Much has been made of the latest Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment run by tech CEO Sam Altman, lasting for three years beginning in 2020, and the study of the results by Eva Vivalt et al. In a nutshell, the abstract below, particularly the text in bold (emphasis ours), seems to be a sort of political and philosophical Rorschach (inkblot) test, in which we all see what we subconsciously want to see:
We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.
And there you have it. Some commenters have reacted positively to it, seeing it as a good thing, and some negatively, seeing it as a bad thing, often quite predictably based on political leanings. That said, the following comment from a libertarian perspective on the Reason article clearly wins the internet:
check out reddit.com/r/antiwork
There are large groups of people who simply think it’s unfair that they are required to work in order to feed themselves. Why should they be required to do things that society deems “useful”?
I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers.
I’m ok with one of the consequences being that some people can stop pretending to work.
The commenter, Bubba Jones, makes an excellent point there. So what if UBI results in such a modest drop in work hours and the nominal size of the labor force? A drop of merely two percentage points and 1.4 hours per week is hardly a mass exodus from the workforce, and I would hazard a guess that the lion's share of the drop is concentrated among those who are at the lower end of the bell curve and the vitality curve, that is, marginally attached workers who tend to enervate more than they energize. (Note as well that this study was done largely during the outlier years of the pandemic, so that may have biased the numbers.) And in any case, more leisure is NOT inherently a bad thing. As Robert Reich famously said, the economy exists to make our lives better, we don't exist to make the economy. This of course echoes Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative that we should always treat humanity as ends in themselves, and never solely as a means to an end.
And it dovetails nicely with the famous quote by the late, great Buckminster Fuller, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century:
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
(Mic drop)
UPDATE: The ever-insightful Rodger Malcolm Mitchell has a great new article about the topic of UBI from a Monetary Sovereignty perspective. Read it and share it far and wide. It needs to go VIRAL!
Also, as the ever-insightful Marco Fioretti notes, the laws of physics ultimately demand some flavor of UBI from a limits-to-growth perspective. Thus whether you are pro-growth, anti-growth, degrowth, or agnostic about growth, all roads lead to UBI.
And finally, to clarify, the TSAP agrees with the Reddit comment IF the middle part is modified as follows:
"I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for [cash] welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic [comprehensive] healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers."
There, fixed it for you. And once again:
(Mic drop)
