Finland Time

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The economic principle I’m exploring is “people generally respond to principles in predictable ways”

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “How will UBI change the incentive to work”

The article published in The Guardian titled “A basic income for everyone? Yes, Finland shows it really can work

” demonstrates this economic principle because it shows how UBI has affected a few individuals lives in Finland.

First, the story Jarvinen, a poor artisan. Being a part of the UBI test run has enabled him to pursue his true passions, none of which “would have been possible before he received UBI. Until this year, Järvinen was on dole money; the Finnish equivalent of the jobcentre was always on his case about job applications and training. Ideas flow out of Järvinen as easily as water from a tap, yet he could exercise none of his initiative for fear of arousing bureaucratic scrutiny.” Anecdotal evidence though it is, in Jarvinen’s case UBI incentivized him to work--doing what he loves instead of fruitlessly searching for low paying, meaningless jobs.

 Second, the similar case of a man named Christian, who was caught “carving and selling wooden guitar plectrums” while on government assistance, which angered authorities as he didn’t have a “real job” and wasn’t spending time jumping through bureaucratic hoops. He was doing what he wanted while being poor, which to authorities meant that he didn’t really need government assistance.

 Third, Finland has a different perspective on poverty than the US or UK-- “One, that poverty is the product of personal moral failure. For the former chancellor George Osborne, it was about skivers vs strivers. For IDS, poverty was the rotten fruit of broken families, addiction or debt. Neither man, nor the rest of their party, can accept what their rightwing counterparts in Finland do: that poverty is no more than a lack of money.” One right wing politician in Finland stated that she believed that in Finland, most people want to work--the poor being “lazy” wasn’t anything that occurred to her, as it does here.

 In my next blog post I will research: what are cases in which UBI has failed, and why? Or what are arguments against ubi