Social Europe: Basic income: Finland’s final verdict

Most importantly, the long-term sustainability of a generous unconditional basic income hinges far less on the immediate impact on labour supply than on the structural effect on health, skills and motivation that can be expected from a smoother lifelong back-and-forth between employment, education and voluntary activities.

By showing a significant positive impact on employment, the experiment did not prove the economic sustainability of a basic income of €560, conditionally supplemented in the various ways mentioned above. Nor was it supposed to do so. But it did yield interesting results which will stimulate further thinking about how best to phase in a basic income and what accompanying measures would facilitate the transition. [...]

Also significant is that the positive effect was less in Helsinki (1.8 more days of employment) than in rural municipalities (7.8 more days), where means-tested housing benefits are less frequent and lower and therefore the remaining unemployment trap is less deep. By contrast, despite the availability of means-tested child benefits, the positive effect of the basic-income regime was higher in households with children (13.7 more days) and for single parents (9.5 days) than in childless households (1.6 more days).

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openDemocracy: Why ‘Universal Basic Services’ is no alternative to Basic Income

On the premise that ‘essential services should be free at the point of need’, paralleling the National Health Service and state education, proponents have identified universal free ‘basic’ housing, free food, free local transport, free TV licence and a free ‘basic’ communications package including mobile phone and broadband internet. All of this, they claim, would cost £42 billion or about 2.3% of GDP. [...]

For a start, what is being proposed is not ‘universal’ in any accepted use of the word. For instance, the provision of ‘free food’ under the UBS banner is deceptive. According to the UBS scheme, the state would provide "one-third of the meals for the 2.2 million households deemed to experience food insecurity each year". That is not universal. It is targeted. Identifying those suffering from food insecurity would necessarily imply means-testing or some complex test of ‘food insecurity’. As with all targeted schemes, many of those eligible would not be reached, while those receiving the free food would, as a result, face an even greater poverty trap and accompanying precarity trap than exist in the British welfare state today. The Department for Work and Pensions itself estimates that going from means-tested benefits into the sort of low-paid job claimants could obtain results in only a 20% increase in net income – a poverty trap of 80%. If they also lost ‘free food’, the net gain would be even less. [...]

Providing ‘the poor’ with free food would extend the charity state and institutionalise the obnoxious system of ‘food banks’, which have mushroomed in the austerity era. The mass provision of free food would also risk more waste of food. However well-intentioned the charity state might be, people receiving free goods tend to value them less and treat them with less care than if they pay for them.[...]

Interestingly, under the German social care scheme, admired both by the House of Commons committees and by UBS supporters, three-quarters of beneficiaries opt for cash payments, even though they are lower than the value of the free in-kind services offered, because cash payments give them the flexibility to be cared for at home by family members or other informal carers.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: Going viral: Fox News, Davos and radical economics

Rutger Bregman became a social media sensation after his onstage tirade at the gathered elite in Davos this year. His call for higher taxes, open borders and a shorter working week captured the imaginations of millions who viewed the speech online. But can his utopian ideas be translated into realistic policy changes? Plus: J Oliver Conroy on David Buckel, a year on from the climate protester’s death in New York

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Fortune: Finland's Universal Basic Income Experiment Just Gave Lawmakers a Really Good Reason to Back the Idea

In its first report, Kela said the basic income didn’t much affect the amount of work that the subjects picked up during the experiment, but it did make them feel healthier and less stressed, and more confident about their ability to find work. [...]

Here’s where it gets interesting for lawmakers. According to Kela: “Respondents who received a basic income had more trust in other people and in societal institutions—politicians, political parties, police and the courts—than members of the control group.” [...]

On a scale of 0 to 10, where higher numbers denote more trust, basic income recipients gave an average score of 6.8 for trust in other people, versus 6.3 in the control group. Trust in politicians and political parties got an average 4.5 among basic income recipients and 4.0 in the control group, and trust in courts and cops was 7.2 versus 6.9, again with the control group providing a lower score.[...]

In the U.S., a universal basic income is one of the core proposals of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who maintains that it would not make people lazier. The preliminary Finnish results seem to back him up on that. Kela’s survey, conducted just before the end of the two-year experiment, also showed that those who received the basic income were just as willing to use official job-finding services as those who did not.

