[Josh Martin]
Gobry, a self-identified right-winger, used to support a basic income like many other conservatives have in the past; now, he doesn’t. Gobry understands the allure of the basic income, but in this critique of the basic income, Gobry uses an analysis from Jim Manzi of a set of randomized field trials from the 60’s to the 90’s in the USA and Canada to “prove” that the basic income fails. Science is on his side, he claims. To him, the only welfare policies that successfully place people into work are the policies with work requirements.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Progressives’ hot new poverty-fighting idea has just one basic problem: Science”, The Week, 21 July 2014.
People need to work, not just for income, but emotional health. (Source: The Week)
BI News should post a permanent link to newer studies evaluating the evidence from the basic income studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, they all showed work disincentives of between 10 and 20 percent in poor households in the U.S. during a time great economic activity, so that a father, mother, and teenager might have 4 jobs between them, not counting school and housework. But proving that overworked people will work less with a basic income is a *long* way away from proving that they will be idle, and an even longer way to saying they will suffer the mental effects of not working, which are known in the context of people needing work to live or being dependent on other people or on means-tested benefits.
(This article also fails to deal with the looming issue of technological unemployment: Even if everything in this article is true, which it is not, what should be the conservatives’ response to the lack of need for workers?)
Tim, I guess you haven’t seen my articles on this topic:
http://works.bepress.com/widerquist/4
http://usbig.net/bigblog/2014/08/249/
Karl,
In your “Failure to Communicate” article, you write, “The five experiments found a range of work–effort reduction from −0.5% to −9% for husbands, which corresponds to a reduction of about 0.5–4 h per week, 20–130 h per year, or 1–4 fulltime weeks per year.” By my math, for a 9% reduction to equal 4 hours, then the hours per week of work without a BIG would be 44.4444, and the hours per week with a basic income would be 40.4444. Is my math correct? Because if it is, *that*, rhetorically, is the single most important fact a BIG advocate needs to know when responding to someone who claims that the North American experiments show a BIG makes people stop working.