Neuroliberalism in Action: The Finnish Experiment with Basic Income

Abstract

This article considers the entanglements of neuroscience, economics and behaviourism in a two-year experiment (2017–18) with basic income in Finland. The participants in this mandatory, state-led experiment are unemployed individuals (25–58 years old) recruited by the National Social Insurance Institution. The experiment is a randomised controlled trial intended to provide useful information about the impacts of basic income on employment and well-being. Focusing on the epistemological foundations of the experiment, this analysis suggests that the Finnish trial with basic income should be considered to be an example of the neuroliberal movement in policy-making as it uses behavioural economics and popularised neuroscience to optimise the cognitive abilities of the unemployed. The primary contribution of this paper is to raise concerns about how neuroliberalism reconfigures citizenship by obscuring the limits between freedom and control and how societies of control use neuroliberal models such as nudging to organise the disorganised and control the uncontrolled.

Keywords

basic income behavioural economics experimental state neuroliberalism rationality societies of control sociology of knowledge

Introduction

‘Free cash in Finland. Must be jobless’ (Goodman, 2016), declares the headline of a December 2016 article in The New York Times on a two-year experiment with basic income by the Finnish government. This trial from January 2017 to December 2018 has raised interest worldwide and is regarded as an opportunity for Finland to become a leader in experimental policy-making. In this paper, I examine the epistemological foundations of this experiment. My main argument is that the trial locates Finland within the geography of neuroliberalism, a political and economic reaction to neoliberalism after the financial crisis of 2007–9 that draws on behavioural, psychological and neurological insights to modulate human conduct within free societies (Whitehead et al., 2018). Based on this premise, my aim is to present the Finnish experiment with basic income as a fascinating case for analysing the entanglements of the state, neuroscience and economics, and how they reconfigure subjectivities by dissolving the political, technological and cultural limits of surveillance.

The epistemological foundations of the Finnish experiment raise concerns about the boundaries between the state and civil society. This mandatory state-led experiment involves 2000 randomly-selected unemployed individuals between 25 and 58 years old who receive a monthly basic income of €560 from the National Social Insurance Institution (Kela). Although the government programme for 2015–19 lists the trial among well-being and health projects, its explicit aim is to offer stronger incentives for working by encouraging citizens to take responsibility for their own lives (Kela, 2016). This focus on well-being distinguishes the basic income trial from the current centre-right government’s other activation policies, such as increasing the role of private employment services and implementing activation measures. Furthermore, the trial promises better earnings: the basic income consists of an amount equivalent to the regular unemployment benefit but is unconditional, does not require means testing and is not reduced for any earned income. Notwithstanding these welcomed aspects of the experiment, my analysis focuses on its theoretical, practical and discursive traits, which, I argue, should be located within the rise of globalised neuroliberal practises in policy-making, in particular, the emergence of neuro-inspired experimental behavioural economics.

In taking the neuroliberal path, Finland follows the United Kingdom and the United States, which, after the financial meltdown, have sought practical, ‘what works’ solutions to societal problems by establishing behavioural insight teams. Founded by the Obama administration and the Cameron government, these ‘nudge units’ serve the aim of importing lessons from behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience to achieve cost savings by focusing on aspects of social life otherwise considered to be either insignificant or unknowable (Davies, 2011, 2015; Pykett, 2013, 2017; Whitehead et al., 2018). Influenced by critical research on the changing forms of governmentality, I position the basic income trial as an example of neuroliberalism in action by tracking and tracing the key theoretical, practical and discursive traits of neuroliberalism in the trial. These neuroliberal traits are: cost savings; working with the grain of human cognition; changes to the context of decision-making; the use of formal policy experimentation and policy trials; and the pragmatic orientation of ‘what works’ government programmes (Whitehead et al., 2018: 27). Furthermore, this study contributes to the discussion on travelling experimental economic policies that are put to work by local actors in different countries (Peck and Theodore, 2015).

My analysis has three aims: to contribute to the understanding on how neuroliberalism works in practice; to show the entanglements between neuroliberalism and neurocapitalism, a brain-focused rationalisation process offering technological solutions for decision-making, depression and anxiety in precarious times (Pykett, 2013; Sampson, 2017); and, more broadly, to extend the critical discussion on how behavioural economics is used to enrich utilitarian theory in ways that reconstruct the economic actor and empower the state (Mirowski, 2014). Drawing on the extensive theorisation of neuroliberalism, neurocapitalism and the behavioural economic movement, this paper uses these critical and theoretical discussions as tools to analyse the complex constellations of neuroscience, economics and behaviourism in the experiment with basic income in Finland.

