“There is a problem with young people lacking secondary education, and reports of those guys not seeking work,” said Heikki Hiilamo, a professor of social policy at the University of Helsinki. “There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”...
The Finnish government was keen to see what people would do under such circumstances. The data is expected to be released next year, giving academics a chance to analyze what has come of the experiment....
April 25, 2018
"In much of the world, the concept of basic income retains appeal as a potential way to more justly spread the bounty of global capitalism while cushioning workers against the threat of robots and artificial intelligence taking their jobs."
"But the Finnish government’s decision to halt the experiment at the end of 2018 highlights a challenge to basic income’s very conception. Many people in Finland — and in other lands — chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work," the NYT reports. "The basic income trial, which started at the beginning of 2017 and will continue until the end of this year, has given monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685) to a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58. Recipients have been free to do as they wished — create start-ups, pursue alternate jobs, take classes — secure in the knowledge that the stipends would continue regardless."
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“There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”
Hey, just like our young people lacking secondary education!
“There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”
The Davos crowd knows at some point a lot of production is automated and the world can get by with a few billion people.
I think this is just part of the larger effort to determine who can be fed into the ovens without impacting society at large.
"...monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685)..."
Crumbs!
You get what you pay for.
Recipients have been free to do as they wished — create start-ups, pursue alternate jobs, take classes or drink beer and smoke pot.
"There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”..."
when you pay people not to work, surprisingly; it encourages them not to work!!!!
simple solution
A) drastically increase the stipend to something more reasonably
B) require sterilization before commencement of stipends
or
C) just round up everyone without a job, and turn them into ecofriendly soylent green
The fatal flaw in utopian progressivism is its perpetually obstinate denial of human nature.
You can always go the Bernie Sanders route and subjugate every citizen to a job, whether they want to work or not. It worked for Stalin.
We've been running that experiment in inner cities since 1965. How has that worked out.? The British have been doing it in the Midlands for years. They have created a white underclass with behavior patterns very similar to the black underclass in the US but with less violence. More drunkenness.
Leland said...
You can always go the Bernie Sanders route and subjugate every citizen to a job, whether they want to work or not. It worked for Stalin."
You nailed Sanders right except that he is lazy. Stalin was anything but lazy. Sanders is a Communist who disguised himself as a Democrat in order to run for President and now a lot of what the Democrats are starting to put forward is barely disguised Communism. Sanders looks to have captured the Democrat Party.
"Aw, hell, no, Mudhead! I'm gonna cut the soles off my shoes, sit in a tree and learn to play the flute!" -- Firesign.
"...monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685)..."
I looked up renting an apartment in Helsinki and found one that's perfectly do-able for 330 euros. That leaves enough for food, and you really never have to buy new clothes. Maybe sneakers every couple of years. Health care is free. I go for the equivalent of video games, which for me would be reading, writing, walking around town, drawing. But I'd probably end up monetizing a blog and selling my drawings. So I'd be the creative entrepreneur they're hoping for.
"...Milton (Friedman)recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
The 20-year-old Althouse would definitely take the money and drop out.
"Ann Althouse said...
I looked up renting an apartment in Helsinki and found one that's perfectly do-able for 330 euros. That leaves enough for food, and you really never have to buy new clothes. Maybe sneakers every couple of years. Health care is free. I go for the equivalent of video games, which for me would be reading, writing, walking around town, drawing. But I'd probably end up monetizing a blog and selling my drawings. So I'd be the creative entrepreneur they're hoping for."
But you would not have had your two sons.
Curious George: You never heard of welfare moms?
Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
That produces a really bad impedance mismatch. The inefficiency would be repugnant.
A shovel and a man are well matched.
Something for nothing- what a novel concept. The ability of society to come up with ever newer and greater ideas like this bodes well for the future.
I find CBS Sunday Morning a good bellwether of what the "liberal" Hive is pushing, and they recently did a piece on guaranteed income. (Guaranteed by the State, of course, and paid by the taxpayer.) Fine--but let "liberals" pay for it. I'd gladly let Darth Soros and other rich statists pay me to do nothing--and I'd funnel the money to the NRA, the National Taxpayers Association, the Foundation for Economic Education and any other pro-freedom organization I could afford. It would be a positive example of biting the hand that feeds me.
