Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150331074345.htm

by AndrewDucker • 11 years ago

9 4 11 years ago

cauterized• 11 years ago

Plus a strong safety net encourages entrepreneurship, since failure doesn't have to mean losing your house, your kids starving on the streets, or going without medical care.

ayuvar• 11 years ago

I liken it to the same concept as a crown corporation - with mincome, you'd see people who would otherwise not be entrepreneurs taking a chance on things that aren't obviously immediately profitable according to traditional MBA-logic but that should exist anyway.

Imagine a diversified economy full of weird Etsy-style craftsmanship businesses, or strange one-offs that are done for the love of the field.

A lot of office and retail jobs would likely be forced to improve as well, once some of the fear of taking the leap to entrepreneurship is removed.

hitlerwasright• 11 years ago

sociology dropped. What about the confounding variables of culture and such that a simple weberian analysis might uncover - ergo, generous welfare in germany may engender different results than generous welfare in, say, scotland.

greggyb• 11 years ago

Sociologists Dr Kjetil van der Wel and Dr Knut Halvorsen examined responses to the statement 'I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money' put to the interviewees for the European Social Survey in 2010.

It seems more accurate to headline that generous welfare benefits are correlated with people's responses to a single survey question.

In economics, the question is almost never what people say, but what they do. It is entirely possible and plausible[0] that the response rate to the survey question and the actual behavior of seeking and achieving employment are not significantly correlated.

[0] Social desirability bias is strong in surveys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias

Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less

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