It just made them happier. Complete and total failure.

(Maybe giving them enough for schooling or training if the goal is finding a job?)

UBI isn't supposed to be for helping people find jobs, it's supposed to dissipate poverty. The results of this "experiment" is like complaining that a hammer doesn't make a very good screwdriver. It sounds like it did its job just fine.

I’m not sure what you did to the site Steele but the sarcasm tags aren’t showing up again.

No, I got you, I'm just angry today. Listening to a podcast on chile's 9-11 coup this morning. Stuff like this, being designed to fail, in the frame of our impending future and our blood soaked past just drives me cray cray.

Right.

Also, if you're jobless, you're probably jobless for a reason. Throwing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month at someone doesn't create new positions for work.

UBI isn't supposed to be a sole source of income and to enable one to be rich.

Exactly. And if you do t have a job it’s not like you can be like “I’ll go to school now, with all this cash”

2019 and we're still talking about jobs. smh.

If you're not helping a rich guy get richer you aren't contributing to society.

No one's talking about jobs. Everyone is talking about gigs now. Get with the times.

No one's talking about times. Everyone's talking about moments now. Live in the moment.

Moments are too long. Live in the present! The present doesn't have any duration at all.

Too long; didn't live.

The somewhat naive hope was that it would generate employment. It did not.

I suppose the premise is the same as "helicopter money". Giving money to people means they spend more on goods and services, which means more people are employed providing those goods and services.

I suspect that you have to give people far more than "basic" amount before it registers as an uptick in employment and not, say, just an increase in the profits of the local supermarket.

Injecting cash at the bottom of the economy obviously won't create jobs, particularly when the consumption economy is buying a lot of imports.

Finland's major exports are hard goods, particularly machines, metals, paper products, plastics and chemicals, instruments, wood products, whatever. To create jobs you need to inject funding into that productive infrastructure so that they can support employing more people.

If these people can't find a job, and they're actually looking, it's because there aren't jobs out there for them to have. Giving them money won't increase the chances that their CV lands them an interview or a job.

Really, this experiment is no different than simply increasing the minimum wage and then providing government subsidies to companies to offset the costs of paying people a living wage instead of a shit wage. It's a subsidy to employers who have shit jobs that aren't worth paying people enough to do.

Without reading the article if this is addressed, there are a chunk of people who really aren't useful, even if they are eager to work. I work with some of them. And if there was a good system to just pay them to stay out of the way, society would be better off for it, rather than trying to find every gomer a job.

That's something I think that gets forgotten. We recognize conscripted soldiers are inferior to a volunteer army. A conscripted workforce? If homelessness and starvation are no longer used as inducement to work I think you'll see an increase in quality and output. Sure you'll have a portion that just want to vegetate or can't hack it , but like you said it's probably better to just buy them out.

The majority of the gomers that should stay out of the way are the ones who will be most eager to work.

so people worked less and were happier?

it worked.