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Independent: The key takeaway from Finland's universal basic income experiment is that countries need to learn from each other

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.

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Vox: The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet

Their takeaway? We’re studying the wrong things. We’ve pinned so many hopes to UBI — some of them contradictory — that it’s not clear anymore what concrete empirical results from our pilot programs would help us conclude it’s a good idea. At the same time, proponents typically haven’t characterized their plans in enough detail that we can figure out how to pay for them and how they’ll affect the poor.

That doesn’t necessarily mean UBI is a utopian pipe dream. But it does suggest that, right now, UBI is proposed as a solution to many different social ills, and the details of UBI proposals are often underspecified — so it’s not clear who’d get money, how much, or how we’d pay for it. If we want to fix our welfare system, that has to change. [...]

But other arguments for UBI assume it will decrease the labor supply. The technological unemployment argument, for example, seems to rest on the assumption that UBI will decrease the labor supply — and that this is a good thing. Under this model, UBI is part of how we transition from a society where people need to work to a society where they don’t. Complaining that they won’t get jobs is beside the point.

As the paper spells out, this makes it tricky to evaluate whether UBI programs are living up to expectations. We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it. [...]

And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive,” the paper argues. That’s not what anyone’s going for.

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Social Europe: The Finnish Basic Income Experiment – Correcting The Narrative

Well, not quite. The Finnish government’s refusal to extend or expand the experiment may not come as much of a surprise once the budgetary implications are taken into account but it nevertheless amounts to one more disappointment amongst those closely watching how the experiment is progressing. And disappointments have been plentiful with this project. After a promising start, the first blow came when the Sipilä government ignored most of the suggestions and recommendations of the research consortium led by Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland) and charged with preparing the experimental design — incidentally, appointed by the very same Juha Sipilä.

The design now being rolled out is much more limited than many had hoped for. Repeated requests for additional budget or postponing the starting date were ignored. Much-needed coordination between the different ministries involved was not forthcoming. The government also delayed appointing the team charged with evaluating the result until the experiment was well into its second year – with detrimental effects for any attempt to gain a more comprehensive insight into the experiment’s wellbeing effects.

Meanwhile, the coalition government didn’t dither and recently embarked on a series of highly contentious reforms, such as introducing a new regime for the unemployed consisting of trimonthly interviews, increased waiting periods and substantial cuts in the eligibility periods for unemployment benefits. All of this is topped by a so-called “active model” that requires jobseekers to either work on a part-time basis or intensively participate in activation measures or face a 4.65 percent benefit cut. Together these new measures represent a major attempt to shift the Finnish social security system even more in the direction of an activation welfare state at the same time as the government is experimenting with unconditional basic income.

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Politico: Democrats Aren’t Moving Left. They’re Returning to Their Roots.

What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)

But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought.[...]

What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds its antecedents in 1944. With the country fully mobilized for war, President Franklin Roosevelt called for “a second Bill of Rights … an economic bill of rights” that would entitle all Americans to a “useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” the “right … to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care” and the “right to a good education.” His speech found partial inspiration in a report by the National Resource Planning Board, which advanced the necessity of a “socially provided income.”[...]

Only in the 1960s did Democrats abandon the concept of universal, single-payer health care and champion a narrower program of guaranteed hospital insurance and voluntary medical insurance for the elderly—the program that we now know as Medicare. They didn’t abandon universal coverage because they viewed it as too radical. Rather, they believed it was no longer necessary. After World War II, major employers began extending unprecedented benefits to workers, including annual cost-of-living adjustments to wages, defined benefits pensions and private health insurance. Given this reality, they turned their focus to a narrower subset of the population that, by definition, would not benefit from employer-based health programs: senior citizens.[...]

The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, Christian Democrats in Italy, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Popular Republican Movement in France are prime examples of center-right organizations that collaborated with socialist and centrist parties in establishing a welfare state that defined what historian Tony Jundt called the “‘European way’ of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations.” The contours of this welfare state varied from country to country, and to be sure, socialists, liberals and conservatives contested—and continue to contest—just how generous the state should be to its citizens. But by the turn of the 21st century, Jundt argued, the “European Way” had become “a beacon … and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life.’”  

