What the evidence shows

People who support basic income tend to cite the experiments only when the results agree with them. It is a mistake, and it costs: the first informed person you meet dismantles the argument in thirty seconds. Here is what the completed programmes actually show, awkward parts included.

Finland, 2017-2018: the most studied case

It is the only national, randomised, government-run experiment in Europe. Kela, the Finnish social insurance institution, paid €560 a month, tax free, to 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people for two years, with no obligation to look for work and no reduction if they found any. The control group was made up of other unemployed people who were not selected.

On employment, the effect was small. Over the reference period recipients worked an average of 78 days, six more than the control group. Interpretation is complicated by the introduction, in 2018, of an «activation model» that changed the rules halfway through.

Anyone expecting basic income to make employment surge was wrong. Anyone expecting it to collapse was equally wrong, and that is the more important result: nobody stopped working en masse.

On wellbeing, the differences were clear. Recipients reported greater life satisfaction, less mental strain, less depression, less sadness and less loneliness. They also reported a more positive view of their own cognitive capacities — memory, learning, concentration — and a financial situation that felt more manageable.

The limits that have to be stated

The Finnish experiment was not a universal basic income, and anyone citing it as one is overreaching. Recipients were a narrow group — people already unemployed and already on Kela benefits — and the amount was not enough to live on. The hardest part was missing entirely: how it is financed when everyone receives it, and what happens to prices and wages when an entire population has a floor beneath it.

That is a structural limitation of nearly every basic income experiment: you can test the effect on recipients, not the effect on the system. Anyone who says the pilots «prove» it works at national scale is using the wrong word.

What can be said, then

Honestly, this:

• Giving money without conditions does not produce the abandonment of work that many people fear. It is the most widespread fear and the one least supported by the available evidence.
• It produces measurable and consistent improvements in mental health and in the sense of security.
• It reduces the bureaucracy and the humiliation attached to conditional benefits.
• We still do not know what happens at national scale, at steady state, financed from general taxation. Anyone who claims to know, in either direction, is going beyond the data.

That is a more modest basis than the slogans suggest. It is also basis enough to justify a serious European trial, which is what this site asks for.