data and blockchain is soaking up jobs lost as PCs become a mature industry with lowered growth. The cycle will continue in the future as well.

No it won't. The biggest predictor of successful employment is intelligence. Intelligence equates to rapid acquisition and the adroit use of task proficiency. What is the aim of AI and robotics?

It took billions of years of organic evolution to produce an intelligent and technological being. In the short time since the invention of the transistor we have already created machine intelligence that out class the most skilled people in many intellectual tasks. What happens when the machines start designing themselves? I don't think we have any idea.

 

[alcoholbob]

History has shown that some advancement will come along that blunts the employment effects of automating earlier innovations. Jobs making autos soaked up jobs displaced by automated looms, computers and internet soaked up jobs lost in autos, big data and blockchain is soaking up jobs lost as PCs become a mature industry with lowered growth. The cycle will continue in the future as well.

Less and less jobs are about making stuff due to automation, it's not just a displacement of making one type of thing but especially with the rise of 3d printing allows all kinds of unconventional manufacturing, making anything with your hands is going to go the way of the dodo.

More likely as Harvard economist David Graeber points out, more and more jobs will be bullshit jobs, i.e., corporate toady jobs where you don't actually do anything but convince a corporate executive why you should be their modern incarnation of a feudal bannerman or squire to play to the simian psychology of a hierarchical alpha needing a posse. If that's the future, social skills will become more and more important in the future bullshitting economy, whereas the value of STEM (pure analytical skills) will likely go down as humans get out-competed by AI and machine learning in anything requiring human brain-power.

 

[sandorski]

AI will one day Design Robots that are then built by other Robots. Other Robots will perform Maintenance of Robots. Humans will pursue Hobbies/Interests, but Labour for Money will not be part of their lives. There will be some exceptions, Artists and Inventors for eg,

I think there is the potential of some very negative consequences of this though. There will be no need for Billions of People, Elites may use that to justify atrocity. Another risk might be that Religions or Social Movements may turn extreme and/or violent due to massive groups of People simply having nothing better to do. We really need to improve our Ethics and Social Institutions in order to transition to this future.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I love the idea and efficiency of a universal basic income but I know the whole thing will fall apart when it’s found some dude is spending all his income on hookers & blow

 

[1prophet]

The point of basic income isn't to get people to work. It's to address the problem of technology taking away jobs in the long run. I doubt even half the eligible population will be employed in 100 years. AI and robots will take those jobs.

It may or may not be the right time just yet for basic income. But it's inevitable.

Another bullshit lie promoted by the rich elite so the working poor blame robots instead of the Mexican or the black man, so now they promote basic income (glorified welfare) instead of trickle down as the solution and our supposed intelligent liberal establishment goes along with it because reasons.

The real reason your good high paying jobs are disappearing is because of the race to the bottom where cheapest is best for the stockholder and those that make money off of investments while those that do the work are supplanted through globalization.

You want healthcare, living wages, job security, unions, good pay and working conditions, vacation, etc. but it interferes with the corporate bottom line because employees are an expense to be reduced not an asset like in the past, and Americans especially have been conditioned to want it all when they are getting a job but refuse to pay for products and services created by higher paid employees because cheapest is best,

Your enemy is not the robot but the crook in Wall Street that looks at the middle class as an expensive serf to be replaced by a cheaper Chinese or Mexican serf that doesn't complain too much when they do jobs for pay and working conditions that are reminiscent of the gilded age in America.

And no, education won't save you because you will be competing with people from third world countries and the same corporate hoodlums that promote that education lie will do everything in their power to not compensate you for that education by hiring lower cost labor from foreign countries that will work for less, much less.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

History has shown that some advancement will come along that blunts the employment effects of automating earlier innovations. Jobs making autos soaked up jobs displaced by automated looms, computers and internet soaked up jobs lost in autos, big data and blockchain is soaking up jobs lost as PCs become a mature industry with lowered growth. The cycle will continue in the future as well.

The trend to use the most cost effective labor. We were always the cheapest species to use. Now there's competition with another one. If you are a CPA for example a machine will eventually do things faster/better/cheaper than you can afford to survive.

You can go to another field, but that's taken too. You have no alternatives because you can't even compete with flipping burger machines.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

The trend to use the most cost effective labor. We were always the cheapest species to use. Now there's competition with another one. If you are a CPA for example a machine will eventually do things faster/better/cheaper than you can afford to survive.

You can go to another field, but that's taken too. You have no alternatives because you can't even compete with flipping burger machines.

The madness will stop in the near future now that CPA’s, paralegals and maybe lawyers, Engineers and computer networking people are starting to be effected.

True test will happen when an AI can make perfect decisions consistently, could an AI be elected to be a Governor? A President? Could an AI vote? What happens when it copies itself?

 

[Jaskalas]

I love the idea and efficiency of a universal basic income but I know the whole thing will fall apart when it’s found some dude is spending all his income on hookers & blow

I disagree.

