In December 2018, the world-renowned Finnish experiment with basic income came to an anticlimactic end. This conclusion was unsurprising given that eight months earlier it had already been widely reported that the pilot program had been cancelled. (In reality, the government had announced that they would not extend the program.)

From January 2017 to December 2018, the Finnish social insurance agency Kela gave out a monthly payment of €560 (about $640) to two thousand unemployed persons — the kicker being that there were no strings attached. The only requirements were that at the start of the experiment the participants had to be between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-eight and they had to be receiving the lowest level of unemployment insurance. If they remained unemployed for the entire two years or they gained employment by January 2, 2017, the participants would continue to receive the check each month. (Although the behavioral data on the two thousand participants is still being reviewed and has not been published, preliminary data suggests that most participants ended up working similar amounts to the control group.)

Now, almost a year later, it seems like a good time to look back and analyze what was undoubtedly a bold policy experiment. The Finnish program was the first national randomized control trial in which an advanced industrialized country incorporated an unconditional basic income — albeit a partial, rather than universal, basic income — into its social safety net. There have been many experiments with basic income in the developing world as a means of making aid more targeted and more effective. The closest historical precedents for Finland’s experiment were carried out in North America in the late twentieth century. Between 1968 and 1982, the United States conducted four state and local experiments with a negative income tax (NIT), and the Canadian province of Manitoba experimented with basic income in the 1970s.