Furthermore, this paper revisits Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992). This post-Foucauldian enquiry proposes the emergence of new, post-disciplinary formations in which ‘individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks”’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5). Deleuze’s (1992) analysis of the societies of control well describes how the experimental platforms of the neuroliberal state reconfigure citizenship with deterritorialised, techno-managerial forms of modulation to organise the disorganised in experimental settings. From this perspective, the Finnish basic income trial is a highly controversial case based on a ‘disjointed relationship between “governmentality” and “discipline” where the former involves a form of macro-political physics of population and the latter, a form of micro-political physics of the body’ (Davies, 2017: 29). Although a complex, ambivalent and hybrid model, the experiment is nonetheless also a well-documented example of how the neuroliberal logic of control works between the poles of the individual and the mass in societies of control.

The traits of neuroliberalism entangle neuroscience, economics and political decision-making, so this article draws from different theoretical and empirical sources, which are divided into five sections. I first locate both Finland and the trial in the political and economic geography of the neuroliberal map and include a brief methodological note about my research process. The next section focuses on the experimental methodology of the basic income trial with a particular focus on randomised controlled trials, a method recommended by the behavioural economic movement to conduct cost-effective policy trials. Elaborating on the uses of behavioural economics in policy-making, the third section situates the experiment within the nudge movement, proposed by behavioural economists for the state to gently guide citizens towards healthier, cost-effective decisions. In the following sections I deepen the analysis by focusing on how the basic income trial is connected to neuroeconomics and neurocapitalism targeting and optimising the brain as if it were a machine. I conclude with remarks about societies of control keen to use techno-managerial forms of deterritorialised control to empower the state.

Geographies of Neuroliberalism

In the 2010s, the Finnish government has increasingly sought consultation on policy-making from ‘behaviouralists’ (Whitehead et al., 2018: 16), economists, academics and corporate strategists seeking to import neuroliberal ideas from their global networks. The small think-tank Tänk, which wrote the first proposal for a basic income trial in 2014, is an example of the behaviouralists who combine psychology and economics and import these ideas into Finnish society, mostly from the British Behavioural Insight Team. This first proposal for conducting a trial was commissioned by the state-led Finnish Pension Alliance and the Finnish State Innovation Fund (Sitra). Citing Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman (1962, 1980), the report suggested a state-led randomised controlled trial with a negative income tax as a viable model for experimenting with basic income (Forss and Kanninen, 2014). Pleased with this suggestion, the funders saw the proposed experiment as an opportunity to advance major social security reforms and tackle Finland’s ‘huge deficit in human capital’ (Sitra, 2014), and Tänk soon presented the proposal to the government’s Social Affairs and Health Committee. The trial, however, turned into a hybrid of different models targeting one particular income level and population segment: unemployed individuals receiving long-term unemployment benefits from the National Social Insurance Institution’s payment platform. The reasons for these changes were practical; Kela’s platform was cheap, and the hybrid model involved various interests in planning of the experiment by a consortium of experts from Kela, the Institute for Economic Research, Sitra, Tänk, the Federation of Finnish Enterprises and the universities of Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Eastern Finland (Kangas, 2016a).

Due to the hybridity of the trial, my analysis is necessarily partial. The primary research material consists of the comprehensive report on the experiment, as well as material from Kela’s website targeted at international audiences and a recent interview about the experiment for The Guardian (2018).¹ The data are supplemented with publications from the British Behavioural Insight Team and the European Commission’s behavioural science unit, selected because they are cited by the consultants and researchers responsible for planning the experiment. This dialogue with the wider, consultant-driven behavioural-change industry also locates Finland within the global neuroliberal politico-intellectual project formed by a cadre of behavioural experts who provide policy advice and recommendations (Pykett et al., 2017; Whitehead et al., 2018). This so-called behavioural-change industry mostly cites popularised work by behavioural economists Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman, so I also considered their writings when crafting a rhizomatic neuroliberal map.

I started working with this map in 2017, soon after interviewing a Tänk consultant about Finland’s workfare activation policies, including the basic income trial.² In the interview, it became clear to me that the experiment was actually a trial not about basic income but about using randomised controlled trials in public policy-making. Finnish economists have frequently stated so, most recently in an interview published in The Guardian: ‘People think we’re launching universal basic income. We’re not. We’re just trialling one kind of model, with one income level and one target group’, meaning that this is not a breakthrough for basic income but more ‘a real breakthrough for field experiments’ (Henley, 2018).

