“Two thousand artists will receive 325 euros a week with no work requirement under a permanent expansion of Ireland’s pilot program.”
Ireland ran a three-year pilot, found that the artists who received the stipend produced more work, sold more work, and required less other social support than the control group. So they expanded it. Most countries would have killed the program when the political winds shifted. Ireland measured the outcome and made the outcome the policy. The boring lesson, again, is that good government is mostly arithmetic.