"Blogger Rick Turley said...
"...monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685)..."
Crumbs!"
Despite Althouse's apartment-renting research, $685 pretty much is crumbs. A marginal living at best. Experiments in Basic Income are basically dry runs for figuring out what the state is supposed to do when technology has eliminated the need for a big chunk of labor. How much do you need to give people to keep the lid on riot and revolution (and thereby keep the state in power)?
Pretty useless article. Aside from it's expensive, there isn't a hint of whether anything went wrong or what.
75% of young people who take the basic income will up as Lotus Eaters.
Fear of poverty is an incredible motivator.
"Pretty useless article. Aside from it's expensive, there isn't a hint of whether anything went wrong or what."
This is actually a pretty good indicator that something DID go wrong, given that the liberal media loves to leave out inconvenient details. If there were a more innocuous reason, or one that didn't cast the leftist program in a bad light, it would have been highlighted.
The Egyptians got the pyramids, the Chinese got the Terracotta army, and the Indians got the Taj Mahal.
What do we get?
For me it's a basic assumption that if a reasonable UBI was offered, the vast majority (like 90%) of people on it would never try to a job and and remain permanent wards of the State the rest of their lives. In the coming roboticization revolution, a shrinking universe of human jobs will leave a large segment of society as unemployable in the traditional sense. Their may be some kind of new 4th sector economy that emerges involving the production and sale of virtual goods in virtual worlds, something akin to gold farmers in World of Warcraft.
1) Something approaching 20% of the population of the U.S. is untrainable and unemployable except for the most basic jobs. Jobs that are being replaced by automation.
2) Current wealth transfer programs require massive, expensive bureaucracies to manage them.
3) Taxpayers would ultimately be better off with a single simple wealth transfer program that would require a minimum of bureaucracy.
The first time I read about a GBI I was opposed to it. My biggest beef was that it would remove the motivation to be productive citizens from a large percent of the population. Someone pointed out to me that we are already there.
I discussed this in my US History classes yesterday. As you would expect many of the kids were all for it. However a significant group took the "Why should we pay to support the lazy bums" position. A frighteningly large number of students took the "sterilize/eliminate the worthless" position.
We're stopping the money this year but releasing the data next year?
IF we just give them OPM money or Obamacare, they will be free to release they're inner creativity because they're basking in security knowing they won't ....
Still waiting, Nancy.
But give the taxpayers back their crumbs....and you get extremely low employment in 14 states, congrats, Wisconsin!
I love social experiments. Vote the dem in, let's see where the state is in 5-10 years.
I say let's rob selected Peter to pay collective Paul.
(Full attribution to Rudyard Kipling.)
The Egyptians got the pyramids, the Chinese got the Terracotta army, and the Indians got the Taj Mahal.
What do we get?
trains and bridges to nowhere (erewhon in SF)
Well, the entire concept is stupid, of course. There's plenty of work if you let people build companies, etc.
But to Finland's credit, they didn't pull an Obama and just implement this thing willy-nilly. They said "let's run this stupid idea on a small scale and see what happens! Then we'll either implement it or kill it!"
And now they are killing it. That's the amazing thing--we never, ever get to kill stupid inane leftist ideas here. Obamacare, for one.
I for one am glad for Finland: if they can't pull it off, then why would we be able to? And they are dramatically stepping back and saying "this doesn't work, don't do it idiots!"
Just in time to throw it in Bernie's and Pelosi's faces. What makes them think that they will succeed where the Finn's failed?
"...Milton (Friedman)recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
In another life, we visited China.
Our guide told us we were on one of the 4 highways in the country. We saw them working on the highway with pick axes. He explained since they have one billion people, they needed to keep them employed and machines would put them out of work.
There's your $15/hr BernieBro job.
When I was in East Getmany, there weren't really any free toilets. We stopped for a break, had to pay AND there was a woman in the lavatory to hand out towels after we washed our hands.
