Universal basic income (UBI) has supporters across the political spectrum. The idea is that if every citizen received a payment from the state to cover their living costs, it this will allow them the freedom to live as they choose.
But voters who turned down a UBI pilot in a recent referendum in the German city of Hamburg apparently found something to dislike. A frequent argument against UBI is that recipients will decide to work less. This in turn will make labour (and consequently labour-intensive products) more expensive.
Indeed, a recent study on a UBI experiment has found that recipients of an unconditional monthly transfer of US$1,000 (£760) were significantly less likely to work. And if they did work, they put in fewer hours than a control group who received only US$50 per month.
This is probably as good a place as any to ask a question I’ve been mulling around recently. One of my dad’s friends told him that when they were on an Indian reservation, the casinos gave a stipend to everyone on the reservation and because they had this stipend, a lot of the people on the reservation decided to work less and instead just get drunk or do drugs or beat their wives or whatever.
My thought on this is that there are so many problems caused by poverty that it’s possible that without the stipend from the casino, these folks would be even worse off. And there may not be good jobs in their area. And my dad said, well why don’t they drive to somewhere that has jobs? Like that is something anybody would want to do if they didn’t need to get the money.
So I guess my question is, are there any people who’ve done research on stipends like this that already exists in the real world and any data specifically on Indian reservations would be really interesting to me?