Moreover, the interview confirmed to me that the trial is an adaptation of neuro-inspired behavioural economics, a field that analyses decision-making based on neurobiological data. Also known as neuroeconomics, this field assumes that people are notoriously poor at processing numbers, and their thinking is filled with heuristics and biases (Wilhelms and Reyna, 2015). Consequently, activation policies, for instance, should be planned to respond to these fallacies and shortcuts in decision-making. Describing this viewpoint, the Tänk consultant stated:

You could say that all people are irrational rather than rational in their decision making. Of course, you take into account in the preparation of decision making the fact that people are not Dr. Spocks but more Homer Simpson. […] And especially if we’re talking about Finnish society where the society supports and pays for medical care expenses, then it also has full responsibility and justification to try to prevent these costs from being born. Especially when it’s also for the individual’s own benefit, but then how that actually happens, then here these kinds of nudging policies have been suggested, so when you understand the fallacies relating to people’s decision making, the biases or shortcuts, the heuristics, then with their help, you can guide people. (Interview, 16 November 2016)

This view of the state guiding irrational people to better outcomes constitutes the heart of neuroliberalism. It also connects the basic income trial, as a post-bureaucratic, freedom-preserving experiment, to the wider behavioural movement proposing that the state should guide post-rational subjects towards healthier, cost-effective decisions (Davies, 2015, 2016; Mirowski, 2014; Pykett, 2013, 2017; Pykett et al., 2017; Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013; Slaby and Gallagher, 2015; Whitehead et al., 2018; Wilkins, 2013). These connections are theoretical, methodological and rhetorical: international and local behaviouralists’ writings, for instance, deploy the figure of Homer Simpson to make clear the differences between emotional, sensitive ‘real people’ and the theoretical abstraction of homo economicus (Whitehead et al., 2018: 182). To locate the Finnish experiment on the neuroliberal map, I track and trace the various practical, discursive and theoretical traits of neuroliberalism in the selected research material.

The Finnish experiment, however, is also a specific case. What makes it unique is the use of the National Social Insurance Institution as a laboratory and the random selection of the research subjects for this experimental platform. In the trial, the unemployed are indeed research subjects, divided into the target group receiving the basic income and the control group of 178,000 citizens receiving regular unemployment benefits. After the trial, the comparison of these groups’ behaviour is expected to generate valid information for social security reforms. When proposed, this randomised controlled trial raised concerns the Finnish state should change its constitution to allow the government to treat citizens differently (Whitehead et al., 2018: 126). To overcome this legal obstacle, the Finnish parliament passed an experimental law in December 2016 to authorise the trial.

The experimental law also strengthens Finland’s strategy to become a leader in experimental policy-making, ‘a bold innovator, a country that actively looks for solutions to the biggest challenges facing modern societies’ (Mäkkylä, 2018).³ Indeed, the basic income trial is the flagship for the promotion of the experimental state, and amid the positive national and international reception of the experiment, ethical questions have been left aside. However, the experimental setting is highly problematic: it targets citizens who are dependent on social insurance platforms responsible for setting benefits under national security programmes, such as unemployment allowances. In the next section, I further analyse this issue, focusing on the policy-making uses of randomised controlled trials, a model typically used in medical research but recommended for planning social policies by the behavioural economic movement.

Organising the Disorganised

The randomised controlled trials used in experimental behaviour-change policies convey a powerful image of hard science. These imaginaries can be explained by the history of randomised trials as powerful and authoritative experiments in which the constructed evidence enjoys considerable rhetorical power (Edwards, 2007). Randomised trials were originally designed for medical drug research, so a trial begins with the selection of a target population, which is then divided into two groups: the treatment group and the untreated control group. Those in the first group, chosen at random, receive a placebo, and the clinical outcomes of the randomly-treated group and the control group are compared and analysed (Edwards, 2007: 10). This methodological setting forms the basis for the basic income trial, but in this experiment the ‘disease’ is unemployment, and the medicine is the basic income received by the 2000 people in the randomly-selected treatment group.

The Behavioural Insight Team (2012) and the European Commission (2013) recommend randomised controlled trials for use in public policy-making due to their objectivity. According to the European Commission’s behavioural research team, this experimental setting ensures accuracy by observing people ‘in their natural environment without any interference from observers’ (Van Bavel et al., 2013: 14). Similarly, Tänk (2014) recommends randomised controlled trials in its first proposal for trialling with basic income. Considering the trial’s experimental setting, however, it is worth asking whether the ‘coercion through implication’ (Whitehead et al., 2018: 126) in randomised trials targeted at the most vulnerable members of society can be seen as objective in any way.

