Really this is just basic economics though. Money has decreasing marginal utility. The first stack of cash you get pays rent, then food, then later on luxuries. For low income workers, the opportunity cost of not working is not being able to afford basic things. If that’s covered, there’s no reason to do a crappy job for low pay. You don’t even need to assume laziness. If cashiers now have their basic needs covered and want to go invest their time into improving their education, then the cost of cashiers goes up. If the cost of cashiers goes up, the cost of food goes up. If the cost of food goes up, the original UBI is now too low, so the cashiers need to stop pursuing education and get some money again. If an equilibrium exists, it’s going to be at the point where poor people need to work, because somebody needs to clean the toilets.
Re:Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Ha...
by b_tterc_p on Thursday April 04, 2019 @11:53AM
(#19573770)
They didn’t get UBI forever, they got it for a fixed amount of time. If they quit working, they would be shit out of luck when they money stopped flowing. It’s not a very useful experiment.
In other words, not implementing their UBI version is simply a way to punish unemployed people for not having a job. You can still argue that unemployed people should be unhappy, but you no longer have any basis for saying that unhappines will make them more likely to get a job.