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Social Europe: Basic Income ‘Made In Italy’ And Unpaid Work

Indeed, it may indeed take much courage to introduce a measure of basic income (the so-called ‘reddito di cittadinanza’) which is conditional upon undertaking ‘unpaid work’ in community-based services. The reform states that to get the subsidy, the ‘poor’ will have to work eight hours a week for ‘free’ (unpaid) ‘for the state’ and accept a job proposal out of three, perhaps in three years (and not more than 18 or 24 months as previously thought) under threat of expulsion from the system.[...]

The effects of the Italy’s recent reform on the most vulnerable social groups, the ones at the highest risk of poverty (i.e. in temporary and low-paid jobs), and those likely to be women, young, older (+45) or minorities, can be perverse, in the sense that conditionality can progressively exclude them by boosting social segregation via further labour market inequality. According to the Italian national institute for statistics (ISTAT) in 2016, 30 percent of people residing in Italy were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. The risk of poverty multiplies for foreigners, women, those living in the south, within households with dependent children.[...]

Sociological and economic theories tell us that access to economic and social rights and legal status – and not ‘work at any price’ – are the fundamental conditions for fostering social inclusion and labour market integration, and therefore they can be expected to reduce poverty in the medium- to long term. Thinking that an inclusive society is one where people ‘work’ only for money may be distractive (Levitas, 1996 ). On the other hand, in Europe we have relevant examples (e.g. the ‘mini jobs’ and ‘one-euro jobs’ in Germany under the Hartz II reforms in 2003) of how precarious individual lives have become through the ‘commodification’ of employment and minimum income schemes as an income accompanying low-paid and/or unpaid work.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Finnish Experiment

Around the world, there is a lot of buzz around the idea of universal basic income (also known as “unconditional basic income” or UBI). It can take different forms or vary in the details, but in essence: UBI is the idea a government would pay all citizens, employed or not, a flat monthly sum to cover basic needs. This funding would come with no strings attached or special conditions, which would remove any potential stigma associated with receiving it. In short: it would be free money.

UBI advocates argue that many jobs don’t pay enough to even make rent and buy groceries: people can work full-time and still be below the poverty line. It’s easy to understand why people on the left would advocate for a guaranteed income, but a version of this concept is also popular among libertarians, who see UBI as a way to shrink the welfare state. For example, you could take away food stamps, medicare, and housing subsidies, and replace all of it with this one flat sum. [...]

The idea of a universal basic income has been around for a long time — Thomas Paine, a founding father of the United States, talked about it centuries ago. As recently as the 1960s and 70s, limited UBI studies were run in parts of the US. President Nixon even brought up the idea of an income floor for families in a State of the Union address.

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New Statesman: Corbynism 2.0: the radical ideas shaping Labour’s future

In recent years, however, the left has rediscovered the politics of futurism. Books such as Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and Peter Frase’s Four Futures argue that technological advancements could render much work unnecessary and liberate humans – sustained by a state-funded universal basic income (UBI) – to pursue a new kind of freedom. Aaron Bastani’s forthcoming Fully Automated Luxury Communism (January 2019) will occupy similar terrain: “What if, rather than having no sense of the future, history hadn’t really begun?” But Labour’s swiftly assembled 2017 manifesto, For the Many, Not the Few, was largely unreflective of such thought. It made no mention of UBI, automation or a shorter working week. Though the manifesto’s headline proposals – the renationalisation of water, energy and rail services, the abolition of university tuition fees and higher taxes on top earners and corporations – were overwhelmingly popular, they were redolent of postwar social democracy.  [...]

A credible left should embrace what one could call incremental utopianism: progressive reforms situated within a radical framework. Alex Williams, the co-author of Inventing the Future (one of the defining texts of Corbynism), told me that the next Labour manifesto should promise a four-day working week. “It aligns with the history of the labour movement. Until the 1930s, cutting working hours was a key demand as well as increasing wages.” [...]