Recent interviews of the consultants and Kela’s responsible researchers on the trial further complicate this question. In The Guardian, a researcher from Kela hints that

Kela hopes [that] additional data that is being collected as part of the trial from healthcare records will provide useful information on whether the security of a guaranteed unconditional income […] might have a positive impact on anxiety, prescription drug consumption or doctor’s visits. (Henley, 2018)

This is an interpretation by the journalist, but documents on the trial vaguely describe the strategy to get information on the participants’ behavioural changes from the data collected by the National Social Insurance Institution (Kangas, 2016a). It seems that the availability of big data allows researchers to observe first and ask questions later (Davies, 2016: 234). The logic of experimentation thus neatly dovetails with the biopolitics of behaviourism.

Indeed, the uses of randomised trials are deeply rooted in practical biopolitical imaginaries. The method was developed in the early 20th century when industrialisation subjected workers to scientific management and at the same time turned the working population into objects of statistical research used to calculate and prevent risks. Soon, trials were used to identify at-risk subjects by conducting behavioural and healthcare analyses of selected target groups, such as mental patients and prisoners (Edwards, 2007: 16–17). In the 21st century, these trials are increasingly used to evaluate public policy, blurring the boundaries between clinical medicine and policy-making processes, as in the Finnish experimental study with basic income. However, this is not the only boundary these trials cross: they also circumvent the hard methodological questions of medical and social research. The experimental reasoning wrapped in seemingly benign intentions and naïve optimism about the use of big data allows for introducing various state-led nudge policies ‘which would otherwise seem entirely unreasonable, or even illegal’ (Davies, 2016: 235). Experimenting with basic income promises to increase well-being and health but it also normalises and enlarges the huge apparatuses of power used by the state to conduct the experiment.

Whereas voluntary participation, a common method in empirical and sociological research, is considered to cause discrepancies in the data, randomised controlled trials are considered to yield hard, factual knowledge, building a valid basis for reforms and legislation (Haynes et al., 2012; Van Bavel et al., 2013). As Olli Kangas (2016b), a research director at the National Social Insurance Institution, states in his blog post:

It would certainly be possible to carry out the experiment on the basis of voluntary participation, but such a design includes so many potential sources of error that we decided against it. A voluntary experiment is only the second-best experiment!

Given these problematised uses of randomised controlled trial methods, the basic income experiment offers a window into how behaviourism merges with law and experimental economics, creating a channel to disseminate neuroliberal rationality to constitutive elements of democratic life (cf. Brown, 2015: 151; Foucault, 2008: 163). To conduct the trial, the Finnish Constitutional Law Committee had to bypass Article 7 of United Nations Document A/2929 (1955), prohibiting states from conducting medical and scientific experiments without the free consent of the individuals involved. Planners dismissed Article 7 as irrelevant as it is intended to prevent abuses in medical experiments, and this particular experiment with basic income is intended to increase well-being (Kangas and Pulkka, 2016: 84–6). Hard ethical questions regarding mandatory, state-led experiments on the unemployed thus were avoided with the rhetoric of good intentions and the technocratic emphasis on the importance of learning ‘what works’ in fast-policy interventions (see also Peck et al., 2012: 278–83).

In randomised controlled trials, the powerful, dynamic word controlled serves as a rhetorical device to reduce criticism as it creates the impression of a solution-driven method to organise the disorganised in complex environments (Edwards, 2007). These trials thus rise above politics, although, as in the Finnish case, they are strategically used to support political aims. In so doing, the culture of experimental policy-making is believed to overcome governments’ social challenges with juridical-economic instruments and the naïve belief that behavioural economics offers technical solutions to structural problems. In the next section, I show how these technical and behavioural interventions utilise nudge politics to push individuals towards cost-effective, healthier paths.

Nudging Erratic Individuals

The neuroliberal movement, with its constellations of behaviourism, neuroscience and economics, has initiated an era of governing irrationality with state-led choice architectures, especially in the United Kingdom. In 2009, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government commissioned the Cabinet Office to produce a report on the implications of neuroscience for public policy (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013: 7). Soon, the Cabinet Office established a nudge unit to develop behavioural economic strategies to guide citizens towards sustainable decision-making (Davies, 2016: 88; Pykett, 2013: 852; Wilkins, 2013: 397). Nudge units have epistemological roots in the popular writings of behavioural economists Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who served as nudge advisors to the Obama administration and the Cameron government. Nudge theory amends Milton Friedman’s libertarianism from a paternalistic perspective, transforming it into a form of ‘libertarian paternalism’ allowing the state to steer citizens’ choices and guide them in the right direction (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009: 5). In libertarian paternalism, people are free to make choices – as long as they make choices within the post-bureaucratic choice architecture constructed by the state.

