At least five interesting things: Debunking the Debunkers edition (#73)

I have some sad news to report: My podcast, Econ 102, is going on indefinite hiatus. Erik Torenberg, my excellent co-host, is very busy at his new job at a16z, and we weren’t able to keep up a regular schedule of podcasting. I apologize to all the fans of Econ 102!

Time permitting, Erik and I may return with more content later. And in the meantime, I am actively thinking about some other ways to deliver you voice and video content, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s this week’s roundup of interesting econ-related stuff!

1. Another “L” for basic income

I had high hopes for the idea that just giving people cash would fix a lot of society’s problems. I still think a system of unconditional cash benefits would be simpler, fairer, and easier to navigate than many of our current welfare programs, and I still think it’s worth giving poor people money in order to make them less poor. But over the past few years, a bunch of new evidence has shown that the costs of cash giveaways are higher (in terms of incentivizing people to stop working), and the social benefits are much narrower, than boosters like myself had believed. Kelsey Piper had a great writeup of this disappointing evidence a few months ago, and I wrote up some thoughts in one of my earlier roundups.

Now we have another piece of evidence showing that cash benefits solve fewer problems than we’d like it to solve. Aaltonen, Kaila, and Nix (2025) study a recent basic income experiment in Finland. In 2017, 2000 unemployed Finnish people were randomly selected to get a change in their welfare benefits. Instead of Finland’s usual unemployment benefits, the 2000 lucky people got 2 years of cash — about $658 per month at today’s exchange rates. This allowed them to A) keep receiving cash even if they started working, and B) avoid the normal job-search requirement that comes along with unemployment benefits.

The authors find that the basic income was effective in terms of raising people’s incomes. This isn’t surprising — if you don’t stop giving unemployed people cash when they get a job, they’re going to get more money overall.

Unfortunately, though, there wasn’t much impact on labor income relative to the control group. We’d hope that if we gave people money unconditionally instead of yanking