In a nutshell, giving people a universal income did not help them get into jobs, but they did feel somewhat happier than those in the control group.
The general reaction to this is that the experiment has been somewhat disappointing. You would expect people to be more willing to take on a job if they knew that they would still keep their state benefit, but this has not happened. And the difference in happiness, while statistically significant, is not that huge.
But I take away a rather different lesson. It is that the idea of doing randomised trials is a really sensible way of evaluating social policies. If this technique were more widely applied, it would be possible to fine-tune welfare support systems so that they gave taxpayers better value for their money, and recipients a higher quality of benefits. The universal basic income is an idea that has generated a lot of global interest. For example, the opposition party in India wants to do something similar. But this is the first proper national randomised trial on a national basis anywhere in the world to see whether it works. [...]
Finland has done a randomised trial of a particular welfare policy. We should learn from this. And governments throughout the developed world should carry out more such studies about other social policies before they launch some politically-attractive new initiative – and find it doesn’t work.
No comments:
Post a Comment