Nudge squads have made huge progress towards globalising and internalising neuroliberal practises in policy-making processes (Whitehead et al., 2018: 43–7), the Finnish experiment being an example of this kind of policy-making process in action. In 2017, Thaler received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making that ‘have been instrumental in creating the new and rapidly expanding field of behavioural economics, which has had a profound impact on many areas of economic research and policy’ (Nobel Committee, 2017). This controversial prize funded by the Swedish Central Bank (Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017: 51) legitimised nudge theory in the eyes of the mass media and political institutions. Even earlier, the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein allured policy-makers with its mundane examples, economic insights and strong dose of common sense. Despite the book’s quasi-scientific setting and relatively few references to academic psychology (John, 2017), Nudge wields significant rhetorical power and has shaped new economic models of post-rational subjectivity.

Economists and policy-makers have turned their attention to this subfield of behavioural economics since the 2007–9 financial crisis revealed problems in neoclassical theories of economic rationality, which assumed individual behaviour is rational and utility maximising (Davies, 2015: 440; Wilkins, 2013: 396). Indeed, after the financial crisis economists have gone ‘gaga over “irrationality”’ (Mirowski, 2014: 259), over behaviourist theories about the irrational, impulsive and morally-flawed individuals who caused the crisis. This trend has provided the momentum for popularised neuroscience to merge with economics and map the neurobiological underpinnings of economic behaviour and decision-making (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013). It is worth noting, however, that some economists have criticised the neuro-inspired hype, claiming that neuroeconomics can solve and explain everything in human behaviour. This hype, as philosopher and economist Uskali Mäki (2012) comments, is connected to the alluring rhetorical advantages of this emerging field of economics that promises to reveal the hidden mechanisms of the human mind – the black box – and help governments create policies based on these findings.

Nevertheless, the dynamic between neuroscience and economics has served as a productive framework for popularised accounts of mundane anecdotes about irrational, flawed behaviour. A good example of such anecdotal work is neuroscientist David Eagleman’s (2015) best-selling book The Brain, in which he argues that the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis was not simply an economic phenomenon but also a neural one. Subprime loans allowed people to purchase nice houses, which perfectly ‘appealed to the neural networks that desire instant gratification’ and unfortunately activated lenders’ neural networks to take unethical yet tempting risks (Eagleman, 2015: 130). Eagleman (2015: 97), therefore, recommends gently ‘nudging the unconscious’ to improve decision-making regarding health and well-being; such soft paternalism can have ‘far more powerful influence on our decision making than outright enforcement ever can’. This claim is also the basic assumption of behavioural change to improve well-being with basic income.

What then is the difference between liberalism and neuroliberalism? As Foucault (2008) states, has not liberal economic theory focused on human behaviour and its strategic programming since the 1930s? Brian Massumi (2015) considers the changes in economic liberalism and argues that during the 1990s, economists started to acknowledge and accept the ambivalences and flaws in individual decision-making. After this turn, neoliberal economic theory drew from experimental setups and theories on intuitive action, the power of gut feelings and other forms of nonconscious decisions. Although Massumi (2015: 22, 114–15) only briefly refers to nudge theory, these quasi-chaotic flows and the protean node of decisional autonomy can be seen in nudge theory and the premises of the basic income trial, which assume that subjects need to be governed with inciting and orienting rather than disciplining and punishing (cf. Massumi, 2015: 41). Whereas nudge units describe this ‘positive’ form of power as soft paternalism, Massumi (2015: 19) labels it as priming, ‘a form of conditioning which modulates behaviour by implanting presuppositions and activating tendencies in an open situation of encounter’. Nevertheless, priming and nudging are theoretically very close; they emerge as paradoxes, connecting freedom and control with the use of hard and soft power, and activate tendencies through modulating.

As the Finnish experiment with basic income also shows, neuroliberal soft power is the freedom to choose, whereas neuroliberal hard power is the demand that choices be made in architectures built on quasi-scientific assumptions about erratic, post-rational individuals. Nudge theory then serves as a strategic tool allowing the neuroliberal state to obscure the relationship between freedom and control. Furthermore, nudge theory validates the use of experimental economics and nudge advisors, whose expertise, in turn, legitimises the exercise of social and political authority (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013). From these premises, nudge theory offers a platform for unique policy experiments combining microeconomic and macroeconomic theories based on vague risk calculations of individual decision-making and gently guiding erratic individuals to improve their well-being and stabilise public finances. In the following sections, I examine these combinations, focusing on the bio-techno-rational optimising strategies used by the neuroliberal state.

