UBI exerts neuroliberal power over “erratic” individuals and disguises control as freedom – it governs subjects unconsciously and legitimizes exercise of the sovereign’s authority.

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 noncon- scious decisions. Although Massumi (2015: 22, 114–15) only briefly refers to nudge theory, these quasi-chaotic flows and the protean node of deci- sional 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 prim- ing, ‘a form of conditioning which modulates behaviour by implanting presuppositions and activating tendencies in an open situation of encoun- ter’. 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 exam- ine these combinations, focusing on the bio-techno-rational optimising strategies used by the neuroliberal state.