Agreed. But would those “five hours of work” be enough for the whole economy to stay afloat and pay the basic income?
The question is - once you start accumulating, how much will people prioritise "getting more stuff" over "playing computer games all day"?
I mean, I earn about $60k. I'm not about to drop down to a $10k income, even if I could get that without any effort. And I think most people are like that - a big reason, as far as I can tell, that many people who could work, don't is that they would lose money by doing so, at least to start with, and they're terrified to take that risk.
Let's say you're unemployed now - someone asks you to help them wash windows for a few hours next week. Doing so would jeopardise your benefits, and possibly leave you homeless if you were found out. If you could take that bit of work, you'd probably find the number of hours going up (if you were any good at it) and possibly leading into more, better, work.
But if we stop people even taking that first step, we effectively shut them out of the job market.
(I'm sure there would be _some_ people that decided to play games all day. But I'm fairly sure the free riders would be a tiny part of the population. People like stuff too much for that.)
I don't.
And that's the problem with the whole discussion: a simple, critical tipping point makes or breaks the whole proposition, and nobody can sufficiently prove which way it will tip to the satisfaction & persuasion of the sociopolitical opposition. Doesn't help that the proposition, hinging on this vapid presumption (either way), involves ENORMOUS amounts of money: "oops, we were wrong, too many people became free riders" would prove disastrous. Humans have tried a lot of socioeconomic structures, and a "play if you want to" BI model hasn't taken hold.
"Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.
The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did."
Which isn't at all conclusive. One town, in one culture, does not mean very much in the long term. But it's enough for me to think that more experimentation is worthwhile.