Particularly: "But this negative definition, that laziness is “too much not working” makes no sense, as leisure already describes 100% of the time one spends not working (the concepts of leisure and laziness have often been related, confused, or even intertwined; otiosus means laziness in Latin, from otium, meaning leisure). In any case, people often accuse themselves and others of laziness even when they don’t seem to particularly enjoy the activities they engage in instead; it is hard to conceive of “procrastination” or “persistent self-recrimination” as colloquial “leisure.” "
Laziness is the lack of ability to exert oneself towards (difficult) meaningful pursuits.
Playing video games instead of working out is giving in to momentary pleasure instead of pursuing a meaningful and difficult end. The difference between laziness and industriousness is the difference between what you do in your life today, and what you would tell yourself to do if you wouldn't experience the next 24 hours but would 'do' whatever you laid yourself out on a to-do list.
Agreed. The 100% of leisure time is leisure is particularly bad. Citing Michelangelo and Donatello as examples of how UBI won't decrease work is also, uh, unrepresentative. And there's lots of moving goalposts between "laziness doesn't exist" and "some people don't want to work, but you're just jealous". And if you consider yourself lazy, you're just being too hard on yourself.
When I was in college, I often spent all day playing video games, didn't get my schoolwork done, and was on academic probation. I was being lazy / unfocused. While there's no universal, quantitative definition of laziness, it clearly exists. You might as well argue love doesn't exist because people define it differently.
The authors have addressed this point though, I think.
"But the outward-looking lens of this flawed framework, which treats the individual’s preferences as the ultimate driver of their behaviour, is the real problem. The fact is that most people do not get to choose their full ranges of professional or personal activities."
It's possible playing video games is something some people deem to be their optimal choice of action given their economic circumstances (constraints). It could be optimal relative to working at minimum wage under a horrible boss, for example.
And the authors further make the point that we shouldn't assume the motivations behind people's choices (whether its giving in to momentary pleasure or not). Because we don't know observe all the constraints of the environment in which a person is living.
It's unlikely that playing video games is ever the optimal choice. Optimal means best possible, not simply "better than an obvious alternative". I'm quite sure, whether from the point of view of individual improvement or pro-social societal benefits, there is usually something more optimal to do with most of your time than play video games. Or to leave comments here ;)
“A person who says playing catch with your child is not lazy but playing catch with your friends or your dog is lazy, or that playing with a dog is not lazy but playing videogames is lazy, is simply making arbitrary judgments about which expenditures of time are most meritorious”
Deciding who is allowed to make these judgments is a tricky question. But to suggest that there is no judgment to be made at all, or that “any activity is fine” is absurd. How does society get better, correct our mistakes, improve how we tackle tough issues? I don’t think it’s by suggesting that all choices of how we spend our time are equal. Would you say that about elected officials? Medical providers? Public safety professionals?
I don’t understand the point of writing something like this.
I always thought of being lazy as one of my defining characteristics. It seems like many people work because they have a drive to be the best or something. I work in order to support my ability to loaf. I went to law school to forestall entering the workforce. I work as a lawyer because it is easier, and better able to sustain my loafing. I enjoy being a lawyer a lot of the time, but if I was independently wealthy, I would enjoy going to art museums instead.
As faithful followers of the natural law of least effort, we are all lazy. Laziness understood as "unwilling to work or use energy" is the engine of technological advancement and progress.
I have no moral problem with "laziness," and I'm looking forward to a post-scarcity future in which we can all be as lazy as we want.
That said, this point:
>>Blaming people who are looking for work for not finding it is like blaming someone who dies on the list of prospective kidney recipients for not living longer. Most people in labour markets are price-takers operating in limited information environments; to imagine otherwise is fantasy. People upset about matching problems in the labour market (and people are right to puzzle at the figures that U.S. presently has 10M job openings and 8.5M unemployed and actively looking for work!) have valid concerns, but should not look first to the laziness of their compatriots as an explanation.
...ignores the fact that there is a strong incentive for many people to *say* they are looking for work when they aren't really looking for work, because you can't qualify for unemployment insurance unless you appear to be looking for work. I don't know how many of those 8.5 million fall into this category, and the authors don't say.
Yes, I was very surprised the authors didn't tackle this question. A friend owns a small business, and he's desperately struggling to hire enough workers. He is a kind, dedicated employer who truly goes out of his way to make his workplace as enjoyable as possible. For his latest job opening, he has received 100+ resumes. He called twelve people in to interview. He offered the job to six people. None of them accepted.
I have heard a variation of this story from about a dozen people with small businesses. This is a widely known phenomenon among business owners, so why aren't Econ PhDs addressing it?
A much better essay on the concept of laziness is Scott Alexander's "The Whole City is Center". It's in the form of a philosophical dialogue, and it's not nearly as smug and off-putting as this essay. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
I have to say, I found this essay suspect when it said "we argue laziness is simply the demonstrating of unpopular preferences, perhaps under non-obvious constraints"; psychology can't be shoehorned into just a few umbrella econ terms (like 'preferences').