That's also how you get 100% employment in the workers' paradise.
Socialism kills, free markets feed.
TANSTAAFL.
What do you do when you have a significant number of people who are a drain on society's resources? You try to make that group as small as possible, of course.
The people who are pushing the idea of a universal basic income aren't in favor of UBI because it would be good for the people who get UBI, but because it would be good "for society." That's pretty scary.
Oh, but the Finnish "experiment" didn't really show that UBI isn't really a "failure," because they didn't do it right.
Just like nobody has really tried communism.
You know, socialism sometimes sounds so compelling. A Command economy should be more efficient than just letting random chance and human greed pitted against each other do all the decisions. So why in practice has it almost always been such a disaster of epic proportions?
I'll approach this from a philosophical point of view. Now, we are told (and leftists use this all. the. time.) that after Jesus died and was resurrected, that for a time the Saints had all things in common. And apparently it worked, although not for long due to a lot of reasons but likely to do with small groups just collapsing from worldly pressures.
In the 1800's, we had a few communal experiments. The one's I'm most familiar with are the experiments the Mormons tried. Few may know this, but the Mormon church has a very communal ideal, and for quite some time tried to live what we would call a communist style economy. It was abandoned late in the 1800's. And wouldn't you know it, the most anti-communist group in America in the 50's and 60's may well have been the Mormons.
And the leaders explained why.
Communal style living, etc only works with a very select group of people. The Mormon leaders pointed out that only a people who are honest, who do not covet or play the "keep up with the Joneses" game, who are hard workers and willing to sacrifice and take care of each other--only a truly Christlike people can successfully live in a communal society like that. A people who have conquered the natural human instincts towards greed and coveting.
With a people like that, they aren't envious when Bob gets more than, perhaps, he has "earned" because Bob might need more than he is capable of producing equivalent income for. A people who do not mind when Joe, who toiled and scraped and built something great, is reassigned from farming to cabinetry work or something. A people who are willing to sacrifice and work towards a common ideal.
We see a little bit of that united to work towards a common ideal with corporations. But how much more efficient and productive and effective would our companies be if everyone who worked there truly believed in the cause and exerted effort because they really wanted the company to succeed?
Communism, socialism--they promise the rewards of community living without demanding the change of the people's hearts to actually practice such a lifestyle. They ignore the natural man.
Capitalism works because it recognizes the natural human nature and uses that to succeed.
Only a religious group could possibly change their followers enough to overcome the natural man would be successful.
Brigham Young pointed out the problem once. He was going around, trying to get people to contribute their excess property. And he said that somehow, the horse that was lame in two legs and blind in one eye and 25 years old was always the "excess property." Not that nice steady mare who was great behind the plow--no, those horses were never "excess." And until such a horse is "excess property" from everyone in the group, you'll never ever get communal style living or socialism to work.
The Finnish Government should have all watched "Trainspotting" a few times.
What I found most interesting is that the Finns started with a small experiment to see if this would work. In the US Progressives would begin by putting all Americans into such a scheme, creating yet another un-repealable entitlement.
It seems to me the Finns, Danes and Norwegians are moving towards the Swiss model.
My guess is they see the Swedes and don't want that to happen to them.
This has been going on for years with unemployment "insurance" programs in countries like the UK and Canada. I had friends in Canada who dropped out for a time and enjoyed a respite from work while "unemployed". Some of them used the time productively and some of them didn't. The more productive ones went on extended vacations! My favourite example is the British reggae band UB40 (record sales of over 70 million) which allegedly formed in a British welfare line and called themselves after the British unemployment benefits form UB40.
It is human nature to take "free" programs such as this and game them. In other words claim unemployment and then work in the grey economy where you get paid cash. I am doubtful that Althouse would ever do this, despite her claims. She has too much of a protestant work ethic.
Vance, that was excellent.
So is economic displacement by robots and AI a big thing in Finland?
"The 20-year-old Althouse would definitely take the money and drop out."
It's amazing so many people don't understand this impacts far more people than they are currently targeting. Apparently we're going to completely rework our wage system but no one is going to alter their decisions based on it. Totally credible.
