But why? Why is it so necessary that everyone spend their days working? Why not just allow the structurally unemployed to pursue whatever it is that they want to do? I'm not saying we have to give them all mansions and butlers, but why do we have to make up fake, worthless jobs for them to do? It seems as though overall human happiness would be better optimized by allowing them to stay home or perhaps contribute to society in other ways than clocking in for a 9-to-5. The goal shouldn't be for all of humanity to be employed, the goal should be for all of humanity to have happy lives.
I answered that same question here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907937 I think most people are not natural aristocrats. They are not going to be tinkering in their home laboratories, crafting programming languages or writing ebooks. I fear that most people will degenerate in every manner if not subjected to the discipline of work. They will end up drinking and playing video games all day long. Furthermore, I think most people want to work, it provides purpose and fulfillment.
That said, as long as I'm social engineering a solution to the nation's problems, why not try an A/B test? Try giving the money away with no strings attached in one city or state (far away from me please) and see what happens. I am just more pessimistic about human nature than you are, so I do not think it will end well. I think there is a lot of evidence about the problems of idleness from the history of welfare and housing projects.
A compromise would be to make one of the "make work" options be an artistic or technological fellowship. So if you went to your employment office for your make work, and said you were working on an art project or new programming language, they would pay you to do that, you would just have to show some progress along the way.
The degeneration you fear sounds like a fine alternative to me. I'd rather deal with happy drunks than stressed out angry workers. Idleness doesn't bother me. The crime you allude to is usually committed by the young men who have no income in those situations and result to crime to obtain funds.
>In its four most deprived neighborhoods, some 30 percent of the residents of working age are considered “economically inactive,” neither holding jobs nor looking for them.
> "The housing projects in Wythenshawe represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation. But the problems here — a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality — are common across Britain."
> Bringing home her groceries recently, Jane Leach, a 46-year-old caregiver for the elderly, described a typical weekend evening on the small grassy area that serves as a park of sorts between two rows of houses on her street. The youths start coming after 6, she said, dozens of them, boys and girls, mostly in their teens. They get drunk, take drugs, harass the residents, steal cars, urinate and defecate in the gardens, smash beer bottles on doorsteps, fight, pass out.
> When she tries to intervene, Ms. Leach said, the youths yell abuse at her. When she tells them to get off her car, they tell her there is nowhere else to sit. Recently, youths slashed every tire on 12 cars up and down the street, she said. When her partner was smashed in the face by a 14-year-old, Ms. Leach said, the police took 45 minutes to respond.
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The article blames the stealing to some extent on poverty. But these people are not impoverished in the classical sense of the world. They have food, healthcare, and decent housing. I'm sure they have access to libraries where they could have a near infinite supply of books. Maybe they cannot afford vacations or fancy entertainment systems, but under any sort of basic income for not working scheme, people would face such limits in income.
And also, even if you could turn these people into less violent and vulgar idlers, as a first order moral principle, I do not want a world that looks like idiocracy or the ship in Wall-E.
I think this part is important, though. The poor in our society are alienated and often cut-off from the larger society and culture. If unemployment was a socially accepted norm I do not think you would see this, I think you would see more people acting like "natural aristocrats".
On the other hand, I don't necessarily disagree with you entirely. Maybe people do need to work, it is possible. In that case, my solution would be to find the absolute minimum that people "need" to work in order to remain socially-balanced and force them to work that much, preferably doing something that contributes to the general welfare.
being unemployed, with no access to resources you can use to build things, is a very different environment than being unemployed with full access to things you can build.
"However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary."
That negates the experiment. There is little incentive to quit your job or loaf when the free money is only temporary. It may also take years for the effects to be felt, as social norms break down gradually. Also, there is a big, big difference between doing this policy in a small town in Canada, where there can be social pressure to not free-load, and where you have a population with a strong cultural work ethnic, versus enacting this policy in a large, heterogeneous city.
But why? Why is it so necessary that everyone spend their days working? Why not just allow the structurally unemployed to pursue whatever it is that they want to do? I'm not saying we have to give them all mansions and butlers, but why do we have to make up fake, worthless jobs for them to do? It seems as though overall human happiness would be better optimized by allowing them to stay home or perhaps contribute to society in other ways than clocking in for a 9-to-5. The goal shouldn't be for all of humanity to be employed, the goal should be for all of humanity to have happy lives.