I think it's human nature to do a little as possible for the most reward. If someone is giving you money to literally do nothing, then you're likely going to do..nothing!
It reminds me of the scene in Battlefield Earth where the aliens with a superiority complex release starving humans into an abandoned building and they eat the first thing they see - a rat. Aha, man's favorite food must be rats!
It comes from your head. The statement itself is neutral, and for whatever reason, you're giving it a negative connotation. Most organisms on this planet evolved so as to expend less energy without necessity, humans as no exception.
That is not negative or positive - that's a normative judgment you give that statement.
Months later the word came back about fraud. And it was a doozy. The program was a general success, but there were SO MANY fraud cases. And I don't mean "missed a number" or "didn't understand that this asset mattered" or even "struggling but not legally struggling enough" - I mean blatant, totally unnecessary, how-are-you-not-ashamed fraud. As a liberal I found it shocking.
It's easy to allow this outrage to count for more than the actual money is worth, to ignore the many, many legit needy cases where people WEREN'T being like this.
I read once that the true difference between a liberal and conservative is not about compassion - both can be fully compassionate - but whether they are more outraged by someone in need being neglected or by someone not in need taking advantage of the offer of help.
I also think that most people don't actually see either side of this coin - they don't see the people in need getting help, nor those that abuse it. They hear about it and their emotions take hold (in either direction). And most of them, regardless of reaction, aren't hearing the actual truth.
But I'm doubtful that people are actually sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, doing _nothing_. Maybe they're not getting jobs per se, but I'm very curious about what they actually are doing with the time they'd otherwise have to sell.
Rather than us positing and projecting values, I'd love to see some data around this (though obviously I would love it somewhat less if it proved my optimistic viewpoint wrong).
Don't forget about the importance of relative status. At least some -- my guess would be a large majority, but part of the problem with these discussions is that everyone's just doing WAGs without much real data -- folks will want a) better than average educations for their children, b) nicer houses in safer than average neighborhoods, c) etc... and will work quite hard for it. And since these are positional goods, UBI will have no impact on their availability.
Personally, I tend to think that UBI is untenable for mostly other reasons (extraction by rentiers, for example).
This type of thinking needs to stop.
You don't get to enjoy our lavish society without contributing.
If you want food and a shack, you can already live this lifestyle for less than 5k/yr.
Hanging out with your family, playing sports, and helping animals will not keep an economy moving.
An ever-growing number of folks in 'our' society (presuming Western technological) are making only symbolic contributions. Automation is rapidly overtaking jobs.
Understand what that means. It doesn't just mean unemployment/underemployment. It means nobody has to work to create what automation took over. An ever-increasing fraction of the 'lavish society' has no human cost burden at all.
So that knee-jerk thinking above is growing ever-more irrelevant and obsolete. That's pretty much the whole conversation here.
Unless I am inspired, I will not work for free.
I imagine the opposite would be true for myself, and I consider myself a hard worker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort
https://medium.com/the-mission/dont-use-rewards-for-motivati...
http://hepg.org/hel-home/issues/10_2/helarticle/the-case-aga...
"Rewards kill creativity. Some twenty studies have shown that people do inferior work when they are expecting to get a reward for doing it, as compared with people doing the same task without any expectation of a reward. That effect is most pronounced when creativity is involved in the task."
Would this not suggest that people do their best work when they aren't doing it for the paycheck? In other words, given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.
But having fun making art means little to an economy.
Having less fun designing a robot to pick potatoes will transform an economy.
Creativity is nice, but it doesn't directly correlate with additional value.
The proposition was that people will do the least work for the most reward where possible.
The cited article suggested that rewards result in poor quality work.
(EDIT: This is a genuine question; I'm not highly educated on economics and I'd like to know the approximate models that currently exist on how much growing the economy helps numbers like homeless population, healthcare coverage, lifespan, birth survival, food security...)