Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health

> Welfare systems very often end up being a trap because of this--people can't afford to succeed because they'll hit some tripwire that makes them worse off.

This is very much a problem in the US. I've lived it myself before I was making 6+ figures, and I've known many people that lived through it as well.

I had a higher quality of life working very part time minimum wage + benefits (SNAP, free healthcare, subsidized housing) than I did making 50k/year.

Most on welfare like that, you actually end up with a much worse quality of life the moment you make a little more money or find a better job and lose your benefits. There's far too big of a gap between "needs assistance" and "makes enough money to have the same or better quality of life as being on benefits" so for most, you just purposely work less or work lower paying jobs in order to keep collecting benefits because to do otherwise means you are worse off.

For someone who has subsidized housing, free healthcare, and SNAP, why would purposefully lose all of that, but still remain poor, just because now you work 40 hours/week instead of 20. Unless you can make a huge jump (say, go from minimum wage up to $75k+/year immediately), don't bother trying to get off welfare, it won't do you any good.

The tax code (at least in the US, YMMV in other countries) is already progressive. Making more will never have you taking home less.

However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499.

What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around is to have benefits adjusted to get people to a baseline.

Say the poverty level is $1000 a month. You get $1000 - X, where X is how much you made in that month.

No one needs to be kicked to do anything. Welfare payments are needed for various reasons. Some people are unable to work for various reasons and need welfare to live. Some people find themselves in temporary situations where the money helps them during hard job transitions or difficult periods in life. It’s important to give people incentives to help them achieve what will make their lives truly better. Sometimes, free money removes those incentives and temporary situations become permanent. I hope you don’t perceive all incentives to encourage constructive behavior as “kicking people.”

All that says to me is that basic income support had a beneficial effect on mental health in Germany, Finland, and Malawi. This isn’t like a drug trial, where the underlying system, the human body, is more or less the same. Each country is different enough that the same policies don’t necessarily produce the same outcomes, which is why mental health did not improve in every program which provided basic income support, such as Mincome (Manitoba). As such I am still unconvinced these results mean anything for different places where these programs have not been implemented and tested, where day-to-day life, socioeconomic realities, and government policies are different.

You observe further differences in program outcomes when you notice that providing basic income support in both Finland and Germany did not reduce crime, but there was some evidence of crime reduction in other places under similar programs. So I don’t take the mental health improvement results for granted, especially since, at least in the Finland case, it’s unclear what will happen when you increase the sample of respondents, ie is the effect going to increase, or decrease, or become negligible altogether.

I also think these studies need to report on societal benefits like crime reduction, graduation rates, or gainful employment activity as well. Maybe you cannot ensure that individual effects such as mental health status might improve across countries under such programs. But maybe by pulling enough levers, you can ensure that crime reduction is always a guarantee regardless of type of place.

Consider also that there’s an unnecessary assumption that giving people more money is a meaningful benefit. What if you tested against different options, like creating more community programs, third places, or apprentice programs which guarantee jobs with a certain income. UBI is a useful tool under some circumstances, but assuming that it will improve individual outcomes across the board is unfounded. I still do think that a thoughtful and robust UBI program might ensure more stable local communities and economies, regardless of its benefits or lack thereof for an individual receiving it. In short, these studies are measuring the wrong outcomes to make their case.

I don't think "liking" is the correct phrasing.

Many jobs _do_ have someone constantly looking over your shoulder to ensure that you're doing to job adequately. These jobs are often low-trust environments often staffed by low-trust individuals.

In terms of the unemployed, are they mostly high-trust or low-trust? That's what should determine the terms and conditions of the program, not whether they "like" the program or not.

> patriarchal bureaucracy

My sides.

Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean.

There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.

> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI

No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:

"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."

That's unemployment benefits.

Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".

> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",

It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.

Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.