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Finland Launches Basic Income Experiment With Jan. 1 Cheques for Those in Pilot Project

posted by on Wednesday January 04 2017, @10:48AM   
from the now-we-wait-and-watch dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Basic Income is a subject that regularly surfaces in Soylent discussions, so here's a story about Finland's impending experiment with it:

Finland has become the first country in Europe to pay its unemployed citizens a basic monthly income, amounting to 560 euros ($587 US), in a unique social experiment which is hoped to cut government red tape, reduce poverty and boost employment.

Olli Kangas from the Finnish government agency KELA, which is responsible for the country's social benefits, said Monday that the two-year trial with the 2,000 randomly picked citizens who receive unemployment benefits kicked off Jan. 1.

Those chosen will receive 560 euros every month, with no reporting requirements on how they spend it. The amount will be deducted from any benefits they already receive.

The average private sector income in Finland is 3,500 euros per month, according to official data.

Also at The Guardian and swissinfo.ch.

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Original Submission

• Re:Fails at scale? (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 04 2017, @02:58PM

  by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday January 04 2017, @02:58PM (#449371)

  I suspect that the problems are likely to be social. We already have a section of the population that regards society in general, and the government in particular, with a large sense of entitlement: society exists to provide for their needs, they don't expect to contribute anything. UBI is likely to make this worse. A large-scale introduction needs to be coupled with something else that stimulates individual engagement with society.

  That makes sense when the problem you are trying to solve is not enough people working hard enough to ensure that the needs of society are being met. But when the problem you are trying to solve is that there's actually a surplus of labor and not enough jobs, then the people who aren't contributing labor at all but are sitting around living on their poverty-level government handout are in fact helping to solve your problem. That's in general the problem that capitalism is running into: It has no good built-in mechanism for dealing with a general surplus of productivity.

  What this would trigger, though, is a re-alignment in how employers can treat their employees. With UBI, employees would always have a viable option of walking away from their job. I don't think most people would, because the income from UBI is poverty-level and most people want to live better than that, but it would definitely change the power balance, because without a welfare system and without savings (which most people don't have), the options are either (A) work, or (B) starve to death, whereas with UBI the options are either (A) work, or (B) live at a poverty-level income. I don't think anybody knows what the effects of that will be.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

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