Follow up...
@ Finland’s Basic Income Pilot Was Never Really A Universal Basic Income...when Finland recently made it clear that they will not continue to administer the program after the end of 2018, several outlets–most prominently The New York Times–read it as a death knell for universal basic income, and “a reflection of public discomfort with the idea of dispensing government largess free of requirements that its recipients seek work.”
To interpret what happened with the Finland program in this way is not only incorrect, it also does a disservice to the other universal basic income experiments currently in the works from Stockton and Oakland, California, to Kenya to Ontario.
The whole premise of a true universal income program is that people can be eligible to receive the supplemental payment regardless of whether or not they work. While the income threshold for receiving the benefit necessarily varies by context, generally the idea is to help people clear the poverty threshold wherever they live.
In Finland, the government only made the basic income stipend available to people who were already unemployed. “That’s really the biggest distinctive factor compared to what a universal basic income program is,” says Ioana Marinescu, a professor and economist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor market policies. And it was always the plan, Marinescu adds, for the Finland trial to conclude at the end of 2018. So it’s not that the government is axing the program–they’re just choosing not to extend it, and not to expand it for people who are employed but low-income. The organizers of Finland’s trial have also issued a statement correcting the misconception around the ending of the trial....
And according to Finland, the media reported fake news...
@ Finland's basic income organisers correct inaccurate media reports of trial's premature deathMany international media outlets have been very keen on reporting about Finland's two-year test run of Universal Basic Income (UBI) ever since the trial began more than a year ago.
However, according to the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela), many of those media outlets appear to have misunderstood recent developments in the trial.
The government has decided not to expand the programme, but the trial is still under way, according to Kela.
Professor Olli Kangas, head of Kela's research team, said the experiment will run as planned, and is not being prematurely halted.
"The effects of the experiment will not be published while the experiment is in progress, because a public discussion of the results could influence the behaviour of the test and control groups. That would lead to skewed results" Kangas said in a Kela press release on the matter.
Kela said that while there are no immediate plans to continue or expand the programme after the end of the trial, the effects of the previous two years' trials will be studied.
It said the data it manages to collect and analyse would be released by the end of 2019 or the start of 2020....
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler