It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.
> I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive
Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.
> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions
The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.
I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
> I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.
And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.
