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It's hard to get any conclusion from this article. There is this:

> The researchers also noted a mild positive effect on employment

> Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.

And, of course, the often neglected (and that appears as a negative on the numbers):

> Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours

But actually nothing of substance on either direction.

Do you have a better article?

It's a negative result. What isn't there matters - in particular, no info on there being some form of monetary ROI.

I don't have other sources at hand - just memories from when the study was published and there was quite a lot of discussion.

Hum... I've searched the study, and it looks like results are still scheduled to be published this year. Granted that it was a quick search, but I get no source for the claim that the result was negative.

Besides, UBI being cheaper to administer than current social security, failure in finding any difference is a reason to adopt it, not to keep the status quo.

UBI is definitely not cheaper that current social security. "To administer" maybe, but the total cost is probably orders of magnitude more, and doesn't even solve the problem: certain demographics will still need extra.

> UBI is definitely not cheaper that current social security.

If you count taxing a person to give the money back to the same person as a cost, it's certainly not.

> There was no clear indication that basic income encourages people to find jobs. You can scratch that one off the list.

You clearly didn't read the study or even the guardian article. There was clear evidence that basic income encourages people to find jobs in many cases, just not conclusively in every case (which no proponent of UBI argues).

> There was a pretty big and important hypothesis that the study was trying to pin down: is UBI profitable? Do you give 500 EUR and get more back?

That wasn't even close to the hypothesis that they were trying to disprove. You made this up off the top of your head. They were trying to develop a simpler, less bureaucratic welfare system that didn't have the pitfalls of the existing system while measuring dependent's wellbeing.

> And the answer is: there is no trace of that.

Again, not true. There was plenty of evidence that a UBI (as enacted in this study) could have positive economic effects, just not in every single case, and not conclusively.

Pretty much the only conclusive result from this study was that the dependents had a better sense of well being on average from the control group. That's it. I have no idea where you got these made up factoids from, I cant find any kind of review or analysis that shares your opinions or statements.

From an income redistribution standpoint giving $500 and mostly getting less back can make sense. If you give $500 to 10 people and get zero back, but one of those people earns a billion dollars per year, it could be still be fine. Either way, it's an important datapoint. It should be an intentional decision to do it as wealth redistribution if that's the way we want to go, rather than pretending it's something it isn't.

If it improved people’s lives and had no obvious drawbacks, do we really need anything else to call it a success? Why is something only a success if it makes the stock market go up, or some capitalist richer? I cannot strongly stress enough how profoundly I do not care about either of those things. Making people’s lives better is an end unto itself.

I cannot strongly stress how amused and annoyed I am by you completely ignoring that this money has to come from somewhere. Goddamn kids.

Of course giving people money makes them happy. Problem is that money represents resources, there's a limited amount of those going around, and printing money doesn't do anything except devalue the value of a dollar.

It's a functional problem, not a distribution problem.

I cannot strongly stress how amused and annoyed I am by you defending the interests of people with more money than you and your entire family have ever made or ever will make.

You're right. Our current system requires us to use money to represent limited resources and those resources are not infinite. Congratulations.

However the idea here that some people just have to suffer and be catastrophically disadvantaged so that an (increasingly smaller and squeezed) middle class can enjoy the fruits of their hard labor as the money continues to concentrate at the top is absurd.

Try thinking outside of the box for a moment. The current system is fundamentally broken but I guess as long as you've got yours it suits your needs.

I was born in communist Romania. Thank you very much, but I had one socialist system in my life, I really don't want another. Every single one that humanity tried was either suboptimal, dystopian or straight up humanitarian catastrophe. But sure, I guess they weren't "real" socialism, so let's try and try and try again. sigh.

Somebody in my country once said something like: "If you're not communist at 20, you have no heart. If you're still communist at 30, you have no brain". So I guess I should be more patient. But well... I am a bit irritated by people saying things with conviction while not knowing enough history to cross the road.

It's disingenuous to suggest that the thing I am advocating for is the system as it existed in communist Romania. I am not.

Just as I do not advocate for the current economic system in the way it exists. However I know that our current system's goal isn't to provide for the people, and the failings of our current system are extreme.

My biggest point is that I'm not saying everyone should be provided a luxury yacht by the state. It's impractical and nobody needs a luxury yacht to be happy or live.

But I know that people do need things like a place to sleep, food to eat, and access to healthcare to be happy and live. And if you slip in to a situation where you lack any one of those things, getting out of it can be that much more difficult.

I think we have an obligation to each other as humans to try and provide for each other. I guess that it's an unpopular belief.

What history, literally two comments up I was saying how the standards defense is that "it was not _real_ communism, let's try again and this time we'll get it right". groan

The goal of the system isn't to provide for people. That's the core fallacy that doomed pretty much any socialist system ever. Systems are shit - all of them. More you rely on one, more fucked you are.

What you want is to let people to provide for themselves.

Because yes, they can and they want to. And trying to say that they need a "system" to provide for them... ugh. It's offensive in so many ways. People are not children - children are children.

Now, this being said, things are quite complicated. There are commons problems, which are very hard to solve by the free market. You do, unfortunately, need some system for those, with the inherent shittyness. But as a rule, the smaller it is the better. More you try to do centralized, worse results you get. Even the modern great success stories in social democracy (western countries, northern europe etc) - they either have a catch (like natural resources) or did most of their growth on a small system, and now are spending their success as social benefits.

And yes, you do want a social safety net, for general principles. You don't want old people dying in ditches because an investment firm went bust with their pensions. But that's about it - safety net has nothing to do with treating perfectly healthy adults like they're disabled or children. They are the ones _paying_ for the safety net. Somebody has to.

This bizarre sort of doublethink when it comes to organization is just so baffling. You seem to believe that private institutions can be as big as they want and will always run fine, but public institutions are always shit. Why? You say that people have to be left to take care of themselves- you show me a person who is truly taking care of himself without being a part of some larger organization or community and I’ll show you a naked hermit shivering in the woods. Look, I live in the United States, where we are utterly incapable of building something like high speed rail or dealing in an organized way with a pandemic, and it’s exactly this kind of thinking that got us here. There is no fundamental difference between a public and private organization, except that one is run somewhat democratically and the other is a private fiefdom. And we all have a duty to look out for each other, not just ourselves. That’s how civilization keeps itself going.

I'm not particularly sure what your point is. I don't love big private organizations. I'd prefer a world with medium sized companies that fail fast. But I don't hate them, not a lot - they have two big things that separate them from governments: you can always go to another, usually just by crossing the street and going into a different shop. And they can't shoot you or throw you in jail.

In Utopia for Realists, a book full off UBI case studies, this question is addressed multiple times and yes, UBI is a money saver for governments.