“So what, you expect me to be ﬁne with people staying at home watching TV while I do all the work?”

This is a deeply rooted attitude and criticism to Basic Income and so we thought we should try to address it.

First of all, we don’t really know at any given time if an act is a contribution to society or not.

What is a contribution to society? Can we really tell? A man working in an arms factory is contributing to society? An artist making strange paintings few people like is contributing? An executive in a transnational corporation?

First, we don’t have a consensual goal for society against which we could measure our advances.

Second, even if we had such a consensual goal, it is not easy at all to assess whether an act leads us to it or not, specially in a complex society like ours.

Third, an act in this context, cannot be judged disregarding the Time dimension: John Doe is indeed doing nothing all day, but his mind is working, maybe it is restructuring itself, maybe it is planting the seeds for a great contribution to society in a few years. We really don’t know what consequences a moment has over time. Notably, from an ecological point of view, there is actually an excess of production in our society, so someone not producing could be contributing more to society than someone producing.

2. When left free, people eventually begin to do something with their lives.

This assertion should be conﬁrmed by scientiﬁc studies, but in my experience and observations, inactivity comes mostly from a reaction to previous ‘bad’ activity. It is a rest and puriﬁcation from it. After a few years, we naturally begin to want to do something with our lives.

If a persons’ motivations for doing something were usually ‘external’, to the person and to the act, it takes a few years to develop, or ﬁnd again, internal motivations for doing something. 3. Contributing to society should be seen as a good in itself for the contributor, the reward is in the act itself.

The exploitation objection’ is based on the premise that contributing to society is a sacriﬁce, but that needs not be the case, specially in a BI society. You might want to contribute because you feel good doing it, not because you have to, or because you’ll get a reward from it.

People usually want to feel they are ‘good’, so if they do a ‘good’ act, they will feel good doing it. Thus if a person is not contributing to society right now, well, too bad for him.

4. Work under BI should be justiﬁed by measuring satisfaction plus payment, minus effort plus sacriﬁce.

Should the satisfaction of doing something good not be enough motivation, let us not forget that under BI, acts are still paid for. So the exploitation objection is mitigated by the fact that the active get paid more than the inactive.

If satisfaction from action plus payment is not enough to compensate an effort, then let it not be done.

What if too many people end up not doing anything all day for too long and BI cannot be maintained? Well that would be a different problem. Perhaps society could address it through all kinds of work incentives and education. But it is my personal belief, that few people enjoy inactivity for a long time, even if they are free to do it. We seem to have a deep need to justify our own existence, at least to ourselves, and that is hard to achieve not doing anything.

Add to all the above the social pressure of having a good answer to the question “so what do you do in life?” and we shan’t worry anymore.