HELSINKI: Finns have been getting money from the government each month — and they are not expected to do anything in return. The participants, ages 25 to 58, are all unemployed and were selected at random by Kela, Finland’s social-security institution.
While the project has been praised internationally for being at the cutting edge of social welfare, back in Finland, decision-makers are pulling the brakes and taking the project in a whole new direction.
“Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income,” Miska Simanainen, a Kela researcher, told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
The initial plan was for the experiment to expand in early 2018 to include workers as well as people who are not working, but that did not happen, to the disappointment of researchers at Kela.
Researchers say that without workers in the project, they’re unable to study whether the so-called basic income would allow people to make new career moves or enter training or education.
In recent years, an increasing number of tech entrepreneurs have endorsed universal basic income, a system in which people receive a standard amount of money simply for being alive.
Entrepreneurs who have expressed support for universal basic income include Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Chris Hughes, a Facebook cofounder, and Ray Kurzweil, Google’s futurist and engineering director.
These tech moguls say that universal basic income in combination with other methods of combating poverty could also help solve the problem of increased automation in the workforce — a problem critics say they have been very much a part of creating
