(I would have also liked to see the study actually show it being a sustainable solution , but the ironic outcome is enjoyed nevertheless!)

"Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run."

He's now a highly paid insurance PM consultant.

I have a few other stories like this too, a few people I knew mucked around on the dole for a year, deliberately failing interviews, and decades later are now happy, successful, people.

You shouldn't experiment on long term unemployed as they are the abnormal cases, most people get back to work within 3 months if helped.

There's a simple thought experiment, if every month you get 100 unemployed people and 90 get a job but 10 are bad and don't, within a year you might look at the system and say 'look, it doesn't work, 120 people are bad and don't get a job, and only 90 get a job', where in reality 1080 got a job and 120 didn't.

I also happen to know many people through world of warcraft who live on their parents money, have no urge to win their own, simply live on little and have been playing for years now. They are not picking up new skills or doing something social.

I rather hope that someday money will be enough of a problem to motivate them to deal with their issues or just do something with their life, than keep things the same and hope for a change.

You come across these people because they spend a much larger amount of time than normal people.

It's a basic consequence of simple stats that are very easy to misinterpret, and that's my point.

I also think that this is exactly what this kind of UBI will do: Subsidize low-paying jobs.

The man on the other hand seems to have this outlook that since he used to be a journalist, if he doesn't get another job as a journalist, he'll get to collect unemployment benefits indefinitely.

I wonder if that's him gaming the system or if that's really how the system in Finland works.

> I wonder if that's him gaming the system or if that's really how the system in Finland works.

If it's like Sweden, then he still has to apply for jobs and is pushed to go outside of his field if he is to continue getting benefits.

So many people identify strongly with their occupation. This man is a journalist and author and used to be able to sustain on that. It's as if switching field would be admiting defeat and losing yourself.

That is, the alternative to UBI here isn't "no income"; we already have basic income in Finland, though it's highly dependent on enduring various activation measures that are mostly useless in providing actual employment (and, in a few instances, have turned out to be sweat shops that use the unemployed for unpaid labour). Accepting a low-income, part-time job tends to result in the automatic loss of several months of basic income, though the pay from such job might be significantly less - so, in a situation where there aren't enough jobs to go around, the rational thing to do is to avoid any actual work and to simply keep jumping the hoops.

The proposed UBI models are aimed specifially at unraveling these "welfare traps" and at reducing the attached bureaucracy.

Introducing UBI because of robots taking jobs reminds me of that quote, "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"

okay so I can stop reading there, because whatever that is will be informed by the culture surrounding you, which if I had to guess would be center to right american

Yes and no. The B in UBI is basic, you won't starve or freeze but if you want nice things such as a new gaming PC, you would still need to earn to pay for that. Maybe in that world you would do just enough work to earn it, then not bother working again until you needed to upgrade - and that's OK.

Sort of the exact opposite of the intention I would imagine. The idea would be to give people a leg to stand on so they can take risks, not hide in their confort zone...

560€ per month, in Finland, is not enough take people out of their "comfort zone". Check out the rental prices in some of the larger cities: https://www.vuokraovi.com

It's not really clear from the video, but neither of these people could possibly be living off of 560€ alone. The man even said that his financial situation didn't change significantly, so there has to be some other source of income.

I think many proponents of UBI overestimate the ambitiousness of the average person.

Nobody in my family has ever taken even minor risks like say, traveling abroad (for work or fun), starting a small business etc. I'm the first and I am only taking baby steps now.

Point being, we can't expect to give UBI for a few months and suddenly expect people to take big risks or become ambitious or attack huge problems. These things take time. Imagine a person who has seen his parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc being only salaried workers all their life, rarely moving out of their comfort zone. It wouldn't be easy for such a person to suddenly change (climb Everest, start a biz, spend a year writing a novel etc), even if their food and lodging is taken care of.

I don't know whether UBI is a good thing or bad. But I think both the for camp and against camp are too quick to jump to conclusions - these are social experiments not Math problems. They will take time and we can only learn by trial and error. And what works in one community might not work in another, even within the same state/country.

This did not eliminate risk at all.

The efficiency of this process is the whole argument on why capitalism is superior to other systems.

Subsidies and other special favors distort this process, to the point of overproducing things that are not needed and underproducing things that are. The danger I see is that UBI is exactly such a subsidy.

"The class of persons able to buy goods and services other than those that satisfy their basic needs. ..."