Increased investment in technology, as well as a higher minimum wage to raise the cost of labour, would accelerate automation and make a four-day week conceivable. A recent trial by the New Zealand trust manager Perpetual Guardian proved so successful – higher productivity, reduced stress – that the firm is considering making it permanent. On 10 September, Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), declared that “in this century we can win a four-day working week”. More than 1.4 million people work seven days a week, with 3.3 million working more than 45 hours a week, a TUC study found. [...]

Though overwhelmingly supported by the party membership, Corbyn has no more than 20 committed ideological followers among the parliamentary party. The project is heavily reliant on hard-working and trusted media performers such as McDonnell and the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry (though a vanguard of activist commentators such as Owen Jones, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker, and former Corbyn aide Matt Zarb-Cousin adds ballast).

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The Guardian: Universal basic income hasn’t made me rich. But my life is more enriching

The Finnish basic income trial, of which I am part, finishes at the end of the year. Having been interviewed by nearly 70 separate media outlets, from the BBC to Le Figaro, the question I have been asked most often has been: how has the basic income trial changed my life? My answer is simple. In money terms, my life has not changed at all. However, the psychological effects of this human experiment have been transformative. I vastly prefer basic income to a benefits system fraught with complicated forms, mandatory courses and pointless obligations. [...]

The idea is that temporary and part-time work is becoming increasingly common, which may mean there is also a growing interest in social security models that support the acceptance of such work. The basic income trial has indeed resulted in work for myself and many other participants, from IT experts, artists and commerce professionals to new graduates. And there is little doubt that the trial benefits people in creative fields, freelancers, people doing expert work and project workers – an ever-increasing number of people. [...]

Basic income models do come with a small increase in taxation. For a large number of employed people this will, however, be compensated for by the basic income. As more people manage to find work while supported by basic income, taxation for everyone can be eased. In terms of purchasing power, basic income would have a predominantly positive effect as it would help people in low-income jobs the most. The critics fear that basic income will make people lazy. However, limited evidence from several basic-income trials from around the world prove that people use basic income to improve their quality of life and not as a licence to do nothing. Research has shown that unemployed people do not have a low motivation for work. Neither is it justified to say that unemployment on a large scale is the result of an unwillingness to work. The isolated cases of lazy, work-averse individuals so eagerly highlighted by the media do not represent the situation accurately.

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Social Europe: The Populists’ Euro

The second point is less well known, but even less controversial: recent polls show that 60-72% of Italians favour the euro. Some believe the single currency safeguards their savings, while others regard it as an emblem of Italy’s status as a founding member of the European Union. But if motives differ, the balance of public opinion does not.

Bowing to this reality, the coalition partners have now dropped the idea of abandoning the euro, expunging the possibility from their “contract” and respective websites. Paolo Savona, a diehard opponent of the euro, has been denied the finance ministry. But Carlo Cottarelli, whose proposed appointment at the head of a technocratic government would have disenfranchised a majority of voters, has also been denied the reins of power. Appropriately, given the election result, Italians now have their populist government and their euro, too.  [...]

In fact, the argument for a measured fiscal stimulus is sound – just not the kind of fiscal stimulus the League and M5S have in mind. An economy in Italy’s condition needs “two-handed policies”: supply-side reforms of labor and product markets to boost productivity and international competitiveness, accompanied by demand stimulus to prevent the uncertainties of reform and the surrounding political noise from depressing spending. Although Italy has a heavy debt burden, it also has a modicum of fiscal space, given low interest rates and a primary budget surplus.

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AJ+: Will Robots Make Us Poor? Universal Basic Income And The Robot Tax

Rapid development of self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence and robotics are expected to aggravate inequality, as wealth goes to those who own the robots. Technologists and politicians are proposing solutions like universal basic income and job retraining to keep job displacement from leading to poverty and homelessness. While many see the coming problems, there is little agreement on how to fund them, and few doubt the degree of expected change.

AJ+'s documentary series on automation explores how advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and automated vehicles will affect jobs, cities and inequality. From trucking to radiology, new technology is already changing white collar and blue collar occupations, reshaping cities and concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. Robots are taking over the world as companies like Tesla, Amazon, Uber and Google are using robots to automate. 