Optimising Cognitive Capacities

As discussed, the neuroliberal state reinforces its power through libertarian paternalism and policy experiments utilising mechanisms of soft control. The Finnish experiment with basic income provides a window into the paradoxes of this techno-managerial and experimental post-bureaucratic architecture, which treats individuals as simultaneously autonomous subjects and research objects whose motivations and impulses are evaluated. For instance, in Kela’s animated rationale of the trial (Kela, 2017), this experimental form of freedom presumes that a basic income will improve the participants’ mental and physical health and restore their cognitive resources by healing the suffering caused by unemployment. Consequently, the neuroliberal state sees strong potential in basic income as a route to social inclusion that inspires a feeling of belonging and encourages entrepreneurialism. Despite these seemingly benign intentions, critical theory cannot overlook the dark side of neuroliberal biopolitics that dissolves the political, technological and cultural limits of surveillance (cf. Davies, 2016: 223). As the neuroliberal state negotiates the dynamics of freedom and control, it is keen to use experimentality as a powerful tool to tackle the vicious problems of austere conditions.

In a critical reading of neuroculture, Tony D. Sampson (2017) exposes how the neuro-inspired and brain-focused behaviourist theoretical traditions intervene in the making of subjectivities in accordance with austerity. Austere political and economic conditions often lead to societal changes in which freedom is never given – it is always reconfigured and negotiated (Sampson, 2017: 82–6). The question then concerns what we are negotiating when the neuroliberal state seems to fundamentally distrust individuals’ decision-making capacity. It seems that we are negotiating the ways the state – almost acting like a human resources unit – may optimise and improve citizen-workers’ emotional, immaterial and cognitive capacities (Davies, 2011, 2016; Pykett, 2013, 2017; Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013). Furthermore, we are negotiating the limits of the uses of neuroscientific findings in policy-making processes and adjusting, fixing and modifying the human brain for austere times.

With these elements of bio-technical rationality, neuroliberal rationalisation overlaps with the 1940s cybernetic understanding of networked brains and the use of the computer as a metaphor for organisation and self-control (see also Mirowski, 2002: 140). Cybernetician William Ashby (1948) developed this understanding of machine-like adaptive behaviour, arguing that ‘the brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine. […] It gets information, and then it does something with it’ (cited in Rid, 2016: 63). Since then, cybernetic theory has moved towards more sophisticated and rhizomatic theories of assemblages in which the self is a formation filled with potentialities and spaces of possibilities (Sampson, 2017). Nonetheless, the neuroliberal adaptations of neuroscience resonate with old-fashioned behaviourism, with their road maps and choice architectures built by nudge units. Furthermore, neuroliberal theorists seem to highlight economic reasoning (Massumi, 2015: 115) and to assume that the self is a formation that can be decoded with proper guidance and self-reflection.

Resonances of 1940s cybernetics can be seen, for instance, in the writings of behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, a key figure in neuroliberalism who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his work on the psychology of decision-making. Kahneman’s (2011) theory on cognitive processes divides consciousness into system 1 and system 2. Whereas system 1 is an autopilot, filled with heuristics, impulses, cognitive errors and experience-based, embedded thoughts, system 2 is analytic, intentional and purposeful. After making this division, Kahneman (2011: 24–5) indicates that, with proper cognitive techniques, all persons can optimise their decision-making by slowing down system 1 and letting system 2 take control in a way that minimises effort and maximises performance. This understanding of cognition as a ‘distinction between two selves’ (Kahneman, 2011: 14) has similarities with the computational metaphor of the mind, which also combines cognitive science with economics and thus modifies the theory of economic rationality (Mirowski, 2002; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017).

Unsurprisingly, this crude, quasi-scientific version of the cybernetic mind fascinates economists and policy-makers worldwide. Indeed, Kahneman’s writings are frequently cited in the reports by behavioural squads, including the proposal for the basic income trial and other reports recommending that Finland should use quick-to-implement models, experiments and behavioural approaches in policy design (e.g. Demos and Avanto, 2015). These recommendations draw mostly on the Behavioural Insight Team’s (2012, 2016) reports which promise that cost effectiveness can be achieved with neuroscientific findings which, with the assistance of randomised trials, can expand citizens’ cognitive bandwidth and mental-processing capacity for rational, healthy decision-making, especially when facing alluring, competitive demands. The basics of this optimisation of cognitive capacities can be gleaned, for instance, in the Behavioural Insight Team’s 2016 report on poverty, decision-making and the improvement of opportunities with behavioural sciences:

The poverty implications of having limited ‘bandwidth’ is a new and transformative area of enquiry. Researchers are finding that, just as your computer’s performance is reduced when you run too many programmes at the same time, the multiple dimensions of poverty and disadvantage – including financial worries, time pressures, coping with stereotypes, and emotional distress – sap our mental processing capacity, which in turn affects our judgement and decisions (Kaplan & Berman, 2010; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). For this reason, policymakers and service providers need to think carefully about the extent to which programmes and services impose additional cognitive costs on low-income groups, and what can be done to restore depleted bandwidth. (Gandy et al., 2016: 13)

Accordingly, the basic income trial is expected to restore depleted bandwidth through post-bureaucratic, freedom-preserving choice architecture. This architecture is promised to liberate the unemployed from anxiety and depression – from themselves – without requiring any changes to socio-economic infrastructures. The idea that poverty affects neurocognition fits well with contemporary bio-psycho-social models of health and disease, but at the same time the ‘researchers commonly fail to recognize the role technoscientific practice itself plays in bringing forth specific configurations of neural difference’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2016: 39). The idea of the machine-like consciousness and two selves is a good example of how neuroscientific findings reinforce the existing power relations between the self-reflexive and self-controlled subjects and ‘the poor’ who suffer from limited bandwidth.

The cybernetic theory of consciousness could support a highly nuanced understanding of networks, the fuzzy boundaries between the machine and the brain and the technical nonconscious that reconfigures all of us as citizens and consumers, without making clear distinctions between the conscious and the nonconscious as modulated by deep technological structures (Hayles, 2016; Sampson, 2017). Instead, however, the neuroliberal state adopts an analytical perspective that opens the porous borders of the human mind to ‘somatic surveillance’ (Hayles, 2016: 43) in quasi-scientific neuroliberal experimental set-ups analysing group behaviour from the outside without permission. Indeed, neuroliberal policy experiments, such as the basic income trial, draw on the mysteries of the human soul but have no genuine interest in it unless microscale modifications of human cognition offer techno-rational solutions to organise the disorganised and control the uncontrolled in stabilising finances.

Neurorationalisation in Societies of Control

As argued, many aspects of the basic income trial recall practical biopolitics, especially the state’s use of statistical analysis, neuro-inspired risk assessments and randomised trials for vigilance and intervention (cf. Foucault, 2008). This experimental ‘blackboxing’ (Slaby and Gallagher, 2015: 42)⁴ and the use of neuroscience push citizenship onto the smooth path for effective, strategic policy-making and ‘what works’ governance. In the Finnish case, these elements emerge in the research setting of positive empiricism operating through the National Social Insurance Institution.

Deleuze’s (1992) postscript about societies of control becomes significant to analyse this experimental setting (see also Davies, 2017). While disciplinary societies characterised by enclosed spaces, such as barracks and factories, mould the individual to fit society, the neuroliberal state modulates its restless, mobile subjects through bio-socio-technological mechanisms. This understanding of control as modulation constantly in formation constitutes an integral part of contemporary life, and its open terrains are filled with databases and technologies that encourage freedom and action while making subjects vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation (Cheney-Lippold, 2011). Considering that current analyses of societies of control mostly focus on algorithms, marketing and web analytic companies, it is worth asking how the experimental neuroliberal state reinforces its power through databanks and technological rationality.

It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between moulding and modulating, but the differences can be distinguished by comparing early-20th-century Americanisation and Fordist programmes intended to mould workers by controlling their behaviour, manners and morals (Meyer, 1980) to ‘bio-psycho-social’ (Davies, 2011: 66) optimisation in the neuroliberal state. Fordism utilised experimental programmes, and Ford himself was interested in workers’ cognitive abilities to develop ‘better brains’ to run the ‘mental power-plant’ (Sampson, 2017: 49), but he had neither the patience nor the neurobiological data to tackle workers’ irrational drives.⁵ Instead, the harsh Fordist imperative to control behaviour was aimed at selecting workers and helping managers deal with the laws of personality in order to ‘mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole’ (Ford, 2016 [1922]: 111). Moreover, Ford had little tolerance for workers who relied on feelings: ‘unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on “feeling” they are failures’ (Ford, 2016 [1922]: 276).

