Gwynne Dyer: Universal basic income is not crazy and not going away

[whatthehey]

34. Of course it would for some, assuming you define "idleness"

as "not working to produce anything of commercial value". Where societies have afforded this option to privileged minorities in the past, from the monied gentry in 18-19th Century Britain to the Russian nobility in pre-revolutionary times to the free citizens of Periclean Athens, the people engaged in pohilosophy, natural sciences, intellectual inquiry and yes pure hedonism for the less cerebral. Western science began because "idle" Greeks could draw triangles in sand all day and work out geometry rather than growing crops or selling wine. The theory of evolution was developed because a well to do Victorian Englishman could spend five years on a ship collecting and drawing specimens rather than being the country doctor he originally set out to be. Dostoyevsky, pre banishment, could sit and read and study philosophy because he got money from his father's estates. Crime and Punishment would hardly have been the same were he forced to become a tailor instead. None of the above "worked" in the sense it's used in our labor market, and they and millions of others were supported by unearned income. Many of those millions just sat on their duffs and did bugger all of note, and sure some "worked" by choice, managing commercial interests or launching new businesses.

UBI would create the same here. Some would sit idly, some would have the time and interest to increase the store of knowledge and art for all mankind regardless of profit, and some would be driven to amass more wealth from industriousness. None of these is intrinsically "wrong" except to a neopuritan outlook that changes the k in work to a th. When the world needs less work to provide an overabundance of its needs, which is already true and getting more so daily, you aither need to reduce work or waste it. The latter is simply insane and inhumane.