Lazy? No. Just haven’t found work to do that they consider worth the effort. Will UBI be an incentive to find that sort of work? Maybe. Will their work benefit anyone else? Maybe. It will take many years to find out, by which time it will be impossible to drop the UBI, no matter how disastrous UBI may prove to be.
We're actually doing an experiment like that now. Look at the quit rate. The Trump/Biden economic stimulus provided a huge number of low paid workers with a chance to make that assessment, and the rapid growth and transitions of the recovery offer them opportunities. There hasn't been anything like this since the end of World War II when all the veterans came home, collected their benefits and leaned into the deficit spending and war surplus.
Unlike the UBI, the wealthy is desperately trying to end the experiment and hoping employees stop getting used to better pay and working conditions. It's hard work ratcheting them down decade after decade.
The stimulus is a one-off on a small, unrepresentative segment of the population. I don’t see how we can draw any broad conclusions about UBI from this unique situation. And I don’t buy that pay and working conditions are ratcheting down. Statistics don’t really support that at all.
"Most often, when promising new or progressive ideas are presented in policy and economics, the retort is, “Aha! But then the lazy person might win!” Or “a person near to, or related to, or the same colour as, or in the same neighbourhood as a lazy person might win!” "
It's remarkable to me that a post titled "People Aren't Lazy!" utilizes such a lazy strawman.
The comparison of medieval patronage to UBI is also a bit bizarre. Patronage was given to individuals who had already demonstrated extreme talent and willingness to work. It was more akin to a scholarship program for gifted students, and nothing like a blanket UBI program.
The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?
Until we have affordable automation for those jobs, it would spell disaster for businesses who depend on these employees, especially small businesses that run on a tight budget. I'm yet to see anyone spell out a comprehensive plan for how we could implement UBI without decimating small businesses and possibly the economy as a whole (if someone knows of any resource that comprehensively tackles this question, please share, because the idealist inside me loves the idea of UBI.)
"And yet, by and large, society deems toiling away at a job one hates to be more meritorious than patiently waiting for a job one likes, which is almost always a job in which one will be more productive and effective."
I hear this argument a lot: that people who are unhappy at their jobs are very inefficient and wasting resources, and society would actually be more prosperous if they weren't locked into those jobs. But again, I just don't see much data backing it. I read this entire article hoping the authors, being Econ PhDs, would present data to support this, and was very disappointed that their argument boiled down to, "Trust us, it's true!"
"To call someone else lazy requires less humility, less empathy, and less introspection than admitting one’s own anger and disdain at the prospect that someone else might be enjoying herself. In this sense, if “laziness” is wrong, the sin involved is not the sloth of the accused, but the envy of the accuser."
This is a bizarre statement, and one that completely fails to take into account the impact of laziness on families and communities. My cousin is lazy. All he does is play video games, smoke pot, hang out with friends who also don't work, and collect a disability check (he has a "back injury" that somehow prevents him from working, but not from dirtbiking and playing baseball.) He absolutely, completely neglects his children. It crushes them and has completely destroyed their self esteem. Luckily, his wife has divorced him and taken the children (he made no effort to get custody), but his kids now have to deal with the life-long trauma of having a dad who has made it very clear they're just not worth the effort.
And, no, he is not someone basking in happiness as he enjoys "leisure." He's an utterly miserable person, and I suspect the root of his laziness is untreated mental illness. In my experience, that is the root of most laziness: not an idealistic rejection of the capitalistic rat race, like these authors suggest, but a deep self-loathing fueled by a lack of community and purpose in life.
Can part of that be attributed to our capitalistic lifestyles? For a lot of people, sure. But that doesn't mean laziness "doesn't exist."
Anyway, I adore Noah's writing (even when I don't agree with him, he presents clearly thought out arguments and uses data to back them). But I'm honestly a bit baffled that he'd share an essay this low in quality.
"The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?"
You pay them enough for the job to be worth doing, without relying on the threat of destitution to make people desperate enough to work at your crap job.
As far as I am aware, true UBI hasn't yet been tested. What has been tested is short-term, localized trials of UBI-like programs. This is very, very different than true UBI (long term, large population, non-localized, with all businesses fully aware of the extra cash in the population's pockets).
I really hope a true UBI trial will occur. I'd be thrilled if an entire region, say Northern Washington, voted to turn their citizens into a giant trial population. My gut says UBI won't work, but I really hope I'm wrong, and either way I'd love some hard evidence.
Does 850,000 people in Spain qualify as big enough?
And why should we trust your gut more than actual experiments done?
UBI is just money. In a way there are lots of countries where most people get "free money" but it's not called UBI. It can be called something like "Child Allowance". Has no negative effects, only positive.
I think Wikipedia actually does a really good job of defining UBI, or at least my personal understanding of it: "Universal basic income (UBI)... is a sociopolitical financial transfer concept in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a legally stipulated and equal financial grant paid by the government without a means test."
So, no, I actually don't think 850,000 people is large enough to actually prove/disprove UBI. That's only about 2% of Spain's population, and Spain's trial is means-tested. Which means it doesn't fit the definition of UBI. Not to mention the study only recently started and has no conclusive evidence to provide thus far. I don't believe we'll fully understand the impacts of UBI until some large region actually implements true UBI for a multi-year period.
