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

It can be also interpreted as "contact with government officers is inherently stressful", at least for some individuals. That would be enough to move the group mean.

Which I saw in my own family. My mother was never unemployed and never demanded anything from the state coffers, but she was afraid of the bureaucracy and the inscrutable power that it wielded over citizens' matters.

My former secretary is somewhat spooked by contact with the governmental structures as well.

And note that actually getting work removed the controlled money. That's quite a disincentive to actually finding work. 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.

I'd like to see welfare systems and tax codes modified with a rule that no situation can cause more than a 50% marginal "tax". (Which would mean many cutoffs in the tax code would effectively be replaced with phaseouts even if Congress didn't specifically fix them.)

You're probably not aware that €560 is subsistence money in Finland. Eat noodles every day, sell your car, keep indoor temperature at 18 C to save electricity, then maybe you have enough to pay rent. The idea that people in that situation needs to be kicked even harder to "get of their lazy asses" is cruel.

> I am also not sure how to extrapolate study results from Finnish people to people in other cultures.

Well the article points out similar (and sometimes even stronger) effects on mental health for experiments in Malawi and Germany. So seems that it does extrapolate.

It's funny how so many posters seem to attribute it to just "free money, yeah".

There are plenty of complaints on HN how increased buerocratic burdens/tasks, in particular when they seem pointless or unrelated, leads to low job satisfaction, burn out and mental health issues. But somehow when it comes to the unemployed the same thing does not apply?

I certainly can relate that the more tasks pile up the more stressed I become (and being unemployed certainly can feel stressful). Adding some pointless administrative tasks that don't help with my actual goals can often be enough to push me over the edge so I just want to quit.

Or more so that bureaucracy involved is extremely annoying. Consisting tracking of making enough applications even if there is no relevant positions, possibly making to apply to some irrelevant position. Or just various courses and other stuff like CV workshops that mostly seem like waste of times. Fail any of these and you might end up lowered or no money...

Not really, because you don't feel you've earned it. Also you've paid taxes through the nose to get it in the first place.

Sales taxes ramp up the cost of living.

So I assume you like your manager constantly checking on your jiras, how much code you have written and calling you in to meetings where you need to justify in detail what you have done over the last week?

If not, why not? Those checks are just there because you are expected to earn a profit for the company.

+1 they don't even try to hide the amount of bias in the study.

Getting psychologically damaged by receiving financial support while you looked for a new job is such a wild statement.

>>since it removes pressure to find a job.

NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers. 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pressure.

>>expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits

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

>> not meant to enable a life-style

An income of €560 per month, about $20/day, is hardly a lifestyle; it is enough to stay out of the gutter. This is only giving to people who do not have savings a sliver of the resources available to people sufficiently fortunate enough to have education and savings to fall back on.

It shows many of the differences in poverty are not due to any kind of merit/demerit, but simply lack of funds.

>>An useful measurement would be

Yes, that would be a DIFFERENT useful measurement. But to ignore the mental health aspects is to ignore real harms to both the people themselves and to the larger society, such as reduced isolation and crime, healthier communities, etc. Much of this was addressed by other experiments later in the article, which you either failed to read or intentionally ignored.

The entire point of the studies and article wasn't your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)", but the effects of payments vs bureaucracy.

The actual evidence is massively piling up that eliminating a patriarchal bureaucracy, means testing, and all this other govt overhead and simply giving everyone just-above-poverty-level income, will dramatically improve society, and it will be far more effective than all the layers of bureaucracy which not only add overhead, cost to the taxpayer, but also actual harm.

Well, unemployment benefits are also meant to protect your job.

As in you, the currently employed person.