If a person has the tools to survive but then chooses not to, and is in need of an intervention, then that's what prison... or rather... some kind of rehab is for. Aside from... if people are letting themselves starve, there should be no judgements on what people do with their money. It really is the Libertarian version of a social safety net, without authoritarian strings. Or rather, that's what I desire of it.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

The madness will stop in the near future now that CPA’s, paralegals and maybe lawyers, Engineers and computer networking people are starting to be effected.

True test will happen when an AI can make perfect decisions consistently, could an AI be elected to be a Governor? A President? Could an AI vote? What happens when it copies itself?

For the first part the people who control the economy at the top simply won't care. Perfection isn't a necessity, it's a matter of economic efficiency. Suppose that a machine is equal to a human in a specific task, but the TCO is half that of people? The people who financially benefit will pick the AI.

We need to define something as "AI" is often taken in the wrong contexts. A general purpose AI isn't a "person". Chances are what passes for a "mind" would be completely different from ours although any interface would have to take ours into account. That time remains in the unknown future assuming it happens at all. No, when I refer to machine intelligence I mean a "professional system" which performs specific tasks. Right now we have programmed trading where decisions are made in fractions of a second. As the ability to manage even larger data sets at faster speeds becomes a reality why have humans at all? What is needed are those who program and design the machines- for now. At some point, machines are developed that can do that too and already we've seen examples of machine intelligence taking off and going down paths that were near incomprehensible to humans.

At that point in the not too far future then what? The hardest thing, manual dexterity is left. Plumbing under the sink would be harder as making machines that are as competent as insects in movement remain beyond our ability, again for now.

So machines aren't "people" who vote, but aliens with greater abilities than humans in economic potential.

Since that won't change, economics must and it will be easier to get 100% of 6 day creationists to abandon all faith and embrace all science.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I disagree.

If a person has the tools to survive but then chooses not to, and is in need of an intervention, then that's what prison... or rather... some kind of rehab is for. Aside from... if people are letting themselves starve, there should be no judgements on what people do with their money. It really is the Libertarian version of a social safety net, without authoritarian strings. Or rather, that's what I desire of it.

I agree with what you disagree with. I don’t think the majority of non AT P&N will feel the same way. Welfare Queens and stuff like this has history. Fair or unfair it exists and someone will run on it.

 

[Jaskalas]

I agree with what you disagree with. I don’t think the majority of non AT P&N will feel the same way. Welfare Queens and stuff like this has history. Fair or unfair it exists and someone will run on it.

Then we should campaign on not controlling the lives of others. And hope that Americans don't want to be placed into chains. Such negative outcomes can / do occur without Basic Income. It's a side topic, one we should always be on guard against.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I agree with what you disagree with. I don’t think the majority of non AT P&N will feel the same way. Welfare Queens and stuff like this has history. Fair or unfair it exists and someone will run on it.

There's the rub. What happens when people lose purpose on a massive scale? Humans are cave animals which "do things" to survive. That is our evolutionary mandate. TNG pipe dreams are just that. The pursuit of art and music and higher qualities are fantasy and not because of technology, but because we aren't those animals the series portrays.

 

[Jaskalas]

There's the rub. What happens when people lose purpose on a massive scale? Humans are cave animals which "do things" to survive. That is our evolutionary mandate.

Do you realize that we'll invent and/or maintain an economy amongst ourselves, one that extends beyond AI and Basic Income? It may not contribute to GDP, (would it?) but we'll FIND ways to entertain ourselves. Some of us already do, perhaps you've heard of video games. I mean, we already invent our own currencies (Bitcoin) but in this case we'd use them to compete towards excess, comfort and entertainment, not base survival.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Do you realize that we'll invent and/or maintain an economy amongst ourselves, one that extends beyond AI and Basic Income? It may not contribute to GDP, (would it?) but we'll FIND ways to entertain ourselves. Some of us already do, perhaps you've heard of video games. I mean, we already invent our own currencies (Bitcoin) but in this case we'd use them to compete towards excess, comfort and entertainment, not base survival.

The key word is "some". We might go back to a primitive society. The reasons for large populations in cities is to find work. When there is no work then the only thing left is remnants of cultures found there which have no purpose other than an association with common interests.

People will entertain themselves. People go to art galleries, they form gangs and attack others because they can, but there is no overriding survival mandate assuming a universal income. Yes, I have heard of video games. Perhaps the answer is the development of full sensory immersion, a Matrix of sorts, where one can interact as they choose. At that point one could be king of the world, a discoverer in FTL, a great healer, a child rapist, a mass killer, Satan, God, anything. There's no reason to have real children, just virtual ones. Omnipotent animals in their cages. Perhaps that's our fate, our Great Filter.

Then again perhaps we have the Eloi and Morlocks. Those at the top levels of control create a paradise and lose what they do not need, intelligence and memory, the will to survive. The rest go feral or starve if the economic disparity is the result.

It could be something completely different, but the one sure thing is that an alien world that is increasingly incompatible to us as animals becomes more the norm.