I absolutely don't think you should trust my gut over actual experiments. My gut is often wrong, and that's why I hope the future will hold a large trial of actual UBI.
And I strongly disagree that UBI is "just money" and no different from child allowances. It's intended to fundamentally alter our economy in ways that child allowances aren't. I fully agree that child allowances are great and should be encouraged, but I don't agree with the logic that, "Child allowances work, therefore UBI will work with no negative effects."
None of those 20 trials were UBI, though. All were means tested with small populations and short term.
That being said--I completely agree! I would love to see more and bigger trials. Gut feeling is very often wrong when it comes to economics, and I honestly really hope that hard data can prove me wrong. I love the idea of UBI and the future it promises.
So your theory is that the means-testing would break things because the guy making 250K/year would have his buying habits distorted by failing to receive his $5k/year?
How is UBI, "intended to fundamentally alter our economy??"
In response to your first point: no, it is not the spending habits of the 1% I'm concerned about. Means testing limits financial assistance to a very small portion of the population, which means that the greater economy doesn't adjust much to the inflow of money. Landlords can't jack up rents for everyone if only 2% of the population is receiving assistance. Neither can grocery stores slap on a 10% price increase. A tiny percentage suddenly having an extra $5000 is extremely different than every single person in the nation having that money. They create wildly different incentives for businesses. Hence I think the studies on UBI are very interesting and perhaps promising, but do little to prove that true UBI would be successful.
And per the classical definition of UBI, it's supposed to make work optional for many individuals, since basic support is guaranteed. In my mind, that's a fundamental shift of how our economy currently works. Right now, for better or worse, the need to survive is the motor of much of our economy. Taking that away will have consequences, both good and possibly bad.
Speaking of lazy...this piece is evidence of intellectual laziness (it certainly isn't economic science). The question that ought to be being asked about disincentives to productive behavior is how strong they are AT THE MARGIN. Which takes diligent research to answer, not self-congratulatory blog posts.
Funny how ordinary (non-academics) people recognize laziness as a reality, and are then looked down upon for their astuteness.
"Laziness" tells us which jobs or tasks are crap enough to automate.
Also, we generally don't call workaholics who won't pull their weight at home "lazy." I've definitely known docs who take call to get a reprieve from home responsibilities (I am most definitely not one of those). I think thoughts within their households differ on whether the extra income offsets the burdens.
I get the feeling I am reading an argument for UBI and transfers to the unemployed buried under a rhetorical argument against slandering people with the term "lazy".
I think the term lazy is a lot like, albeit the opposite of, "greedy". Both reflect the vice of taking a useful trait to a harmful extreme. A greedy person takes self interest to the point of self harm or antisocial harm of others. A lazy person takes leisure to the extreme of harming their long term interest, or harming the interests of others they might care for.
One obvious concern with transfers to those not employed is that it incentivizes not getting employed. And why should we care if they get employed? Because employment is a positive sum, win/win activity which produces value for consumers and workers. Both expect and usually gain benefit from the relationship. The consumer gets a fine cup of java in a relaxing environment out of the house. The barista gets $16 an hour and various other benefits. We accomplish more together in a complex network of market activity than we can on our own, and wages is the incentive for us to join the network in a productive way.
If the person instead opts to play video games then the consumer benefit is not created. Total utility is reduced.
I agree that UBI might be a better way of providing a safety net in a modern economy. I seriously doubt it, but like another commenter on this page, I think it would be a great long term experiment somewhere willing to court possible disaster. And by replace, I mean eliminating existing "welfare" programs and transfers, and replacing it with a widespread UBI.
I say this as someone who chose to drop out of a career as a financial executive (I designed novel financial products). Eventually, I just decided with tax rates where they were that I would just retire early (in my forties) and spend time surfing and with my family. No regrets. I don’t really consider myself lazy (ok, I might be a bit lazy). I just chose the trade offs that best met my need. But who did lose out on my admittedly selfish choice were all the millions of consumers who could have benefitted from any creative products which I was capable of creating. Their loss, not mine. Some create coffees. Some new products. A UBI would just have encouraged me to opt out sooner, or to opt out with less personal saving.
My high tax rate directly makes me more "lazy" by discouraging me from taking on more work shifts. I would otherwise work more but there is little incentive knowing that 40-50% of that money will go to the government. I'm sure this will also be my reason for earlier retirement, especially if rates go up even further.
"The difference between a lazy person and a decent person doing the same job is astounding."
I'm not sure what the substantive difference is between this statement and "[W]e also collectively pay a price for the bad, inadequate work done by people who hate their jobs and lives."
If you have a task that nobody really _wants_ to do just for its own sake, and you won't (or can't, because the task doesn't produce enough marginal value) pay enough to get people to feel well-remunerated and do it cheerfully, then _yes_, people are going to do it resentfully, and find every opportunity to shirk. That's not "laziness", it's humanity. If washing dishes in the back of a restaurant were great fun, then restaurant owners would be doing it themselves, instead of trying to get some schmoe to do it for $10/hr.
