UBI is the modern Rorschach test—everyone sees a different result when they look at the (few and usually flawed) experiments with UBI. I guess I am not different. Anyway, here is an obvious problem I see with the article:
[prime-age men who are not in labor force] report much less paid work than their peers—an average of just 12 minutes per day, nearly six hours a day less than employed men, and almost five hours a day less than employed women, but also close to an hour a day less than unemployed men. Perhaps more surprisingly, their time freed from work is not repurposed into helping out around the home, such as doing housework, cooking, and other tasks of home maintenance. In fact, they devote significantly less time to such home chores than unemployed men—less, too, than women with jobs. NILF men also spend much less time helping to care for other household members than working women—less time, as well, than unemployed men. Apart from work, by far the biggest difference between the daily schedules of NILF men and everyone else comes in what the ATUS calls “socializing, relaxing, and leisure,” a category that encompasses a range of activities, from listening to music to visiting a museum to attending a party. [...] The overwhelming majority of this “leisure” is screen time: television, internet, DVDs, and all the rest. [...] almost half of NILF men reported taking some form of pain medication every day.
The first impression is quite damning: The lazy voluntarily unemployed men don’t do any productive work, don’t even help at home, spend most of their time looking at screens… and for some weird reason take a lot of pain pills.
Ignoring the last part, it is exactly what the model “job is the source of all virtues” would make you predict. UBI would remove the need to work, then humanity would lose all its virtues, and we would all wirehead. Thank God for bullshit jobs that saved us from the threat of too much free time because of automation!
What about those pain pills, though?
So, here is another explanation that seems to fit the same data, and provides a different picture. Suppose you have a fraction of population that suffers from incurable chronic pain. It probably makes sense if they work less than healthy people. It could even explain why they help less at home. If you think about what such person could do—lay in their bed, watch TV or listen to radio, talk to someone, take a walk—depending on what categories are available in the questionnaire, it could fit under “socializing, relaxing, and leisure”. It would definitely explain the taking of pain medication every day. And if these people realize they are unable to keep a job, so they stop actively trying to find one… then they get classified as “people who don’t have a job and are not even trying to find one”, duh.
Hey, I am not trying to say here that everyone who avoids job is actually a disabled person. Healthy lazy bums definitely exist, too. And I have no idea what is the actual proportion of these two groups in population. I just see an obvious alternative explanation that the article completely missed, because it automatically assumed the “job = source of all virtues” model. Makes me wonder what else they missed.
Yet another alternative explanation: Assume there are by nature two kinds of people: lazy and non-lazy. In a society where everyone must have a job or face serious consequences, the non-lazy people will have a job, and the lazy will be jobless. If you mistake correlation for causation, it is easy to conclude that the job makes people non-lazy (rather than the non-laziness making people employed). Essentially, you take a selection of people who are too lazy to get a job even in situation where not having a job seriously reduces the quality of your life, include the observation that they are also lazy in non-job aspects of their lives… and conclude that everyone is like that, only the jobs magically transform us into something better.
EDIT: To make my objection more simple—It is statistically shown that in USA people without jobs are more likely to be black than people who have jobs. Conclusion: UBI will make you black. Discuss.
UBI is the modern Rorschach test—everyone sees a different result when they look at the (few and usually flawed) experiments with UBI. I guess I am not different. Anyway, here is an obvious problem I see with the article:
The first impression is quite damning: The lazy voluntarily unemployed men don’t do any productive work, don’t even help at home, spend most of their time looking at screens… and for some weird reason take a lot of pain pills.
Ignoring the last part, it is exactly what the model “job is the source of all virtues” would make you predict. UBI would remove the need to work, then humanity would lose all its virtues, and we would all wirehead. Thank God for bullshit jobs that saved us from the threat of too much free time because of automation!
What about those pain pills, though?
So, here is another explanation that seems to fit the same data, and provides a different picture. Suppose you have a fraction of population that suffers from incurable chronic pain. It probably makes sense if they work less than healthy people. It could even explain why they help less at home. If you think about what such person could do—lay in their bed, watch TV or listen to radio, talk to someone, take a walk—depending on what categories are available in the questionnaire, it could fit under “socializing, relaxing, and leisure”. It would definitely explain the taking of pain medication every day. And if these people realize they are unable to keep a job, so they stop actively trying to find one… then they get classified as “people who don’t have a job and are not even trying to find one”, duh.
Hey, I am not trying to say here that everyone who avoids job is actually a disabled person. Healthy lazy bums definitely exist, too. And I have no idea what is the actual proportion of these two groups in population. I just see an obvious alternative explanation that the article completely missed, because it automatically assumed the “job = source of all virtues” model. Makes me wonder what else they missed.
Yet another alternative explanation: Assume there are by nature two kinds of people: lazy and non-lazy. In a society where everyone must have a job or face serious consequences, the non-lazy people will have a job, and the lazy will be jobless. If you mistake correlation for causation, it is easy to conclude that the job makes people non-lazy (rather than the non-laziness making people employed). Essentially, you take a selection of people who are too lazy to get a job even in situation where not having a job seriously reduces the quality of your life, include the observation that they are also lazy in non-job aspects of their lives… and conclude that everyone is like that, only the jobs magically transform us into something better.
EDIT: To make my objection more simple—It is statistically shown that in USA people without jobs are more likely to be black than people who have jobs. Conclusion: UBI will make you black. Discuss.