Wall Street Journal: Basic Income: The Free Money Experiments | Moving Upstream

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and other tech titans are promoting the idea of universal basic income, as a way to help citizens weather job disruptions caused by emerging technologies. Canada is giving it a try, with a pilot program that gives participants up to $17,000 annually for three years — no strings attached. WSJ’s Jason Bellini checks in on this free money experiment. 

The Guardian: Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.) [...]

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by the early 21st century, advances in technology would lead to an “age of leisure and abundance”, in which people might work 15 hours a week. In 1980, as robots began to depopulate factories, the French social and economic theorist André Gorz declared: “The abolition of work is a process already underway … The manner in which [it] is to be managed … constitutes the central political issue of the coming decades.” [...]

Yet post-work has the potential to appeal to conservatives. Some post-workists think work should not be abolished but redistributed, so that every adult labours for roughly the same satisfying but not exhausting number of hours. “We could say to people on the right: ‘You think work is good for people. So everyone should have this good thing,’” says James Smith, a post-workist whose day job is lecturing in 18th-century English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. “Working less also ought to be attractive to conservatives who value the family.” [...]

Instead, she would like the movement to think more radically about the nuclear home and family. Both have been so shaped by work, she argues, that a post-work society will redraw them. The disappearance of the paid job could finally bring about one of the oldest goals of feminism: that housework and raising children are no longer accorded a lower status. With people having more time, and probably less money, private life could also become more communal, she suggests, with families sharing kitchens, domestic appliances, and larger facilities. “There have been examples of this before,” she says, “like ‘Red Vienna’ in the early 20th century, when the [social democratic] city government built housing estates with communal laundries, workshops, and shared living spaces that were quite luxurious.” Post-work is about the future, but it is also bursting with the past’s lost possibilities. [...]

And yet, as Frayne points out, “in some ways, we’re already in a post-work society. But it’s a dystopic one.” Office employees constantly interrupting their long days with online distractions; gig-economy workers whose labour plays no part in their sense of identity; and all the people in depressed, post-industrial places who have quietly given up trying to earn – the spectre of post-work runs through the hard, shiny culture of modern work like hidden rust.

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The Guardian: What happens when the jobs dry up in the new world? The left must have an answer

f modern Britain has a defining problem, it boils down to an across-the-board failure to leave the past behind. Brexit, self-evidently, is a profoundly retrogressive project, helmed by Tory politicians split between continuity Thatcherites and devotees of a supposed one-nation Conservatism who still yearn for a quiet, sepia-tinted England. The latter are personified, in her own shaky way, by the prime minister. Labour, meanwhile, has a clear set of moral responses to an obvious social crisis, and the first stirrings of a convincing programme for government. But it, too, has a tendency to take refuge in fuzzy dreams of yesteryear: 1945, old flags and banners, the idea that a dependable job in a factory is still a byword for emancipation.

And all the time, the future takes shape. Academics at Oxford University’s Martin School say that as automation gains pace, even work in retail – which is all many places currently have left – “is likely to vanish, as it has done in manufacturing, mining and agriculture”. The era of driverless transport will soon be here. Even for the labour market’s winners, a digitised economy’s quickfire cycles and ever-changing demands are steadily killing job security.  [...]

So what might the progressive politics of the 2020s and 2030s look like? Clearly, our most glaring inequalities call for action that only a powerful central state can carry out. We should start, at long last, to move tax policy towards concentrations of wealth and assets, not least land and property. The line should be redrawn between what ought to be considered public services and utilities, and things best left to the private sector, a point underlined by the nightmarish collapse of the outsourcing giant Carillion. Investment needs to be forcibly pushed into places long deprived of it.

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Jacobin Magazine: Where Next for Finland’s Welfare State?

That’s something with which we’re struggling. The welfare state is a good concept and still retains widespread support among Finns. We represent a certain continuity in terms of these structures but understand that change is needed because they are under attack. One thing that separates Finland from Sweden is that we had a lot of influential autonomist-leftist debates in the mid-2000s which impacted policy and thinking in the Left Alliance. I come from that scene — as do many others — in the squatters’ movement and the politics of urban space.  [...]