We've structured the world so that people have to choose between miserable jobs, or full-on immiseration -- starving in the streets. Asking people in miserable jobs to pretend to be enthusiastic and grateful about this situation is both absurd and cruel.
Historically there was an element of necessity to this -- we really _weren't_ producing enough stuff that we could set a minimum standard of living that was above abject poverty. But now we definitely are, and our perpetuation of a system where we maintain the possibility of being punished by poverty, as a whip to spur people to work harder at shitty jobs, is _entirely_ a policy choice. We could afford a model where we do a fairly generous UBI to ensure that any worker that feels abused or taken advantage of can tell their boss to shove it and go spend some time on searching for something better, without fearing that they'll end up homeless and hungry, combined with rolling back the minimum wage in favor of a very large negative income tax on low dollars of income. (The point being that as an employer you can make the choice to hire people to do tasks with low productivity, and the pay will look reasonably attractive from their side because of the negative tax. But you'll have to treat them with some level of fairness and dignity, because there will be other low-wage employers out there, and they aren't afraid of starving if they walk.)
In my industry we pay people really well. A lot of people still don't do their job as well as others. Not because of lack of skill, they know how to do it but for some reason they just can't bring themselves to make an effort. Most of them just don't care.
I do think their upbringing is the reason, they don't care about others to any large degree.
I could call them lazy, entitled or idiots. Not sure if it really makes a difference.
So you've never had a lazy coworker who was less productive than the rest of the team? You've only had underperforming team members who weren't treated with enough respect and dignity and that's why they never seemed to do any work?
I have read Time Enough For Love several times (before I was 15 because it is truly horrible as an adult). I did not remember that little story. I can quote quite a few of the bits from "The Notebooks." (Everyone should be able to ....butcher a hog, conn a ship.....)
This argument only really makes sense if we think that personal and social incentives toward hard work are aligned.
If we think about contexts where people aren't given individual rewards for work, laziness as a value judgment makes perfect sense. If you go on a long camping trip with your friends, and one of your friends never helps collect firewood/pack up the stuff/etc., calling them lazy and treating that as a value judgment is perfectly reasonable, and saying "they just have different preferences" is unreasonable. In that context, it's clear that work has to get done, that much of that work is unpleasant, and that a willingness to participate in that work is a moral quality that deserves praise.
The work that most of us do now is also important, and done for the good of society. The only reason to think of it as purely a matter of personal preference is if we think that the money we get from working harder is commensurate with the value we create by working. If this isn't true, then people who work hard are carrying people who don't, just as if we were on a camping trip.
The funny thing about this is that if you want more economic redistribution (as I do), you want a world where our personal rewards for working hard are smaller than the benefits to society. You want a world that looks more like the camping trip. And in order for that world to work, we need people to feel proud of hard work.
One possible retort to this is that people's natural preference for creating good stuff is strong enough that our society would produce what it needs without incentives to work hard (either monetary or moral/social). That might be true for creating art, writing novels, or even making google. I doubt that it's true for restocking shelves, data entry, and all of the many difficult, necessary, and unglamorous tasks that keep our society running.
Yeah, but then you get the makers who cheat. If everyone is producing more than they consume, some people are going to grab the extra stuff for themselves. It's the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy was that the rich people took the commons away from the poor people who relied on it. It might work on a camping trip, but that's because there is an enforcement mechanism. If you don't do your bit, you won't get invited on the next trip. In society, the cheaters usually hire lobbyist, fund politicians, set up bogus economics research groups and so on so that everyone has to invite them on the next camping trip and the next.
I loved this. A different lens from which to approach behavior, of others and ourselves. Turns out, the “lazy accuser” in my life is…drum roll…yeah, it’s me.
So, onward and upward. A journey of self-introspection lies ahead but first, I can and I must stop assigning merit to leisure activities. It’s ok to lounge, as long as lounging is providing enjoyment. What a concept.
Horrible post.
Particularly: "But this negative definition, that laziness is “too much not working” makes no sense, as leisure already describes 100% of the time one spends not working (the concepts of leisure and laziness have often been related, confused, or even intertwined; otiosus means laziness in Latin, from otium, meaning leisure). In any case, people often accuse themselves and others of laziness even when they don’t seem to particularly enjoy the activities they engage in instead; it is hard to conceive of “procrastination” or “persistent self-recrimination” as colloquial “leisure.” "
Laziness is the lack of ability to exert oneself towards (difficult) meaningful pursuits.
Playing video games instead of working out is giving in to momentary pleasure instead of pursuing a meaningful and difficult end. The difference between laziness and industriousness is the difference between what you do in your life today, and what you would tell yourself to do if you wouldn't experience the next 24 hours but would 'do' whatever you laid yourself out on a to-do list.
Agreed. The 100% of leisure time is leisure is particularly bad. Citing Michelangelo and Donatello as examples of how UBI won't decrease work is also, uh, unrepresentative. And there's lots of moving goalposts between "laziness doesn't exist" and "some people don't want to work, but you're just jealous". And if you consider yourself lazy, you're just being too hard on yourself.
