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Americans believe in the importance of a good day’s work. And so it’s understandable that the prospect of a universal basic income (UBI), in which the government would issue checks to cover the basic costs of living, rubs some people the wrong way.
But even if some people did stop working, they might wind up contributing to society in other meaningful ways. People who perform the unpaid labor of taking care of children or elderly family members, for example, are certainly doing important work. UBI would simply provide a means of compensating this type of labor efficiently.
And historically, many of mankind’s most groundbreaking achievements have come from people with the luxury of plentiful leisure time. As economist Forget notes in an interview with Freakonomics: “If you look at the 18th and at the 19th century, some of the great scientific breakthroughs and some of the great cultural breakthroughs were made by people who did not work.”
A universal basic income would certainly be a step in the right direction ... it would free immense creativity that today is absorbed in doing jobs that, when you really look at it, make little sense.