Mixed Results for Universal Basic Income Experiment

[OnAJourney]

An experiment in Finland with Universal basic Income has concluded and it would appear that results are mixed at best. Will there ever be a point where a UBI could actually work?

Finland basic income trial left people 'happier but jobless'

Although people ended up happier, the government hoped it would help the unemployed to find work.

www.bbc.com

 

[1Lord1Faith]

For a lot of people on the left, UBI focuses too heavily on individuals’ personal wealth and buying power - or rather, their lack of it - without doing anything to stop companies wasting resources by producing far more stuff than people need, and over-working their employees in the process.

Economics writer Grace Blakely makes this point in the New Socialist, adding that “without fundamental structural reforms to our economic system, UBI will only be a sticking plaster papering over the cracks”.

Wow, just…wow. It seems that the principal of ‘supply and demand’ is unfamiliar to much of Europe.

The writer from the New Socialist is saying that this UBI won’t work without more socialist reforms to the economy. The only way to make this hole work…is to dig it deeper.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

Our children have tuitions.
Therefore I work.
When I no longer have tuitions to pay for, imma stop working.
I’m not particularly greedy, and I don’t need stuff to make me happy.
So if I had the government covering my basic costs, I wouldn’t be working as hard as I do (at outside employment. I like homemaking and find it fulfilling)

 

[ATraveller]

What a weird assumption. Somehow jobs will appear because everyone has a basic income.

Around where I live, thanks to our ungrateful fellow citizens in other parts of the country and a useless and incompetent level of government (a long story I won’t bore people with), a vast number of high-quality jobs and job opportunities have vanished.

If I were given a basic income, exactly how am I going to get a job when not enough of them exist to allow us to find them, aside from moving to some other place with that basic income?

 

[abucs]

I guess in theory if we mechanised enough, accepted a stagnant standard of living and had a limited population you can see the logic although I don’t know even then if it would work. I can’t see such a program today doing anything but making society worse.

 

[HerCrazierHalf]

The time for UBI hasn’t arrived. IMO UBI is for that time in the future were automation increases productivity per capita so much that less than a quarter of the population needs to work to provide the goods and services needed and wanted.

With the way automation is going it’s probably 2 or 3 decades out.

 

[Theo520]

Will there ever be a point where a UBI could actually work?

The govt should focus on supporting a tight labor market in the private sector, so there is real demand for labor, real jobs instead of make work govt jobs. That is how to get the unemployed back to work.