The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into

Summary

The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling IntoTo win the argument for universal basic income, advocates must confront the myth that less work means less worth.BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently.The general idea behind universal basic income (UBI) is almost as old as America itself. You can trace it back to 1797, when Thomas Paine argued for guaranteed payments in his political treatise “Agrarian Justice.” Fast forward to 2020, and Andrew Yang revived the idea with a “Freedom Dividend” during his failed presidential campaign. Despite the 200-plus-year chasm that separates these two men, the criticism they faced for backing UBI was strikingly similar: that “no one will work” and that “we can’t afford it.”Because of this, supporters of the program might be tempted to believe that the purpose of UBI experiments is to allay these concerns with empirical evidence on the effect of UBI on work hours. The problem, however, is that these concerns are not rooted in empiricism but normative belief: namely that 1) lower-class people who refuse employment should receive nothing and 2) UBI costs more than it’s worth. And while not all UBI opponents believe these things, those who are often move the goalposts to portray almost any findings about cost and labor effort as reasons to reject UBI.We must resist playing this game.UBI-related experiments consistently find evidence that no participant responds to UBI experiments by dropping out of the labor force. Yes, some people reduce their hours of work, but the decline in work effort (if any) is clearly within a sustainable range. In other words, the evidence decisively contradicts claims that “no one will work” and “we can’t afford it.” But if we take the bait of focusing on such extreme statements, we attract everyone’s attention to opponents’ favorite issue: “Did the people who got the UBI ‘work’ as much as the people who didn’t?” Once the question is framed this way, it tosses a softball to...