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Basic income does of course still discourage work: for instance consider the case of someone who would starve without having job but doesn't with basic income.
by devit 11y ago
Basic income does of course still discourage work: for instance consider the case of someone who would starve without having job but doesn't with basic income.
But of course encouraging work is not really the ultimate goal, so this is unrelated to whether basic income is a good idea or not.
- vanderZwan 11y agoYes, and to add to that we could also have a long discussion about what entails "work" in this context.
- evanpw 11y agoThis is exactly the issue of decreasing marginal utility of money. If your income is $0, then the utility you get from an extra $1 is huge, because it keeps you from starving. If you have a $10k / year basic income, then the utility you get from that next dollar is much smaller. But this effect on work is likely to be much smaller than the effect from the high effective tax rates that you get from mean-tested welfare, especially at typical first-world standards of living. I wouldn't say that discouraging work is totally irrelevant either. The reason that first-world standards of living are high is that lots of people are performing (often unpleasant) tasks for complete strangers, in exchange for similar favors from other strangers (i.e., working for money). Decreasing the number of people willing to do that is (all else equal) a bad thing.