> "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income; instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth."
The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle probably isn't.
I think a good source of data could be the population of retired people. I'm pretty sure if I could afford to be retired, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life.
Hopefully, merely collecting a universal/basic income will not be similarly stigmatized.
I don't want Basic Income only to be told where and how to work. If I have to work for it, I want to go find work my damn self that I find palatable.
Which is (part of) why I don't want Basic Income at all.
(Edited for clarity)
Basic income doesn't aim for people to sit idle, and in practice basic income doesn't seem correlated with idleness. Some studies show an increase in work hours [0], and another showed a slight decrease in work hours among new parents and teenagers [1].
Loss of self-worth need not occur when people are given the freedom to say "no" to unfulfilling and unproductive jobs, the freedom to take time off to care for their own or another's health issues, and the ability to pursue their passions -- teaching inmates, launching a startup, or becoming a world-class gamer.
[0] e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552
[1] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
> of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex- cessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science."
In a broad sense, the shift towards a services-based economy is a type of "make-work" in the shadow of heavy automation in first agriculture then manufacturing. This is very much Parkinson's Law writ large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Furthermore, what is the economic benefit of the activities listed above? What would be lost if those activities were either abandoned or required to be paid at a fair market price? I know, charging grandma by the hour is a silly idea, but I say so to illustrate the benefits to society by activities not reflected in GDP, and to invite discussion about whether society would be better served by individuals living on basic income alone who spend their time helping others, without having to worry about making next month's rent.
You can work hard at something which provides immense satisfaction and personal value (perhaps even value to others). But a job is strictly something you do in exchange for money.
A job doesn't necessarily contribute to your self-worth. Meaningful work, does.
What jumped out of the paper(around page 25) was that Europeans have been just Happy! Why are first 12 members of the EU Happy over time? I'll let you speculate.
Now to entitled--usually white upper class men--who have been telling the poor what to do since biblical times. Dummy up! I've had seen too many people die early because they became homeless.
I think what most of these researchers fail to comprehend is the difference between poor, and poor with no safety net. No parents. No friends couch to crash on. Just the inviting, wet thicket of Scotch Broom to crawl into, and being woken by gently nudge of a police officers' latest extension of their authoritarian arm. Real poverty is homelessness. It's ugly. I don't know why we are even debating someting, like a minimum income, at this point in time. I have seen friends die way too early because of their homeless stints. It seems by the time they get a little help, it's too late. They just die early?
I'm not going to list off my gripes about making a living in this enviorment, but a lot of us tech workers are very succeptable to being homeless. At least half the guys I know without roofs over their heads were former Programmers. At one time they we happy, and young, banging away with Fortran.
(Willie Brown is actually the first one I heard, wondering out loud, exactly what we are going to do with all the future homeless tech workers.
They now sit in coffee shops fiddling with our discarded toys.
Basic income at this point--yes. I actually think if some of these poor people were given a little bit of help, they might just start business, and who know where it will end. There's only one benefit from being poor; some of you see the world a different way.
We have never had a basic income in the United States. Let's give it a shot? I look around at what's happening in the United States, and I don't like the trend. It was better in the past.
(Yea, what if it gets worse. Go back to this wonderful system of privileged elitism. I won't be back, so any comments--I will miss out on. Oh, yea as to sitting idle--the subsided poor I know, are busy. See the world is funny place. Even if you get the couch in the subsidized house, you are expected to do/fix all sorts of things, including being a amature psychiatrist. The poor always pay in some way. Think about it. Did you really ever get a completely free lunch, outside of maybe grade school, or when you were young and pretty. Pretty is gender neutral.)
Arguments for universal BI (as opposed to tweaks to benefit entitlement rules) are in effect a suggestion that people on those programmes should have less so that we can afford to extend subsidies to middle class stay-at-home wives and twenty-somethings on gap years, because rich people that don't want to work obviously deserve the same as people with nothing going through a crisis. And you have the temerity to intemperately accuse anyone that questions it of being elitists.
And yes, BI is something which has been chiefly advocated by privileged white men.
Japan seems to have one solution to this problem. It's a culture that highly discourages idleness, yet also aims to look after people's welfare, so they have a very large number of (practically speaking) quite useless jobs - crossing guards on parking lot exits and streets with no traffic, platform attendants, park attendands, etc. It was quite weird seeing this at first, but once I started thinking about it as a socially acceptable form of welfare, it made a lot of sense.
I don't think their system will work here (serving people is seen quite positively there, whereas here it is often looked down upon here), but it is a good working example.
Basic income can liberate a lot of people to focus on bettering their situations, rather than just trying not to drown from day to day.
Most people want to do something, and generally want to feel productive. How many stories have you heard about unhappy office drones leaving a job where they spent all their time on the internet to something more rewarding?
But where will this productive energy go? Plenty of people will still have jobs, likely doing something more in line with their interests. Others will volunteer their time and participate in the community. I think lots of people would love to spend more time mentoring young people, being with their families, etc. It could be a revolution in community participation and lead to a more healthy society.
Satisfying and productive work doesn't need to be paid work.
