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, Andrew Yang revived the idea with the “Freedom Dividend” during his unsuccessful presidential campaign. Despite the gap of more than 200 years separating these two men, the criticism they faced for supporting a UBI was surprisingly similar: “No one will do the work” and “We can’t afford it.”
Because of this, proponents of the program may be tempted to believe that UBI experiments are intended to address these concerns with empirical evidence on the impact of UBI on working hours. The problem, however, is that these concerns are not rooted in empiricism, but rather in normative belief: namely that 1) lower-class people who refuse employment should get nothing and 2) the cost of a UBI exceeds its value. And while not all UBI opponents believe these things, those who do often run into the goalposts to portray almost any conclusion about cost and labor effort as reasons to reject UBI.
We should avoid playing this game.
UBI-related experiments consistently find evidence that no participants respond to UBI experiments by dropping out of the labor force. Yes, some people reduce their working hours, but the decline in work effort (if any) is clearly within a sustainable range. In other words, the evidence decisively refutes the claims that “nobody will do the work” and “we can’t afford it.” But if we resort to focusing on such extreme statements, we draw everyone’s attention to the opponents’ favorite issue: “Did people who got a UBI ‘work’ as much as those who didn’t?” Once the question is framed this way, it throws a soft ball to opponents who conceivably argue that UBI is out of the question because some people didn’t work as much as they otherwise could.
Any unconditional grant of sufficient amount for subsistence necessarily allows people of lower classes to refuse employment. This fact – at least for those critics who feel that people refused employment should get nothing – makes a UBI undesirable. by designFor them, UBI will always remain “unattainable” because its costs will appear to be higher than they thought, If UBI proponents attempt to refute this belief with a technical explanation of the difference between a 4 percent decline in labor hours and 4 percent of people leaving the labor force, they fall into their trap,
Supporters need to focus on all the good that guaranteed income brings. As Brew Lane argues, UBI has “positive effects on socioeconomic indicators related to money poverty”, including “alleviation of stress and mental illness, improvement in eating habits, settlement of household and personal debts, improvement in happiness, subjective well-being, and social and community participation.”
Rather than trying to allay the fears of critics, the pro-UBI movement needs to challenge the narrative in which refusing to accept employment is a “bad” experimental observation.
Meanwhile, supporters of UBI fall into the trap of critics, even when they point to the findings of UBI increases labor effort. Consider these headlines from the UBI experiment in Stockton, California: “Experiment in guaranteed income leads to more jobs,” “Californians on universal basic income pay off debt and get full-time jobs,” and “The biggest benefit from the Stockton basic income program: jobs.” Even the city’s mayor, Michael Tubbs, who was instrumental in establishing the program, echoed this type of rhetoric, saying, “Number one, tell your friends, tell your cousins, the guaranteed income did not make people stop working; in fact, people who received a guaranteed income were working more than before they received a guaranteed income and almost twice as much as those in the treatment group.”
The results that Tubbs points to are largely determined by the study’s design: People who received smaller grants when they weren’t working much to begin with generally worked more in the UBI study; People who initially receive larger grants while working full-time often work less. By portraying Stockton’s increases in labor effort as a self-evident good, Tubbs’s comments make it more difficult for future experiments, which might involve larger grants, to report the potential finding that people work less. Accepting the narrative that it is always “good” for low-income people to spend as much or more time on paid labor than they do now is a game that UBI proponents cannot win and should not play. If the biggest problem in the world today were to get the lower class to do as much work as possible, then UBI would not be the best policy to achieve it.
Rather than trying to allay the fears of critics, the pro-UBI movement needs to challenge the narrative in which refusing to accept employment is a “bad” experimental observation. How can this happen? Good Is it a matter of the global poor spending more hours in harder jobs that are likely to require less pay and more work? What do you think would happen to wages and working conditions if the two billion people living in deep poverty around the world decided to work more at the same time? The theory predicts that they will work longer hours at lower hourly wages.
One of the many disadvantages of UBI experiments is that they cannot measure how much wages and working conditions might improve in response to a substantial UBI, because the effect depends on interactions between millions of citizens and employers across the country. The closest thing that UBI experiments can measure is the first stage of the process, and that stage involves giving people a choice beyond working too hard for too little. So, instead of trying to argue about working hours, UBI proponents might have better luck broadcasting the goodness that comes when people with the worst jobs decide to work less — and use the experiments as a platform for participants to tell their stories.
carl widerquistProfessor of Philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar, who specializes in distributive justice, author of “universal basic income,
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