{"id":29490,"date":"2016-08-29T07:48:51","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T14:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/universal-basic-income-wouldnt-make-people-lazy-it-would-change-the-nature-of-work"},"modified":"2017-06-04T09:44:35","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T16:44:35","slug":"universal-basic-income-wouldnt-make-people-lazy-it-would-change-the-nature-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/universal-basic-income-wouldnt-make-people-lazy-it-would-change-the-nature-of-work","title":{"rendered":"Universal basic income wouldn\u2019t make people lazy\u2013it would change the nature of work"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Americans believe in the importance of a good day\u2019s work. And so it\u2019s understandable that the prospect of a universal basic income<\/a> (UBI), in which the government would issue checks to cover the basic costs of living, rubs some<\/a> people<\/a> the wrong way. Writing in The Week in 2014, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry envisions<\/a> a UBI dystopia in which \u201cmillions of people\u201d are \u201clisting away in socially destructive idleness,\u201d with \u201cthe consequences of this lost productivity reverberating throughout the society in lower growth and, probably, lower employment.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a reasonable concern. After all, the most successful anti-poverty programs in the US thus far, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, have been carefully designed to promote work <\/a>\u2013not enable people to avoid it. But based on the evidence we have so far, there\u2019s little reason to believe that a UBI would lead people to abandon work in droves. And even if some people did indeed opt to give up their day jobs, society might wind up reaping untold rewards from their free time in the long run.<\/p>\n

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the US and Canada were seriously considering the possibility of instating a UBI. During that time, the US government commissioned a series of experiments across six states to study the effects of guaranteed income, particularly its effects on work. The Canadian government introduced a similar experiment in the town of Dauphin.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans believe in the importance of a good day\u2019s work. And so it\u2019s understandable that the prospect of a universal basic income (UBI), in which the government would issue checks to cover the basic costs of living, rubs some people the wrong way. Writing in The Week in 2014, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry envisions a UBI dystopia [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1878,1490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-employment","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60580,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29490\/revisions\/60580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}