When I was in college, I often spent all day playing video games, didn't get my schoolwork done, and was on academic probation. I was being lazy / unfocused. While there's no universal, quantitative definition of laziness, it clearly exists. You might as well argue love doesn't exist because people define it differently.
The authors have addressed this point though, I think.
"But the outward-looking lens of this flawed framework, which treats the individual’s preferences as the ultimate driver of their behaviour, is the real problem. The fact is that most people do not get to choose their full ranges of professional or personal activities."
It's possible playing video games is something some people deem to be their optimal choice of action given their economic circumstances (constraints). It could be optimal relative to working at minimum wage under a horrible boss, for example.
And the authors further make the point that we shouldn't assume the motivations behind people's choices (whether its giving in to momentary pleasure or not). Because we don't know observe all the constraints of the environment in which a person is living.
It's unlikely that playing video games is ever the optimal choice. Optimal means best possible, not simply "better than an obvious alternative". I'm quite sure, whether from the point of view of individual improvement or pro-social societal benefits, there is usually something more optimal to do with most of your time than play video games. Or to leave comments here ;)
Relaxation and escapism are pretty darn important for optimal performance at other times.
The paradox of the "mythical man-month": 32-35 hours a week produces maximum results.
“A person who says playing catch with your child is not lazy but playing catch with your friends or your dog is lazy, or that playing with a dog is not lazy but playing videogames is lazy, is simply making arbitrary judgments about which expenditures of time are most meritorious”
Deciding who is allowed to make these judgments is a tricky question. But to suggest that there is no judgment to be made at all, or that “any activity is fine” is absurd. How does society get better, correct our mistakes, improve how we tackle tough issues? I don’t think it’s by suggesting that all choices of how we spend our time are equal. Would you say that about elected officials? Medical providers? Public safety professionals?
I don’t understand the point of writing something like this.
This suffers from a multitude of issues, including:
- Overworking, burnouts and "hustle culture" (Mythical Man Month and 32-35 hour work weeks being optimal)
- Entrepreneurship and its impossibility of quantifying its productiveness (e.g. MLM vs Tech)
- Labor Strikes and Antiwork as a means to better standards of living (or its ineffectiveness and narrow thinking)
- Lack of labor-market-fit research on intelligence, dominance, and sociability (and how fitting industries are often genetic)
I always thought of being lazy as one of my defining characteristics. It seems like many people work because they have a drive to be the best or something. I work in order to support my ability to loaf. I went to law school to forestall entering the workforce. I work as a lawyer because it is easier, and better able to sustain my loafing. I enjoy being a lawyer a lot of the time, but if I was independently wealthy, I would enjoy going to art museums instead.
Paid work is definitionally not your first choice of activity, or else you wouldn't need to be paid for it.
It really does take an academic to miss the obvious so effectively.
As faithful followers of the natural law of least effort, we are all lazy. Laziness understood as "unwilling to work or use energy" is the engine of technological advancement and progress.
I have no moral problem with "laziness," and I'm looking forward to a post-scarcity future in which we can all be as lazy as we want.
That said, this point:
>>Blaming people who are looking for work for not finding it is like blaming someone who dies on the list of prospective kidney recipients for not living longer. Most people in labour markets are price-takers operating in limited information environments; to imagine otherwise is fantasy. People upset about matching problems in the labour market (and people are right to puzzle at the figures that U.S. presently has 10M job openings and 8.5M unemployed and actively looking for work!) have valid concerns, but should not look first to the laziness of their compatriots as an explanation.
...ignores the fact that there is a strong incentive for many people to *say* they are looking for work when they aren't really looking for work, because you can't qualify for unemployment insurance unless you appear to be looking for work. I don't know how many of those 8.5 million fall into this category, and the authors don't say.
Yes, I was very surprised the authors didn't tackle this question. A friend owns a small business, and he's desperately struggling to hire enough workers. He is a kind, dedicated employer who truly goes out of his way to make his workplace as enjoyable as possible. For his latest job opening, he has received 100+ resumes. He called twelve people in to interview. He offered the job to six people. None of them accepted.
I have heard a variation of this story from about a dozen people with small businesses. This is a widely known phenomenon among business owners, so why aren't Econ PhDs addressing it?
A much better essay on the concept of laziness is Scott Alexander's "The Whole City is Center". It's in the form of a philosophical dialogue, and it's not nearly as smug and off-putting as this essay. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
Bingo.
I have to say, I found this essay suspect when it said "we argue laziness is simply the demonstrating of unpopular preferences, perhaps under non-obvious constraints"; psychology can't be shoehorned into just a few umbrella econ terms (like 'preferences').
I strongly disagree that any of Scott Alexander's absurbly long-winded and poorly edited "essays" is better than this post.
I was curious so I just pasted Alexander's "essay" into an online "how long does it take to read this" calculator and it spit out:
94966760847700.8 minutes
Which sounds about right.
Reflect on your comment: it does not add good or beauty.
