Neuroliberalism views structural problems as individual failures and attempts to solve them by ‘fixing’ the subject to optimize them for economic output.

Neurorationalisation, in contrast, is preoccupied with emotions, plas- ticity and their social nature. Focused on affects, the experimental infra- structures 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 net- works’ (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 deter- ministic 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 bio- power. 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 prom- ises 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 neuroli- beralism as an experimental state that tackles unemployment and stabil- ises public finances with the strategic tools and modulative mechanisms of soft control.