Neurorationalisation, in contrast, is preoccupied with emotions, plasticity and their social nature. Focused on affects, the experimental infrastructures and the increasing deployment of neuroscientific arguments in public policy planning open new forms of rationalisation and control. While neuroscientific accounts heavily stress neurons and ‘sprawling networks’ (Eagleman, 2015: 147), neuroliberalism seeks to solve structural problems by viewing them as behavioural and neural problems within individual irrational subjects and their character flaws, which can be fixed with proper guidance (Pykett, 2013; Mirowski, 2014: 256). These deterministic premises inform the writings of behaviouralists, particularly the Behavioural Insight Team (2016), which sees unemployment and poverty as a lack of networks (social capital), self-control (character capital) and bandwidth (cognitive capital).

From this perspective the Finnish experiment is not actually a trial of basic income but a complex constellation of rationalisation, popularised neuroscience, behavioural economics and techniques of modulative biopower. It, therefore, should be viewed as an experiment that relies on the system of technological rationality for modulating, nudging and optimising the bio-psycho-social capacities of the working population. Built on promises of progress related to rationalisation paradigms (Shenhav, 2005: 187–91), this system has the aura of an ‘objectivity machine’ (Slaby and Gallagher, 2015: 41) that gives laypeople the impression of serious technological and progressive advance. With this constellation of neuro-inspired behavioural and technical rationality, Finland successfully locates itself within the global political-economic geography of neuroliberalism as an experimental state that tackles unemployment and stabilises public finances with the strategic tools and modulative mechanisms of soft control.

Conclusion

In this article, I approach the Finnish experiment with basic income as neuroliberalism in action, that is, an example of experimental policy-making built on the assumption that deficits in human capital can be fixed by restoring the cognitive abilities of the working population via utilising popularised findings from neuroscience and behavioural economics. Starting from this premise, I show this trial is not actually an experiment in basic income but, rather, an introduction of neuroliberal policy-making that uses neuro-inspired behavioural economics in experimental policy-making. This attractive experimental setting is filled with scientific rationality and promises to liberate the true self while also optimising the self to fit austere, precarious times. I discuss how this epistemological foundation of the experiment – and its dialogue with the neuroliberal thought collective – raise concerns about how these constellations reconfigure subjectivity and citizenship in societies of control. The aim of this article is also to add a new dimension to the critical conversations on the new neuro-inspired uses of power that entangle behaviourism, economics and neuroscience, dissolve the political, technological and cultural limits of surveillance and obscure the dynamics of freedom and control.

The Finnish experiment with basic income is a highly problematic case filled with multidimensional elements. This means that the analysis of the experiment is necessarily partial and at this point also speculative; so far, the outcomes of the trial are unknown. Nonetheless, what we may analyse at this point are the epistemological premises of the experiment, for instance the uses of the randomised controlled trials for analysing the data obtained from the registers. In September 2018 it was announced that this analysis will be complemented by voluntary interviews and surveys which will also focus on the general attitudes and public discussions concerning basic income. Despite these new amendments, the goal of the experiment is still to help the state to understand how receiving a basic income affects the income, employment status and well-being of a selected treatment group in comparison with a control group. The final report of the entire time span of the experiment will be published in 2020, and results on the first year of the experiment will become available in spring 2019 (Kela, 2018). Currently there are no plans to continue or expand the experiment, although I assume that the preliminary results of the trial will be discussed in the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election scheduled to be held in April 2019.

Notwithstanding this, the research team responsible for the experiment has recommended it to be continued and the sample be expanded to a larger population, particularly low-income individuals. Subsequent experiments have been proposed to test different income levels, tax models and study designs as the state plans to establish a National Income Register in 2019, enabling real-time submission of information on all citizens’ wages and salaries. Indeed, the National Income Register will open up possibilities to test the negative income tax model developed by Milton Friedman and recommended in the first proposal for this experiment. The state is also experimenting with various self-care and digital value services allowing customers to develop their own welfare plans on a platform offered by the National Social Insurance Institution. This paper gives a critical perspective to these experimental settings which, I argue, may be used to modulate, monitor and evaluate citizens and to conduct risk analysis of the working population’s mental, physical and cognitive resilience. Therefore, I suggest that critical scholars should turn their gaze towards the lure of these new scientific rationalities that create a novel and very powerful field of expertise for behavioural economists, choice architects and nudge squads who employ the microeconomic implications of well-being and health to solve macroeconomic failures.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant 282970) and the Alfred Kordelin Foundation (Grant 170286).

Notes

Mona Mannevuo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science, University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests include affect theory, labour history, STS studies and, recently, neuromanagement. Her work has been published in journals such as The European Journal of Cultural Studies and The Sociological Review. She is also one of the editors of Ephemera’s special issue ‘Affective Capitalism’.

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