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Long term unemployment in the contemporary USA means

- Enormous stigma

- Being a powerless pawn of Kafkaesque bureaucracy

- Poor nutrition, distracting hunger, nagging uncured illness

- Pressure, stress, fear and suffering

- Low access to anything not in walking distance, or which costs money to get in

- Easy access to distracting pop culture and particularly TV

It's basically unsurprising that a person here and now who's unemployed DOESN'T behave like a person in a society that distributes Basic Income without stigma.

If you want to look at a group which might make a better comparison, look at retirees, or lottery winners.




Fair point, but compare full-time workers to people aged 75+ (who are mostly retired): the latter have 4.5 hours more leisure time per weekday, and 60% of that is spent watching TV. The category most likely to contain creative hobbies ("Other leisure and sports activities, including travel") gets an extra 4 minutes per day. Education time rounds to zero. They do read more, though: about an hour more per day.

Dropping back to ages 65-74 is mostly similar, except they only read half as much.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm

[2] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t03.htm




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