For what it's worth Britain has around four million adults living on benefits (else they'd starve) who have never had a full- time job in their lives. No idea what they do with their time but aside from the odd part-time job, they depend on someone else working on their behalf. That is a truism not a criticism. Sounds like a pretty good experimental group for testing the suggestion mooted here.

If the BI is high, quite a number.

The question is whether there's (1) something they can do that's more valuable than watching TV and (2) some reasonable way we can motivate them to do so.

If (1) and if a lower BI is an effective way of motivating that behavior, then that's a good argument for a lower BI. It doesn't follow that the optimal level is zero. I don't expect the number that would stay home and collect their $1 of basic income would be substantially greater than the number that currently stay home and collect their $0.

I thought it was a good thing that you don't have to work unless you want to do so for additional income.

Which one of us is wrong? Which one of us will be wrong in the future, as more and more jobs can be automated and thus disappear while the amount of people on this planet keeps increasing?

Just remember that the future is now.

Given 300 million people, it's prudent to consider the net impact and not sweat the details too much.

Say a policy makes 200 million people better off in some virtuous manner but creates 10 million free loaders. Is that a horrible policy? Say the value of the virtuous benefit is 10x the cost of the free loading?

The other poster's concern is obviously punishing the undeserving poor.

However, the point of the article here is to assume that millions will be "free loaders" no matter what we do because their labor is unnecessary.

> [M]illions will be "free loaders" no matter what we do because their labor is unnecessary.

Not if we kill them.