What are the most powerful lotuses?

UBI is the modern Rorschach test -- everyone sees a different result when they look at the (few and usually flawed) experiments with UBI. I guess I am not different. Anyway, here is an obvious problem I see with the article:

[prime-age men who are not in labor force] report much less paid work than their peers—an average of just 12 minutes per day, nearly six hours a day less than employed men, and almost five hours a day less than employed women, but also close to an hour a day less than unemployed men. Perhaps more surprisingly, their time freed from work is not repurposed into helping out around the home, such as doing housework, cooking, and other tasks of home maintenance. In fact, they devote significantly less time to such home chores than unemployed men—less, too, than women with jobs. NILF men also spend much less time helping to care for other household members than working women—less time, as well, than unemployed men. Apart from work, by far the biggest difference between the daily schedules of NILF men and everyone else comes in what the ATUS calls “socializing, relaxing, and leisure,” a category that encompasses a range of activities, from listening to music to visiting a museum to attending a party. [...] The overwhelming majority of this “leisure” is screen time: television, internet, DVDs, and all the rest. [...] almost half of NILF men reported taking some form of pain medication every day.

The first impression is quite damning: The lazy voluntarily unemployed men don't do any productive work, don't even help at home, spend most of their time looking at screens... and for some weird reason take a lot of pain pills.

Ignoring the last part, it is exactly what the model "job is the source of all virtues" would make you predict. UBI would remove the need to work, then humanity would lose all its virtues, and we would all wirehead. Thank God for bullshit jobs that saved us from the threat of too much free time because of automation!

What about those pain pills, though?

So, here is another explanation that seems to fit the same data, and provides a different picture. Suppose you have a fraction of population that suffers from incurable chronic pain. It probably makes sense if they work less than healthy people. It could even explain why they help less at home. If you think about what such person could do -- lay in their bed, watch TV or listen to radio, talk to someone, take a walk -- depending on what categories are available in the questionnaire, it could fit under "socializing, relaxing, and leisure". It would definitely explain the taking of pain medication every day. And if these people realize they are unable to keep a job, so they stop actively trying to find one... then they get classified as "people who don't have a job and are not even trying to find one", duh.

Hey, I am not trying to say here that everyone who avoids job is actually a disabled person. Healthy lazy bums definitely exist, too. And I have no idea what is the actual proportion of these two groups in population. I just see an obvious alternative explanation that the article completely missed, because it automatically assumed the "job = source of all virtues" model. Makes me wonder what else they missed.

Yet another alternative explanation: Assume there are by nature two kinds of people: lazy and non-lazy. In a society where everyone must have a job or face serious consequences, the non-lazy people will have a job, and the lazy will be jobless. If you mistake correlation for causation, it is easy to conclude that the job makes people non-lazy (rather than the non-laziness making people employed). Essentially, you take a selection of people who are too lazy to get a job even in situation where not having a job seriously reduces the quality of your life, include the observation that they are also lazy in non-job aspects of their lives... and conclude that everyone is like that, only the jobs magically transform us into something better.

EDIT: To make my objection more simple -- It is statistically shown that in USA people without jobs are more likely to be black than people who have jobs. Conclusion: UBI will make you black. Discuss.

The "a UBI would make people spend time in ways that made them feel miserable" argument has always felt a little odd to me. It's essentially claiming that

• People who could get jobs where they feel good
• will either quit their jobs or just not get jobs in the first place
• and feel miserable as a result
• but will nevertheless choose to stay unemployed

But if that's the case, why wouldn't those people just... recognize that they are feeling bad, so get jobs and feel better?

I think there's an implication of something like "they will be so badly addicted to lotuses that they can't get a job despite knowing that the lotuses just make them feel worse", but if their mental health is in that bad of a shape, how likely is it that they could or would get a fulfilling job anyway?

I certainly believe that there exists some percentage of the population for whom this combination of factors holds, but it seems hard to believe that they would be such a significant fraction that their loss of well-being would outweigh the increased well-being that others would get from the UBI.

(Now if the argument was something like "people on an UBI would stop working and be happier as a result, and it's morally wrong for non-working people to be happier when they are just living off the who people do work", that would be a different matter, but that's not the argument being made here.)

Is there evidence that giving people a UBI would actually result in significantly more lotus-consumption activity? My understanding is that giving most people in the US an extra $1000/month, for example, would mostly go toward covering expenses, buying higher quality goods, or working slightly less to spend more time with family. 

With all due respect, I would like to explore more of this article and ask some question:

1, How to define UBI? Is it conditional, age related, monetary linked? 

2,  For clarity purpose, let's consider CCT a form of UBI. Social security is a form of subsidised, conditional UBI, does it doing its purpose?

3, How to define work? Spending entire day scrolling in Facebook, yet with Income , does it consider a form of work? What about spending entire time on the internet as an app developer, does it count as work? If there is income, is it not work? What about without income yet for altruistic purpose like citizen science, citizen politics, citizen movements? 

4, NEET, not in education, employment or training. Another related but distinct term is NINJA, no income, no job, and no assets. According to BLS, anyone that unemployed for more than 12 months are considered out of labour market, as well as the intent of not seeking jobs is out of labour market. Is it a mis-identification that are not well defined? Or it is structural unemployment that preclude a lots of labour force from gaining employement? Or the nature of jobs are evolving into a non-permenant, non-structuralised format that defined as informal sector?

5, What are the consequences of the NEET/NINJA? Is the whole term an outdated work? Let's assume you are an Uber driver, would that be considered as NEET? Let's assume yes, given the fluid nature you can earn exponentially more than "Normal" jobs, wouldn't it be a sign of progressive? 

6, Entrepreneur. A French word. For some means unemployed. Refer to The Social Network where Sean Parker is talking with his date. Should UBI be used to support Entrepreneur and nurture them, enabling them to take riskier move without the worry of falling back? Would this be a better productivity enhancement?

7, In the meantime, each person has their own taste. In economics, it is called Preferences. Whether these preferences would lead to a better outcome or worse is an unknown and debatable issue. What known is the diversity of preferences instead of a one-size-fit-all solution leads to market economy. If there is a demand for something, there creates a supply for it. Do we sufficiently measure the productivity on the demand instead of the supply of it? 

I hope these question leads to more interesting comment on the issue discussed.