Lazy? No. Just haven’t found work to do that they consider worth the effort. Will UBI be an incentive to find that sort of work? Maybe. Will their work benefit anyone else? Maybe. It will take many years to find out, by which time it will be impossible to drop the UBI, no matter how disastrous UBI may prove to be.
We're actually doing an experiment like that now. Look at the quit rate. The Trump/Biden economic stimulus provided a huge number of low paid workers with a chance to make that assessment, and the rapid growth and transitions of the recovery offer them opportunities. There hasn't been anything like this since the end of World War II when all the veterans came home, collected their benefits and leaned into the deficit spending and war surplus.
Unlike the UBI, the wealthy is desperately trying to end the experiment and hoping employees stop getting used to better pay and working conditions. It's hard work ratcheting them down decade after decade.
The stimulus is a one-off on a small, unrepresentative segment of the population. I don’t see how we can draw any broad conclusions about UBI from this unique situation. And I don’t buy that pay and working conditions are ratcheting down. Statistics don’t really support that at all.
Your, "No! No! Statistics Can't Prove that!" refrain comes off a bit like you are plugging your hears and humming.
I never said can’t. I said don’t.
That's a lazy response. \s
"Most often, when promising new or progressive ideas are presented in policy and economics, the retort is, “Aha! But then the lazy person might win!” Or “a person near to, or related to, or the same colour as, or in the same neighbourhood as a lazy person might win!” "
It's remarkable to me that a post titled "People Aren't Lazy!" utilizes such a lazy strawman.
The comparison of medieval patronage to UBI is also a bit bizarre. Patronage was given to individuals who had already demonstrated extreme talent and willingness to work. It was more akin to a scholarship program for gifted students, and nothing like a blanket UBI program.
The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?
Until we have affordable automation for those jobs, it would spell disaster for businesses who depend on these employees, especially small businesses that run on a tight budget. I'm yet to see anyone spell out a comprehensive plan for how we could implement UBI without decimating small businesses and possibly the economy as a whole (if someone knows of any resource that comprehensively tackles this question, please share, because the idealist inside me loves the idea of UBI.)
"And yet, by and large, society deems toiling away at a job one hates to be more meritorious than patiently waiting for a job one likes, which is almost always a job in which one will be more productive and effective."
I hear this argument a lot: that people who are unhappy at their jobs are very inefficient and wasting resources, and society would actually be more prosperous if they weren't locked into those jobs. But again, I just don't see much data backing it. I read this entire article hoping the authors, being Econ PhDs, would present data to support this, and was very disappointed that their argument boiled down to, "Trust us, it's true!"
"To call someone else lazy requires less humility, less empathy, and less introspection than admitting one’s own anger and disdain at the prospect that someone else might be enjoying herself. In this sense, if “laziness” is wrong, the sin involved is not the sloth of the accused, but the envy of the accuser."
This is a bizarre statement, and one that completely fails to take into account the impact of laziness on families and communities. My cousin is lazy. All he does is play video games, smoke pot, hang out with friends who also don't work, and collect a disability check (he has a "back injury" that somehow prevents him from working, but not from dirtbiking and playing baseball.) He absolutely, completely neglects his children. It crushes them and has completely destroyed their self esteem. Luckily, his wife has divorced him and taken the children (he made no effort to get custody), but his kids now have to deal with the life-long trauma of having a dad who has made it very clear they're just not worth the effort.
And, no, he is not someone basking in happiness as he enjoys "leisure." He's an utterly miserable person, and I suspect the root of his laziness is untreated mental illness. In my experience, that is the root of most laziness: not an idealistic rejection of the capitalistic rat race, like these authors suggest, but a deep self-loathing fueled by a lack of community and purpose in life.
Can part of that be attributed to our capitalistic lifestyles? For a lot of people, sure. But that doesn't mean laziness "doesn't exist."
Anyway, I adore Noah's writing (even when I don't agree with him, he presents clearly thought out arguments and uses data to back them). But I'm honestly a bit baffled that he'd share an essay this low in quality.
"The authors also fail to answer the question I always have about UBI, which is: When all those baristas who aren't passionate about coffee leave, who replaces them? What about far less desirable jobs, such as being a garbage collector?"
You pay them enough for the job to be worth doing, without relying on the threat of destitution to make people desperate enough to work at your crap job.
UBI has been tested. It worked. So there's that.
As far as I am aware, true UBI hasn't yet been tested. What has been tested is short-term, localized trials of UBI-like programs. This is very, very different than true UBI (long term, large population, non-localized, with all businesses fully aware of the extra cash in the population's pockets).
I really hope a true UBI trial will occur. I'd be thrilled if an entire region, say Northern Washington, voted to turn their citizens into a giant trial population. My gut says UBI won't work, but I really hope I'm wrong, and either way I'd love some hard evidence.
What is true UBI in your view?
Does 850,000 people in Spain qualify as big enough?
And why should we trust your gut more than actual experiments done?
UBI is just money. In a way there are lots of countries where most people get "free money" but it's not called UBI. It can be called something like "Child Allowance". Has no negative effects, only positive.
