Thread by @scottsantens

Some of the findings from the 1st year of #BasicIncome in Finland provided to 2,000 unemployed people:

✔️No negative impact on employment

✔️Reduced stress

✔️Improved sense of well-being

✔️Increased ability to be an entrepreneur regardless of earnings

epressi.com/tiedotteet/hal…

The neutral employment impact after one year fits an experiment of only 2k people. Full UBI would increase overall demand, creating new employment opportunities. This just shows people aren't lazy and want to work.

(Alaska's small UBI increases demand, thus PT employment by 17%)

Entrepreneurship effects are also muted compared to previous UBI experiments, because in Finland it only functioned as startup capital and to reduce risk of failure. It did not also create a population of new customers as previous experiments have which then found large effects.

The result is that in Finland, after one year, self-employment was just 1% point higher. Also they earned a bit less which supports how people would prefer to be their own boss, even if it means reduced income, which the basic income makes possible. The effect is happier workers.

Again though, this is based only on the people themselves and not their environment. A full UBI would create a massive amount of new customers, and thus likely increase self-employed incomes. Because Finland did not increase demand, it just shows their desire for self-employment.

Though only self-reported data has been released so far in regards to health, Finland does support the common effects of basic income on health. Less stress, greater sense of well-being, these are typical findings. I hope we see some health data as far as need for interventions.

In the Dauphin, Manitoba experiment in Canada in the 1970s, where the entire town received a basic income guarantee for five years, hospitalization rates decreased by 8.5%. We'll see in 2020 if Finland’s participants also ended up healthier with less need for health care.

That overall trust increased, both in government and each other, also supports previous findings. Increased social cohesion is a universal result of basic income, because it is literally *trusting* people. It's a policy of trust. As a result, trust grows.

medium.com/basic-income/u…

I'm also not surprised to see people already misreporting Finland's data, and inserting their own spin based on lying by omission and context removal. Finland's experiment was not actual UBI, but some info can be carefully gleaned. This mirrors the 1970s.

academia.edu/1159217/A_fail…

It's silly to claim "Finland shows basic income has no positive effect on employment," because Finland didn't create any new job opportunities. The job market didn't change. But one can claim it had no neg effect (in 1 yr) because people weren't less likely to seek existing jobs.

Considering how many claimed about Finland's experiment who thought it would fail was that everyone would stop working, the fact that claim was proven false and yet those same people will claim it still failed, is an example of the all too common ideological moving of goal posts.

That anyone would claim that an experiment showing no negative impact on employment, some positive impact on self-employment, and positive impacts on health, wellbeing, and trust can be considered a failure, in any way, especially after only one year, is pretty damn ideological.

Perhaps the most important observation of all from Finland’s basic income experiment is that no matter the findings, people will see what they want to see, and so instead of further experiments we should just do it, and let people argue over reality till they're blue in the face.

@threadreaderapp unroll

This thread about the preliminary findings from Finland's #BasicIncome experiment is continued in another thread looking at the text of the full report...

https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1093909613307748353