Four out of Five?

[birguslatro]

According to this BBC article, four out of five Finns support a basic income. That seems an extraordinarily high percentage. The Finns must be one of the least self-righteous peoples on the planet!

Anyway, it seems like they may be doing a trial: "The prime minister has expressed support for a limited, geographical experiment. Participants would be selected from a variety of residential areas. Mr Kanninen [of the Tank research centre] proposes testing the idea by paying 8,000 people from low income groups four different monthly amounts, perhaps from €400 to €700."

My guess is that won't tell you anything useful - such as what it would do to the overall economy. A basic income would be revolutionary, not just a tinkering with the system, and there'd be lots of non-intuitive consequences.

And, as with every time I've seen it proposed, there's always a monetary value suggested for what the basic income should be, as apposed to a way to automatically arrive at it.

How should a basic income be viewed? As a good accumulated by society over time - a bit like the roads everyone gets to use. And how should it be calculated? Perhaps as a percentage of the country's total income. That would have the advantage of being self-correcting. As if the country's total income started to decrease because of an increase in the numbers not working, the incentive to work would increase due to the standard of living decreasing for those on just the basic income.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I think I'd go for either:
1) A figure produced by an independent body that calculates how much is needed to not go hungry or sleep on the streets (plus enough entertainment to not cause mental health issues).
2) A percentage of the average wage. Say, 40%.

(A quick check on http://www.entitledto.co.uk indicates that a single person on Jobseeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit gets around £10k of benefits each year. So 40% of the £25k average pay would be about the same as that.)

The former method gives people what they need, but is open to more argument about what people "really" need. The latter is a quicker calculation, but has obvious issues around what exact percentage to go for.

[birguslatro]

2 is better than 1 - and much easier to notice if it gets adjusted.

However, is corporate profits and the like included in the average wage calculation? I assume not, and what about salaries?

It should be based on a percentage of a country's total income.

But anyway, what's its purpose? Here's a few reasons for it...

1) To simplify government benefits. ie. Unemployment, pensions and so on could be done away with.
2) To make retraining easier for people to do, thus upskilling the workforce.
3) To make starting new businesses easier to do, and so maybe diversifying the economy.
4) To stop the exploitation of those in lousy jobs which they can't afford to leave.
5) To provide an income to those doing useful stuff that doesn't itself generate an income.
6) To put more spending money in people's pockets. (Production isn't the problem in modern economies - it's the markets.)
7) To help address the seemingly endless rising inequality.
8) To increase the total amount of bad art being made in the world.

[andrewducker]

Yup, pretty much all of those reasons.