We propose to put it at a level where people feel empowered to refuse bad jobs. The social democrats believe they can end all precarious work by introducing new laws. We’re saying no, entrepreneurship and self-employment are here to say. People want to do it and it’s also something that brings with it a freedom to be your own boss. What worker does not want to be their own boss? Instead of saying that we need to reverse all these changes we’ve seen in the labor market through new laws, we need a welfare structure that isn’t based on two categories: employed and unemployed. Basic income concerns the whole employment system. [...]

Another example is the so-called sharing economy, which is really more like a renting economy. It’s possible to imagine how these platforms could be run collectively in a way that resembles the traditional socialist concept of co-ownership of the means of productions. We should also look at data. If instead of it being hoarded by large corporations all the data we produce in society were open assets, it would provide a base for innovation which would be radically different compared to an economy with a few private actors owning patents. If data was owned collectively, it would be a great equalizer. Then there is the rapidly occurring automatization of industrial labor. We could respond to that by taxing the robots, creating a universal basic income and moving to a six-hour work day. This is an optimist view of the future — but we need to start thinking that way if we want to avoid the worst outcome. [...]

It should be remembered that the party differs from other populist-right forces in its origins. Unlike, say, the Swedish Democrats and the Front National, it began as an agrarian party with migration playing a relatively minor role. Its rhetoric was much more traditional populism — the ordinary man against the elites, particularly against the EU. In the mid-2000s anti-immigrant, right-wing groups in Finland were looking to come together and saw the potential of the True Finns as a vehicle. The party that rose to prominence was founded on this mix of xenophobic, migration-focused politicians and an agrarian populist base. 2011 was their big breakthrough and research suggests a broad range of sentiments about change propelled them. They said they were outside of politics, with the regular people, rhetoric you can even find in more centrist figures like Macron in France. So it wasn’t some kind of pure anti-immigrant vote.  

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Social Europe: Universal Basic Income: Definitions And Details

Rothstein correctly identifies as an advantage of such a reform that it ‘would force employers to create more acceptable and less demeaning types of work because people would not take jobs they consider unsatisfactory. Releasing people from the compulsion to have a paid job would, according to the proponents, also mean strengthening the voluntary/civil society sector and cultural life’. He equally correctly identifies as disadvantages that it ‘would be unsustainably expensive and would thereby jeopardize the state’s ability to maintain quality in public services such as healthcare, education and care of the elderly’, that it would lose political legitimacy, and that ‘people who can work [would] choose not to work’. [...]

So instead of a UBI scheme that pays £800 per month to every individual, and that abolishes means-tested benefits, let us instead pay £264 per month to every individual (with different amounts for children, young adults, and elderly people), and let us leave means-tested benefits in place and recalculate them on the basis that household members now receive UBIs. Instead of leaving undefined the funding method for a UK-based UBI, as Rothstein does, let us choose to fund it by abolishing the Income Tax Personal Allowance and the National Insurance Contribution (NIC) Primary Earnings Threshold (so that Income Tax and NICs are paid on all earned income), let us apply a flat rate NIC of 12% to all earned income (rather than the current two-tier 12% and 2% structure), and let us increase Income Tax rates by just 3%.

According to research published by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, the effects of such a UBI scheme would be interestingly different from the effects of Rothstein’s. Far from being ‘unsustainably expensive’, it would require no additional public expenditure, and so would not affect expenditure on public services. Rothstein cannot show that his scheme would not impose significant losses on low-income households. This alternative scheme would not impose significant losses on these households, it would impose few losses on households in general, and it would still take a lot of households off some of our existing means-tested benefits. Rothstein cannot tell us how his scheme would redistribute disposable income, or how it would affect poverty or inequality indices. This alternative scheme would redistribute from rich to poor, it would reduce every poverty index and significantly reduce inequality. Rothstein tells us that his scheme would reduce the incentive to seek employment. This alternative scheme would reduce some important marginal deduction rates (or the rate at which additional earned income is reduced by taxation and the withdrawal of means-tested benefits) and it would therefore incentivize employment, self-employment, and new small businesses.

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Vox: What Hillary Clinton really thinks