It's easier to understand why most people can't get the full impact of this program's impotency. These federal workers aren't going to produce anything which even supporters seem to acknowledge by referencing make-work jobs. So we're not actually increasing our production - in fact we're decreasing it as people leave production for make-work jobs. Since there aren't more goods the the additional demand triggers inflation will erodes much of the benefit for the recipients but will also reduce the purchasing power of those already taxed much more highly to create the benefit in the first place.
This plan would be a disaster. Bernie and the Dems know this has no chance of enactment since the responsible people aren't going to destroy our economy intentionally. They're advancing it so they can tell people who would like this guarantee that Republicans took away their jobs.
This is demagoguery on a vast scale.
I think basic income is good idea but all the other welfare programs have to be eliminated and all the bureaucrats fired. Young able bodied people get the least amount while physically or mentally disabled, pensioners, parent who wants to stay home and raise children can have more cash.
Also should allow people to work when they are collecting basic income, maybe they can earn up to thousand dollars a month before income tax kicks in.
the idea that the outcome of giving people money for nothing wasn't obvious from the start and an "experiment" was needed is just as ludicrous as the idea of UBI itself.
I will just stake out this prediction right now- the results of the experiment never get released.
Back in the 1980s, I taught school for a year in a poor part of Alabama. I heard my fellow teachers talking about their school getting its first fifth generation welfare child. For five generations, that child's family had been on welfare. Welfare was a way of life for a lot of people in that area. Even in Alabama, they would've had to get a job that paid over $15 an hour (back then) to break even with what they got from welfare for doing nothing. The career ambitions of many of those kids was to drop out of school when they turned 16 and go on welfare themselves. It was basic economics - subsidize something and you get more people taking advantage of it.
UBI is just another income redistribution racket. Go on Reddit and you'll see people dreaming of UBI. It's hardly a surprise that there are a lot of people who love the idea of getting something for nothing.
"More justly spread the bounty".
"Justice" is a very malleable concept these days, one finds.
Money for nothing and your Cis for free!
You want to get rid of unemployment? Just declare mechanized agriculture illegal. Soon you'll have a smaller population of fully employed people.
Perpetual smoothing functions are a first-order forcing of spiritual destruction and progressive corruption. Perhaps they need to finely distribute work loads in order to create a perception of productivity, and discover another formula to distribute finitely available, accessible resources (e.g. beachfront property in Hawaii). Also, working, sometimes multiple jobs, and breaking even with your non-contributory entitlements (i.e. welfare) neighbor, is not a cause for celebration.
Another consideration is that the rate of immigration should not exceed the rate of assimilation and integration before Planned Parenthood.
"There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games"
No Shit.
Blogger Gahrie said...
1) Something approaching 20% of the population of the U.S. is untrainable and unemployable except for the most basic jobs.
Don't worry. There will still be people needed to pick up after the rest of us. There always will be.
" Jobs that are being replaced by automation."
Oh. God. I've been hearing this every working day for the past sixty years. Automation makes more jobs. not less.
Recipients have been free to do as they wished
"...do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner..." (Marx)
Ann Althouse said...
But I'd probably end up monetizing a blog and selling my drawings. So I'd be the creative entrepreneur they're hoping for.
This represents about 5% of the population. A fraction of that 5% will actually produce things that are useful and succeed while the others will be their lieutenants.
This is the 1% that made Capitalism the most powerful wealth building force in the world and raised Billions out of poverty.
The other 95% generally end up with places in the work force that do not require initiative or creativity.
Then there is the aristocracy. The .00001%. They are the enemy of capitalism and freedom and use government to suppress the 1%.
Don't worry. There will still be people needed to pick up after the rest of us. There always will be.
What happens when the unpleasant demographics become evident?
Jobs that are being replaced by automation."
Oh. God. I've been hearing this every working day for the past sixty years. Automation makes more jobs. not less
Accepting this for the sake of argument...
The new jobs "produced" by automation are high skill jobs. The jobs they are replacing are low skilled jobs. The problem is a lack of low skilled jobs. If 20% of the population is unacceptable to the military...what are these people going to do in the civilian labor force?