I think Wikipedia actually does a really good job of defining UBI, or at least my personal understanding of it: "Universal basic income (UBI)... is a sociopolitical financial transfer concept in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a legally stipulated and equal financial grant paid by the government without a means test."
So, no, I actually don't think 850,000 people is large enough to actually prove/disprove UBI. That's only about 2% of Spain's population, and Spain's trial is means-tested. Which means it doesn't fit the definition of UBI. Not to mention the study only recently started and has no conclusive evidence to provide thus far. I don't believe we'll fully understand the impacts of UBI until some large region actually implements true UBI for a multi-year period.
I absolutely don't think you should trust my gut over actual experiments. My gut is often wrong, and that's why I hope the future will hold a large trial of actual UBI.
And I strongly disagree that UBI is "just money" and no different from child allowances. It's intended to fundamentally alter our economy in ways that child allowances aren't. I fully agree that child allowances are great and should be encouraged, but I don't agree with the logic that, "Child allowances work, therefore UBI will work with no negative effects."
Well, more than 20 trials have been done. None of them had a negative outcome, instead mostly positive.
I'd say that at least means more and bigger trials are in order.
I don't think the smart money is on your gut at this point.
None of those 20 trials were UBI, though. All were means tested with small populations and short term.
That being said--I completely agree! I would love to see more and bigger trials. Gut feeling is very often wrong when it comes to economics, and I honestly really hope that hard data can prove me wrong. I love the idea of UBI and the future it promises.
So your theory is that the means-testing would break things because the guy making 250K/year would have his buying habits distorted by failing to receive his $5k/year?
How is UBI, "intended to fundamentally alter our economy??"
In response to your first point: no, it is not the spending habits of the 1% I'm concerned about. Means testing limits financial assistance to a very small portion of the population, which means that the greater economy doesn't adjust much to the inflow of money. Landlords can't jack up rents for everyone if only 2% of the population is receiving assistance. Neither can grocery stores slap on a 10% price increase. A tiny percentage suddenly having an extra $5000 is extremely different than every single person in the nation having that money. They create wildly different incentives for businesses. Hence I think the studies on UBI are very interesting and perhaps promising, but do little to prove that true UBI would be successful.
And per the classical definition of UBI, it's supposed to make work optional for many individuals, since basic support is guaranteed. In my mind, that's a fundamental shift of how our economy currently works. Right now, for better or worse, the need to survive is the motor of much of our economy. Taking that away will have consequences, both good and possibly bad.
Speaking of lazy...this piece is evidence of intellectual laziness (it certainly isn't economic science). The question that ought to be being asked about disincentives to productive behavior is how strong they are AT THE MARGIN. Which takes diligent research to answer, not self-congratulatory blog posts.
Funny how ordinary (non-academics) people recognize laziness as a reality, and are then looked down upon for their astuteness.
Really enjoyed reading this. Gives a whole new perspectiove to the way we/I characterize people, and even myself. Good choice of guests.
"Laziness" tells us which jobs or tasks are crap enough to automate.
Also, we generally don't call workaholics who won't pull their weight at home "lazy." I've definitely known docs who take call to get a reprieve from home responsibilities (I am most definitely not one of those). I think thoughts within their households differ on whether the extra income offsets the burdens.
I get the feeling I am reading an argument for UBI and transfers to the unemployed buried under a rhetorical argument against slandering people with the term "lazy".
I think the term lazy is a lot like, albeit the opposite of, "greedy". Both reflect the vice of taking a useful trait to a harmful extreme. A greedy person takes self interest to the point of self harm or antisocial harm of others. A lazy person takes leisure to the extreme of harming their long term interest, or harming the interests of others they might care for.
One obvious concern with transfers to those not employed is that it incentivizes not getting employed. And why should we care if they get employed? Because employment is a positive sum, win/win activity which produces value for consumers and workers. Both expect and usually gain benefit from the relationship. The consumer gets a fine cup of java in a relaxing environment out of the house. The barista gets $16 an hour and various other benefits. We accomplish more together in a complex network of market activity than we can on our own, and wages is the incentive for us to join the network in a productive way.
If the person instead opts to play video games then the consumer benefit is not created. Total utility is reduced.
I agree that UBI might be a better way of providing a safety net in a modern economy. I seriously doubt it, but like another commenter on this page, I think it would be a great long term experiment somewhere willing to court possible disaster. And by replace, I mean eliminating existing "welfare" programs and transfers, and replacing it with a widespread UBI.
I say this as someone who chose to drop out of a career as a financial executive (I designed novel financial products). Eventually, I just decided with tax rates where they were that I would just retire early (in my forties) and spend time surfing and with my family. No regrets. I don’t really consider myself lazy (ok, I might be a bit lazy). I just chose the trade offs that best met my need. But who did lose out on my admittedly selfish choice were all the millions of consumers who could have benefitted from any creative products which I was capable of creating. Their loss, not mine. Some create coffees. Some new products. A UBI would just have encouraged me to opt out sooner, or to opt out with less personal saving.
