| > Problem with this society is, that it also requires people who are working, to cover the cost of the poeple who are not working. Curretnly most countries do that for a very small percentage of unemployed (welfare), and most people in those countries are already complaining about the high taxes. You seem hung up on the idea that "working" is equivalent to "producing value". We live in a society where the system is frequently optimized to employ as many people as possible. This creates incentives to encourage a lot of work being done to win zero-sum games rather than producing value for the economy as a whole. I would argue that we are already in a situation where the majority of the population can be supported by a minority of the workers. We have long been living in a world where the limits on economic growth is consumption, not production. If we instead have the need to encourage people to find what motivates them and provide tools to the motivated to maximize that productivity I think you will see very different social structures arise. Beyond that, I think the removal of the lazy from the work force is actually a net positive. Employers can spend less time filtering the mostly useless to find good workers. The 10x producers among us don't have to spend as much working around the lazy coworkers and managers. Even the "lazy" among us have the freedom to discover their passions and find ways to contribute more to society than they would as a low end wage slave. > Yes, non-workers will create music, art, will travel, write blogs, etc., but none of that generates enough income to cover even their own cost. I think you are selling people short here, or perhaps projecting your dreams on others. There is also a great deal of work that people want to do but the value of which is not easily captureable by an employer. > If you raise the taxes on the people left working, and let others live relatively normal lives without working, you'll get less and less of the former and more of the later. This is actually a good thing as long as you maintain sufficient production. As production declines, the standard of living provided by basic income declines which increases the incentives of the semi-lazy to work, which then leads to increased production. As long as UBI is carefully phased in, the system should equilibrilize. Most of these dynamics aren't possible to explore in limited studies like this one. All these types of studies can do is dispell common myths about individual bevaior and the only way to really find out what will happen is to gradually phase in a UBI. |