Basic Income and the Video-Game Myth
Basic Income — a regular payment of money for every resident citizen, regardless of their circumstances, sufficient to pay for essentials.
It sounds like a wonderful idea, but not everyone’s convinced. And one of the main objections people raise is the claim that if you pay everyone a Basic Income, millions upon millions of people will decide to give up work entirely and play video games all day instead. They envisage so many people doing this that the economy will be seriously depressed and might even collapse altogether.
But I suggest this claim is not just overblown — it stands in complete contradiction to what we know about human nature, based on a huge amount of available evidence.
(Robert Jameson in Medium Daily Digest)