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by MperorM 2984 days ago
Basic income for some is how you test whether all the claims you made are true. While I agree with everything you said, there are still many fundamental questions yet to be answered.

Another reason it is not happening any time soon is that rolling it out in a country such as Finland would be WAY more expensive than the current wealthfare models in Scandinavian countries as they stand now.

To roll it out for every citizen as a replacement to current wealthfare, the people who are currently receiving wealthfare will be receiving much less. To many, this would be unacceptable, as these families already are percieved to be struggling to make ends meet.

While I am still a big advocator for basic income in the developing world, I struggle to see how it would work in a country such as Denmark where I live. While I believe there are workarounds such as only providing basic income for the people who apply for it (still unconditional just opt-in instead of opt-out) there are no studies showing the effectiveness of the limitations that are necessary to make basic income feasible.

2 comments

Finland and Scandinavia (especially Norway) are great cases for basic income. Those families who are struggling to make ends meet do it because they can't start working or they will lose welfare. Basic income will allow them to enter workforce, gradually. You just need to start implementing basic income slowly, giving everybody time to adjust - start with €100, create system for it and debug it, then add another €100 each year until desired level.
> Those families who are struggling to make ends meet do it because they can't start working or they will lose welfare.

Someone who has angst that is so extreme, they cannot leave their house without having a panic attack, is not out of a job because of a lack of incentive. I promise you, that person would prefer working a normal job if that were an option.

A mother of 3 young children is not on wealthfare because she has no incentive to work. she doesn't have a job because raising three young children and managing a house is fulltime work.

While it's still terrible that a huge amount of people are terribly disincentivized to work in the current system, the people who need the most care, are also the ones who would not be working after basic income either. These people would be receiving less than a living wage with no way of working afterwards either.

it is simply untrue to say that perverse incentives are the universal reason people don't have a job. We barely know if it is a reason as it stands right now.

There have been minimal trials in the west on basic income, and none of them have been here for long enough to measure anything meaningful.

>While I am still a big advocator for basic income in the developing world

How do they afford it ?

We pay for it :)

The west is so obscenely rich compared to most of the developing world that there simply is no excuse for us to not be helping out.

Give Directly, for example, is a highly rated charity on givewell, that focuses on giving both conditional and unconditional cash transfers to parts of the developing world.