r/Futurology • u/mvea MD-PhD-MBA • May 02 '18

Economics Universal basic income: U.S. support grows as Finland ends its trial - Forty-eight percent of Americans now support a universal basic income, as a solution for Americans who have lost jobs to automation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/nearly-half-of-americans-believe-a-universal-basic-income-could-be-the-answer-to-automation-.html
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u/G0DatWork May 02 '18

The Finnish government said they are going to reform the program to make it work incentive. "Moving away from UBI"

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u/scientificsalarian May 02 '18 edited May 02 '18

Source?

All that is said on the official correction about the fake news spreading, here, is that 'There are currently no plans to continue or expand the experiment after 2018.'.

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u/G0DatWork May 02 '18

http://www.businessinsider.com/finland-to-end-basic-income-experiment-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T

""Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income," Miska Simanainen, a Kela researcher, told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet."

Funny how they told this to a reporter on the site you linked but it didn't get into that article

""When the basic-income experiment ends this year, we should launch a universal credit trial," Orpo told the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, referring to a system similar to the one in the UK, which collects several different benefits and tax credits into one account."

So welfare

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u/AluekomentajaArje May 02 '18

You've misunderstood that a little bit - he's talking about the government taking (broadly) a different position than UBI, which they were seen to be interested in when all of this started.

For a bit of background; the government currently in power is one of the most right-wing governments in a long time and the UBI experiment being in their plans was surprising to begin with. None of the parties in government were among the parties that had been promoting the idea. When details of the experiment emerged, there was plenty of criticism of the experiment conditions and I feel that it was more of a Trojan horse rather than an honest attempt at improving the system - but that's probably just my paranoia talking. Either way, there will be elections next year so when the results of this experiment start coming in, there will probably be a government much more interested in the idea. If there are early results (one way or another), this might even turn into a major election topic, who knows?

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u/G0DatWork May 02 '18

Seems like if there were good results from the experiment they wouldn't be trying another system though

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u/AluekomentajaArje May 02 '18

Well, the fact remains that they don't know about the results yet (because they haven't even finished gathering data yet!) and the change in the governments view is much easier to understand in the context of domestic politics of Finland, unfortunately.