You would have felt lazy, and likely viewed as pathetic and stupid if you were alive in 1825. Why? Because 200 years ago your work options were almost certainly limited to farm drudgery six days a week, dawn to dusk.
The truth about how life used to be is useful to think about in the age of “universal basic income.” It didn’t exist then, and for obvious reasons. Not only was most human exertion directed at the creation of one thing (food), the sad fact that so much of humanity could only do one thing speaks to the likely possibility that much of humanity 200 years ago was lazy, mostly pathetic, and surely not that bright.
The cruel reality of how life used to be comes to mind again as economists with lots of time on their hands (they can thank tractors and fertilizers, among other things, for freeing them from the farm in favor of thought) contemplate whether “universal basic income” (UBI) will cause the recipients of same to be lazy. It won’t. As argued here a few weeks ago, and in my 2018 book, The End of Work (working title: The End of Laziness – Regnery should have gone with my title), the present and future of work will stagger us for how much it elevates skills and intelligence unique to each one of us.
This beautiful future of work includes economists paid to study the implications of paying people not to work, or at the very least paying them for nothing. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo conclude based on the actions of past UBI recipients that guaranteed income doesn’t foster laziness. Well, of course not.
To see why, contemplate yet again the all-hands-on-deck nature of life 200 years ago. More hands at work in the production of food was a necessity once again because the hands at work weren’t that good. That UBI is increasingly part of the lexicon is the surest sign that as opposed to people working because they have to, more and more are working because they want to. There’s a huge difference.
In the difference we can find the drivers of UBI: with work increasingly about individual passion, wealth created at work is increasingly a thing. And the passion is only going to grow. If readers doubt this, they need only ask active users of AI how it’s changed their working days. As opposed to putting them out of work, AI has freed them of some of the worst aspects of work.
Put another way, technology has made us all smarter and more industrious because its own mechanized hands are rapidly removing the passion killers from the workplace. And with people increasingly doing what they love, so grows wealth so substantial in amounts that the creators of it are increasingly of the mind to give others a piece of it, no questions asked, and no work required. But won’t that make people lazy?
No chance. And the reason why can be found in the truth that where wealth is rapidly being created, so is work opportunity of the best kind multiplying. A nation so rich as to be able to offer UBI is one so dense with opportunity that people will take the income while doing the work.
This includes Banerjee and Duflo. Imagine being paid to find out if people being paid for doing nothing will choose indolence over enterprise. What a world we live in! And in that kind of world, work is too good to pass up.