I agree that there are significant problems with a GBI. I just think it might be the best choice among a list of bad choices.
Rusty said...
Oh. God. I've been hearing this every working day for the past sixty years. Automation makes more jobs. not less.
What we have seen before is instead of taking 100 people 100 hours each to make a widget it now takes 1 person 1 hour to make a widget.
Soon it will be going from 1 person 1 hour to taking 0 people 0 hours.
This will have a profoundly different effect on society.
Blogger Larry J said...
Back in the 1980s, I taught school for a year in a poor part of Alabama. I heard my fellow teachers talking about their school getting its first fifth generation welfare child. For five generations, that child's family had been on welfare. Welfare was a way of life for a lot of people in that area.
In the late 70's we already had 3rd generation welfare recipients in NY. Once again, people either don't understand laws of economics or simply try to legislate them into non-existence. The bigger the safety net, the more people that will choose the net. It's about the people on the margins. If you give people welfare or basic income, the marginal gain of employment decreases. The problem in NY is that the entry level job would end up being the equivalent of working 40 hours a week for $1 per hour. Most would choose 40 hours of free time.
They could be taking classes. Like, geo-thermal engineering, or like East Indian history?
They could be starting businesses. They could be taking classes. Perfect. One of them should start a business giving classes on "How to live on 560 Euros a month."
We are heading towards a time when there won't be enough work and societies need to figure out how to run with 75% long-term unemployment. Life-time unemployment. We have to figure out how to distribute goods in a post-scarcity environment and we need to replace the sense of value people get from work with something else because the alternative is people spending their whole lives in some virtual reality war and sex game.
The Finnish experiment may have failed, but we need more experiments, not fewer.
@Achilles:This will have a profoundly different effect on society.
Yes. People will have to give things away in order not to incur storage or disposal fees for all the stuff they produce without labor. They might need to pay people to take their products. A pipeline has two ends.
There's very little production without consumption; a way will be found to see to it that production is consumed (cf "The Midas Plague" by Frederick Pohl).
“There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”
Pro tip: You can do that while holding down a job thanks to advancements in telecommuting.
In theory I wouldn't be opposed to the UBI if it were set low enough that most people wouldn't be tempted to sit around all day smoking pot and playing videogames, if it replaced all other forms of welfare, and if people were immune to the inevitable sob stories about how the single mother drank up her UBI check and left the kids hungry. But the reality is that politicians will promise to increase the UBI amount and add new programs as a way to get votes.
Stopping the program will also make Finland less attractive to Muslim/African
'immigrants'.
Tommy Duncan quoted: "...Milton (Friedman)recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
I went to Costa Rica a couple of years ago. There, they hire men with oxen, shovels and a wagon to mine sand from the riverbed. I asked why they don't use an excavator and our guide explained that the sand mining employed several families and that mechanized equipment was banned in order to keep those people working. Sigh.
There may be other proposals, but at least one proposal for the UBI is that there is progressive taxation and then this is redistributed uniformly to rich and poor. The distribution is supposed to completely replace welfare and much of the welfare bureaucracy. You just collect taxes and write checks. For the rich, it's an automatic rebate; for the poor - basic income. Part of the idea is to eliminate the disincentives to work of a means-tested welfare state. They are already paying people to sit at home and smoke pot, but now they'd lose the check if they took a job. Not under UBI.
Of course, it's a nice idea, but it probably wouldn't work. Runs counter to too much human nature, both on the receiver side and the payer side.
"Of course, it's a nice idea, but it probably wouldn't work. Runs counter to too much human nature, both on the receiver side and the payer side."
Not to mention downright inflationary.
And you get no value for the money.
This is not "1984". Rather it's H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine", the chapters covering the Eloi living woke lives on the "Basic Income" provided by the Morlock government.
As an identity-group, the Eloi frolic and play all day, every day, ongoing free to start businesses, create great art, whatever. Until as individuals they are devoured by the Morlocks.
Yet, the Eloi identity-group persists in their frolic.
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