Yes, we still have to work

“I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!” — Slacker

In my roundup last week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got US$1,000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1,000 a month is not enough to really support anyone by itself.

It suggests that a much larger universal basic income (UBI) would cause a much larger percentage of people to stop working. That would increase the costs of the program, and probably doom it politically — the idea of having the government pay a large portion of the citizenry not to work is likely to be very unpopular.

When I posted the result on Twitter X, however, I got some interesting reactions. A number of people told me — often in angry, indignant terms — that paying people to take leisure is the whole point of basic income, and is a good and desirable thing. Here are just a few examples:

From an economic standpoint, this argument is unpersuasive. Yes, taking more leisure time is valuable — even if you drop out of the labor force entirely, you’re still presumably doing something you like with all those spare hours.

But the benefit of that leisure has to be weighed against the cost of the lost production when the people stop working, plus the monetary cost of providing the UBI in the first place, and the deadweight loss of whatever taxes you had to use to transfer the money.

A welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis. But what’s interesting here is the deep antipathy to the idea of work that seems to have taken root among some on the political left.

Not everyoneon the left, of course —