My high tax rate directly makes me more "lazy" by discouraging me from taking on more work shifts. I would otherwise work more but there is little incentive knowing that 40-50% of that money will go to the government. I'm sure this will also be my reason for earlier retirement, especially if rates go up even further.
I guess they have never had to rely on people doing work for them, ever.
The difference between a lazy person and a decent person doing the same job is astounding.
"The difference between a lazy person and a decent person doing the same job is astounding."
I'm not sure what the substantive difference is between this statement and "[W]e also collectively pay a price for the bad, inadequate work done by people who hate their jobs and lives."
If you have a task that nobody really _wants_ to do just for its own sake, and you won't (or can't, because the task doesn't produce enough marginal value) pay enough to get people to feel well-remunerated and do it cheerfully, then _yes_, people are going to do it resentfully, and find every opportunity to shirk. That's not "laziness", it's humanity. If washing dishes in the back of a restaurant were great fun, then restaurant owners would be doing it themselves, instead of trying to get some schmoe to do it for $10/hr.
We've structured the world so that people have to choose between miserable jobs, or full-on immiseration -- starving in the streets. Asking people in miserable jobs to pretend to be enthusiastic and grateful about this situation is both absurd and cruel.
Historically there was an element of necessity to this -- we really _weren't_ producing enough stuff that we could set a minimum standard of living that was above abject poverty. But now we definitely are, and our perpetuation of a system where we maintain the possibility of being punished by poverty, as a whip to spur people to work harder at shitty jobs, is _entirely_ a policy choice. We could afford a model where we do a fairly generous UBI to ensure that any worker that feels abused or taken advantage of can tell their boss to shove it and go spend some time on searching for something better, without fearing that they'll end up homeless and hungry, combined with rolling back the minimum wage in favor of a very large negative income tax on low dollars of income. (The point being that as an employer you can make the choice to hire people to do tasks with low productivity, and the pay will look reasonably attractive from their side because of the negative tax. But you'll have to treat them with some level of fairness and dignity, because there will be other low-wage employers out there, and they aren't afraid of starving if they walk.)
Sure, we can call it all kind of things.
In my industry we pay people really well. A lot of people still don't do their job as well as others. Not because of lack of skill, they know how to do it but for some reason they just can't bring themselves to make an effort. Most of them just don't care.
I do think their upbringing is the reason, they don't care about others to any large degree.
I could call them lazy, entitled or idiots. Not sure if it really makes a difference.
So you've never had a lazy coworker who was less productive than the rest of the team? You've only had underperforming team members who weren't treated with enough respect and dignity and that's why they never seemed to do any work?
Yup, lazy people (like myself) get things done efficiently and "right" the first time so they don't need to be done twice. Our bosses love us.
Heh. Have you read Robert Heinlein's "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail"? It's incorporated into Time Enough For Love: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#%22The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail%22
I have read Time Enough For Love several times (before I was 15 because it is truly horrible as an adult). I did not remember that little story. I can quote quite a few of the bits from "The Notebooks." (Everyone should be able to ....butcher a hog, conn a ship.....)
This argument only really makes sense if we think that personal and social incentives toward hard work are aligned.
If we think about contexts where people aren't given individual rewards for work, laziness as a value judgment makes perfect sense. If you go on a long camping trip with your friends, and one of your friends never helps collect firewood/pack up the stuff/etc., calling them lazy and treating that as a value judgment is perfectly reasonable, and saying "they just have different preferences" is unreasonable. In that context, it's clear that work has to get done, that much of that work is unpleasant, and that a willingness to participate in that work is a moral quality that deserves praise.
The work that most of us do now is also important, and done for the good of society. The only reason to think of it as purely a matter of personal preference is if we think that the money we get from working harder is commensurate with the value we create by working. If this isn't true, then people who work hard are carrying people who don't, just as if we were on a camping trip.
The funny thing about this is that if you want more economic redistribution (as I do), you want a world where our personal rewards for working hard are smaller than the benefits to society. You want a world that looks more like the camping trip. And in order for that world to work, we need people to feel proud of hard work.
One possible retort to this is that people's natural preference for creating good stuff is strong enough that our society would produce what it needs without incentives to work hard (either monetary or moral/social). That might be true for creating art, writing novels, or even making google. I doubt that it's true for restocking shelves, data entry, and all of the many difficult, necessary, and unglamorous tasks that keep our society running.
Yeah, but then you get the makers who cheat. If everyone is producing more than they consume, some people are going to grab the extra stuff for themselves. It's the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy was that the rich people took the commons away from the poor people who relied on it. It might work on a camping trip, but that's because there is an enforcement mechanism. If you don't do your bit, you won't get invited on the next trip. In society, the cheaters usually hire lobbyist, fund politicians, set up bogus economics research groups and so on so that everyone has to invite them on the next camping trip and the next.
I loved this. A different lens from which to approach behavior, of others and ourselves. Turns out, the “lazy accuser” in my life is…drum roll…yeah, it’s me.
So, onward and upward. A journey of self-introspection lies ahead but first, I can and I must stop assigning merit to leisure activities. It’s ok to lounge, as long as lounging is providing enjoyment. What a concept.