Economics or mainstream journalism do not allow the poor to rest.

Economist Vladimír Baláž wrote a commentary for Denník N in which he exploits a recent study on the effects of unconditional basic income to demonize rest and (perhaps unintentionally) also poverty. His commentary suggests that the only purpose of human life is endless self-optimization and work. If public policies do not achieve this, they are bad and should not be implemented. The cited study, while not using Baláž's dismissive language, also ignores a blind spot in the form of limiting the sample to poor households. This significantly distorts the conclusions of the experiment and reveals a deeper lack of imagination about what public policies and benefits could achieve: a fundamental change in societal rules, not just mitigation of capitalism's negative impacts.

Lines from Capital testify that I am not a critical fan of unconditional basic income (also referred to as UBI). Vladimír Baláž's commentary in Denník N about basic income was such a masterclass in framing and manipulating science for ideological conclusions that I must defend UBI. Similarly, the cited study on the potential effects of UBI on employment and other aspects of labor market behavior did not escape certain issues.

The Poor Do Not Deserve Rest

Economist Baláž begins his text by setting the goals that basic income should achieve to be considered a legitimate policy: it should lead people to self-development, better education, and ultimately better employment. And that the invested money from taxes should eventually return. Social policy must thus be “effective,” bring “return on investment,” and “value for money.”

Knowing why the state introduces specific policies—and striving to evaluate them—is, of course, not in vain. However, the author frames the debate on UBI within narrow limits of measurable goals, which ultimately are only fiscal. For individuals, basic income is supposed to provide space for—excuse me for this inhumane economic jargon—investments in human capital, so that they eventually find a higher-quality and better-paid job. For the state, the main metric (besides the overall impact on the population) should be the return on public resources (higher tax revenues from better-paid work).

For Baláž, a person—or, better, homo oeconomicus—is just a machine that maximizes lifetime income and “happiness” (which most economists can do nothing else but measure with money). When a state benefit or other public policy does not help an individual in this life mission, it is not important.

However, this is just an assumption that Mr. Baláž presents as self-evident (or generally accepted as the goal of public policies in general or UBI specifically). It is an unfounded starting point for debate, which does not even align with the study he comments on. The authors of the study begin their text by describing UBI as a tool for “alleviating poverty.” Its implementation can, of course, influence how much and how people work. The impact of public policies on employment is important for political debate but also for the possible technocratic setting of basic income, which is why the study examines it.

The Poor Do Not Deserve Rest

Those who defend unconditional basic income do so for various reasons. Space for self-development or education is just one of the possible effects. Others are motivated by protection against automation of work, or even contrary to Baláž’s goals: to free humanity from the necessity to work. Finally, there are also arguments related to human rights and dignity—everyone should have their basic needs covered without having to prove their worth through paid employment. Reducing UBI’s goals to self-development and better employment serves only the author’s ideological aims.

In his often openly contemptuous critique of the idea of introducing basic income (“why bother,” “taxing disgusting rich people,” “it will end as always,” “everyone likes to distribute money they didn’t earn”), he overlooks the fundamental problem of his critique—and this is also a problem of the study as such, which at least does not despise the people involved in the experiment: only low-income residents, at the level of the federal poverty line in the United States, participated. For an individual, this is an annual income of 15,000 to 30,000 dollars per year (13,000 to 26,000 euros), and in the study, the median household income was up to 30,000 dollars. The median household income in the USA at that time was almost 70,000 dollars (the study uses the 2019 thresholds).

Households at this income level are, in the American context, simply poor. Up to 40% of their income is spent on housing—and even then, more than 30% of participants in the are in temporary accommodation or temporarily with family. Another 30% of their income goes to transportation and food, 10% to healthcare. About 15% of people in this income group do not have health insurance. And even if they do, co-payments for private health insurance (which about 30% of households in this group have) range in hundreds to thousands of dollars per examination or procedure. Ten percent of households have some debt related to healthcare. About 17% of participants have two jobs.

It is therefore not surprising that the result of the study, during which they received a thousand dollars monthly—i.e., 50–100% more than their usual monthly income—is that people worked a little less and spent most of the money on basic expenses like food, energy, or (daringly!) recreation. It’s simply a matter of priorities, the old good Maslow. If you have been living on the edge of poverty for years, one hospitalization can mean losing your home, working in precarious jobs, your first reaction to financial support will not be to enroll in university. You want to rest.

Baláž presents these results as absolutely devastating for the concept of UBI. Yet, participants who received nearly twice as much money as they earned in employment, on average, reduced their working hours by only one to two hours per week (!). The study itself states that since basic income is, by definition, unconditional, people are not afraid to work because they will not lose the benefit (unlike most state benefits, which people lose once they reach a certain income threshold), so they evaluate it as a better public policy compared to other conditional benefits. However, this is not reflected in the Denník N commentary.

Basic Income Is Not Just for the Poor

Even the study itself did not escape problems. The main one is the one that blinds even Vladimír Baláž: limiting the study to poor households. By definition, unconditional basic income is meant to be an income for everyone—poor and rich alike. Limiting the study to the poor will never allow us to measure the potential effect of UBI on society as a whole. As I mentioned earlier—decisions of poor households will be fundamentally different from those of middle- or upper-class households. Economics calls this marginal propensity to consume—the more wealthy you are, the smaller the share of your income you spend on regular consumption (even lobsters can be overdone). Every additional euro will increasingly go into savings, investments, education, or experiences.

Unfortunately, the authors of the study do not comment on this in their text. Since they defined UBI as a tool for “alleviating poverty,” their sample consists of the poor. Interpretations of the results thus do not address the influence of poverty on decision-making, nor do they suggest expanding the study to a cross-section of the entire population as a potential further area of research.

They are not alone. Most studies attempting to estimate the impact of basic income on human behavior only examine poor households. This is evident in the literature review cited by the study, and I encountered the same issue myself twelve years ago when I wrote my thesis on the impact of UBI on entrepreneurship. I estimated the effect of UBI from the effects of lottery winnings and transition to retirement (which is a certain form of unconditional basic income, with the exception of age).

No Imagination

In both cases—in the commentary on Denník N and in the study itself—there is a huge inability to imagine anything other than today’s world. A world where, in principle, everyone is the architect of their own happiness, and the state exists only to provide the necessary minimum protection against absolute poverty. Where even state policies are subject to capitalist rules of financial return and efficiency. And where rest and leisure are sins, moral wrongs. Work elevates, or so it seems. Or is it just that our work creates nobility?

Also, because of the stigma that state financial benefits carry (supposedly only for the poor on the brink of homelessness and to be measured intensively to see if they “deter from work”), my conclusion from the previous article about basic income—that freeing people from the need to work themselves to death—can be better approached from the “supply” side: by offering a wide range of quality and free or heavily subsidized public services (including not only healthcare and education but also public transport, cultural, artistic, and sports institutions, schools, clubs and events, libraries, public spaces, social services, and housing). The more areas of human life we free from the cruel rules of the market, the greater the freedom from money and work we grant to society.

Then basic income can come.

The author is an economist and data analyst

The text was created with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, with representation in the Czech Republic. The publisher is fully responsible for the content; the views expressed in the text do not necessarily represent the foundation’s position.