by Malcolm Torry | Sep 28, 2020 | News, Opinion, Research
McKinsey, the consultancy company, has published an article about the Finland Basic Income experiment.
The final results from Finland’s experiment are now
in, and the findings are intriguing: the basic income
in Finland led to a small increase in employment,
significantly boosted multiple measures of the
recipients’ well-being, and reinforced positive
individual and societal feedback loops. …
As with any policy analysis, the results of this
experiment remain subject to debate and can’t
necessarily be generalized. As a result, the
experiment does offer an object lesson in the
complexity of designing and implementing
a randomized control trial of basic income.
Nevertheless, more research on basic income is
required. We can hope that Finland’s example
will inform and inspire others as they set up their
own experiments.
by Malcolm Torry | Aug 6, 2020 | News, Research
Details of the unconditional local currency income experiment in Maricá can be found here; with a translation in Portuguese here.
The European Commission is advertising for a post-doctoral researcher to study the unconditional local currency experiment in Maricá in Brazil. Details of the opportunity can be found here.
by Malcolm Torry | Jul 31, 2020 | News
Marie Claire has published an article by Katia Savchuk that describes the experience of one of the participants in an experiment that gave $1,000 a month for a year to twenty individuals selected by ballot.
… In November 2018, McDonald got a call from Aisha Nyandoro, head of Springboard to Opportunities, a local nonprofit where McDonald had taken a career-readiness class. Nyandoro said she’d picked McDonald’s name in a lottery to get $1,000 a month for a year, as part of an experiment called Magnolia Mother’s Trust that was giving no-strings-attached cash to 20 Black single mothers in Jackson’s low-income housing. When her first check arrived, McDonald had $1.01 in her bank account. …
Click here to read the article.
by Malcolm Torry | Jul 16, 2020 | News
The New Yorker has reported on the results of the experiment in Stockton, where five hundred individuals randomly selected from the city’s most deprived districts have been receiving US$100 per month unconditionally.
… For example, during the pandemic, the percentage of money that participants spent on food, consistently the largest category, reached nearly twenty-five per cent over the monthly average, while the amount spent on recreation dropped to less than two per cent.
Participants have also put the money toward rent, car payments, and paying off debt, as well as one-off expenses for themselves or their children: dental surgery, a prom dress, football camp, and shoes. They’ve also been able to cut back on working second and third jobs; one participant, a forty-eight-year-old mother of two who works full time at Tesla, was able to stop working as a delivery driver for DoorDash. Alcohol and tobacco has accounted for less than one per cent of spending per month. …
(To read previous articles on the experiment, click here)
by Malcolm Torry | May 6, 2020 | News, Research
At a presentation on Wednesday 6th May, Kela, the Finnish social security agency, gave further results from the first year of its Basic Income experiment.
The trial group was 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals who had their unemployment benefit made unconditional for a period of two years. A control group of 173,000 unemployed individuals had no changes made to their unemployment benefit.
During the first year of the trial there was no statistically significant change in employment market activity among the trial sample. Analysis of the data generated by the second year of the experiment has now shown that, for the trial group, employment rose on average by six days between November 2017 and October 2018. Larger increases were experienced by families with children, and by individuals whose mother tongue was not Finnish. Evaluation of the second year’s employment data had been complicated by the implementation of a more activation-oriented social security system for unemployed individuals half way through the experiment, which means that changes in employment market behaviour will have been affected by various consequences of the new policy as well as by the unconditionality of the trial group’s unemployment benefit.
The response rate to survey questions about wellbeing was predictably low, but it had still been possible to conclude that, compared with 5,000 randomly selected individuals from the control group, the trial group had experienced a higher rate of generalised trust, less stress, less depression, less bureaucracy, less financial stress, and better cognitive functioning.
From interviews with 81 recipients of the Basic Income, it was discovered that some had experienced a wider variety of participation in society outside employment, and that a sense of autonomy had increased.
The researchers had concluded that wellbeing effects were more significant than employment market effects, which mirrored results from experiments with different but similar mechanisms in Canada and the Netherlands.
A telephone survey to gauge public opinion after the experiment had found that 46% of respondents believed that a Basic Income should be introduced.
The discussion that followed the presentation explored the definition of Basic Income, whether different experiments could be compared if they were experimenting with different things, the importance of a secure layer of income, how long it would take to implement a Basic Income, the importance of social experiments, whether a Basic Income would make people lazy, and the extent to which the effects of a nationwide and permanent implementation of a Basic Income scheme would differ from those of a two year experiment.
Still to do: a report in English; a report on experiment participants’ use of other social benefits and services; and a study of the reasons for individuals with a non-Finnish mother tongue had been disproportionately enabled by their Basic Incomes to gain new skills and find employment.
To see a recording of the presentation, click here.
The final report can be found here. An English summary will be found on the last few pages, starting on page 187.
Social Europe has published an article about the results by Philippe Van Parijs
.
