Finland is the first major country to trial giving free money to citizens
Finland is offering free money to some citizens as part of an experiment aimed at cutting government red tape, reducing poverty and boosting employment.
Starting this Monday, the two-year trial will see 2,000 randomly-picked unemployed citizens receive €560 (£477/$587) each month, with no constraints on how to spend it.
The amount, which will be deducted from any benefits the citizens already receive, would keep coming even after citizens find employment.
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Olli Kangas from the Finnish government agency KELA, which is responsible for the country’s social benefits, said the scheme's idea was to abolish the "disincentive problem" among the unemployed.
The hope is that once unemployed people receive a guaranteed income they'll feel incentivised to look for a job and generally to improve their lives. A basic income, according to its advocates, prevents people from falling through the cracks of social security system.
In Finland, as in the U.S., people get welfare benefits according to their incomes.
“It’s highly interesting to see how it makes people behave,” Kangas told The Associated Press. “Will this lead them to boldly experiment with different kinds of jobs? Or, as some critics claim, make them lazier with the knowledge of getting a basic income without doing anything?"
"It’s highly interesting to see how it makes people behave."
A jobless person may currently refuse a low-income or short-term job in the fear of having his financial benefits reduced drastically under Finland’s generous and complex social security system.
The unemployment rate of Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, stood at 8.1% in November with 213,000 people without a job — unchanged from the previous year.
The scheme is part of measures by the centre-right government of Finland’s prime minister, Juha Sipila, to tackle unemployment.
Kangas said the basic income experiment may be expanded at a later date to other low-income groups such as freelancers, small-scale entrepreneurs and part-time workers.
Basic income has been a popular source of debate among academics and economics for decades but Finland is the first nation in the European Union to actually implement the idea.
The basic income was popularized by the economist Milton Friedman in the 1960s as a "negative income tax" but is picking up steam in several countries -- Canada, India and the Netherlands -- and in Silicon Valley.
The Dutch city of Utrecht is in the process of a pilot project on basic income, and seven other cities in the country have announced their intention to explore the idea, which has been discussed in the Netherlands since the 1970s.
In November, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that he believes the solution to taking care of human workers who are displaced by robots and software is creating a (presumably government-backed) universal basic income for all.
Mashable's Gianluca Mezzofiore contributed to this report.
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