Many people’s view of a UBI depends on whether recipients in fact stop working. For example, people are interested in running studies on that question, often with a clear indication that they would support a UBI if and only if recipients don’t significantly decrease hours worked.
What are we to make of this concern?
A natural way to understand it is to separate the effects of UBI into {recipients may decide to reduce hours worked} from {all other effects}. Then the concern could be understood as a suggestion that this change in hours worked is bad even if the the other effects of a UBI would be good. Put differently, people who express this concern may believe that a UBI would be good if we magically causally intervened to ensure that people continued working the same amount, while the effects of UBI alone are more uncertain.
The reason to respond to this view, rather than directly analyzing all the effects of a UBI together, is that it seemed to me to indicate a moral error that could be separated from the other complex empirical questions at stake.
(Given that this seems like a kind of unenlightening thread about a topic that’s not super important to me, I’ll probably drop it.)
(Given that this seems like a kind of unenlightening thread about a topic that’s not super important to me, I’ll probably drop it.)
Reasonable. If you want a halfway-decent defense of the view that whether UBI is a good idea should depend on whether recipients stop working (while still accepting that work is not inherently good), you might like this.
Learning a lot from this discussion, thank you. I am in agreement with idea that viability of UBI depends on people who are currently working more or less continuing to work. If everyone stopped working, then obviously UBI (and civilization) fails. In fact, you need a large proportion (dependent on level of UBI) to keep working and paying taxes, otherwise UBI consumption simply fires inflation. On the other hand, everyone who does work has more spending power than those who don’t so it seems to me there is powerful incentive to work. I can see that people might use it to reduce work hours, but given experiments on 4 day week, I dont think that would necessarily reduce productivity in many industries.
I cant see a way to determine by reason alone that UBI will be successful without actually running trials over long period to assess response.
Many people’s view of a UBI depends on whether recipients in fact stop working. For example, people are interested in running studies on that question, often with a clear indication that they would support a UBI if and only if recipients don’t significantly decrease hours worked.
What are we to make of this concern?
A natural way to understand it is to separate the effects of UBI into {recipients may decide to reduce hours worked} from {all other effects}. Then the concern could be understood as a suggestion that this change in hours worked is bad even if the the other effects of a UBI would be good. Put differently, people who express this concern may believe that a UBI would be good if we magically causally intervened to ensure that people continued working the same amount, while the effects of UBI alone are more uncertain.
The reason to respond to this view, rather than directly analyzing all the effects of a UBI together, is that it seemed to me to indicate a moral error that could be separated from the other complex empirical questions at stake.
(Given that this seems like a kind of unenlightening thread about a topic that’s not super important to me, I’ll probably drop it.)
Reasonable. If you want a halfway-decent defense of the view that whether UBI is a good idea should depend on whether recipients stop working (while still accepting that work is not inherently good), you might like this.
Learning a lot from this discussion, thank you. I am in agreement with idea that viability of UBI depends on people who are currently working more or less continuing to work. If everyone stopped working, then obviously UBI (and civilization) fails. In fact, you need a large proportion (dependent on level of UBI) to keep working and paying taxes, otherwise UBI consumption simply fires inflation. On the other hand, everyone who does work has more spending power than those who don’t so it seems to me there is powerful incentive to work. I can see that people might use it to reduce work hours, but given experiments on 4 day week, I dont think that would necessarily reduce productivity in many industries.
I cant see a way to determine by reason alone that UBI will be successful without actually running trials over long period to assess response.