The “a UBI would make people spend time in ways that made them feel miserable” argument has always felt a little odd to me. It’s essentially claiming that
People who could get jobs where they feel good
will either quit their jobs or just not get jobs in the first place
and feel miserable as a result
but will nevertheless choose to stay unemployed
But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t those people just… recognize that they are feeling bad, so get jobs and feel better?
I think there’s an implication of something like “they will be so badly addicted to lotuses that they can’t get a job despite knowing that the lotuses just make them feel worse”, but if their mental health is in that bad of a shape, how likely is it that they could or would get a fulfilling job anyway?
I certainly believe that there exists some percentage of the population for whom this combination of factors holds, but it seems hard to believe that they would be such a significant fraction that their loss of well-being would outweigh the increased well-being that others would get from the UBI.
(Now if the argument was something like “people on an UBI would stop working and be happier as a result, and it’s morally wrong for non-working people to be happier when they are just living off the who people do work”, that would be a different matter, but that’s not the argument being made here.)
The “a UBI would make people spend time in ways that made them feel miserable” argument has always felt a little odd to me. It’s essentially claiming that
People who could get jobs where they feel good
will either quit their jobs or just not get jobs in the first place
and feel miserable as a result
but will nevertheless choose to stay unemployed
But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t those people just… recognize that they are feeling bad, so get jobs and feel better?
I think there’s an implication of something like “they will be so badly addicted to lotuses that they can’t get a job despite knowing that the lotuses just make them feel worse”, but if their mental health is in that bad of a shape, how likely is it that they could or would get a fulfilling job anyway?
I certainly believe that there exists some percentage of the population for whom this combination of factors holds, but it seems hard to believe that they would be such a significant fraction that their loss of well-being would outweigh the increased well-being that others would get from the UBI.
(Now if the argument was something like “people on an UBI would stop working and be happier as a result, and it’s morally wrong for non-working people to be happier when they are just living off the who people do work”, that would be a different matter, but that’s not the argument being made here.)