An Overview of the Results on Consumption, Health, and Social Behavior

Abstract

The primary policy issue to which the experiment on graduated work incentives addressed itself is, of course, the effect on willingness to work. There is, however, a second category of issues, somewhat broader and less easily defined but of comparable importance, which concern the general effects of graduated work incentives on the life style of the beneficiaries. These issues can be described, in considerably oversimplified form, as follows: Those who fear the worst of a system of graduated work incentives may hold the hypothesis that a large part of the payments will be wasted by the recipients-either being spent on drugs, drinks, and gambling or being dissipated in increased leisure time unproductively used. Those espousing such an extreme view would say that a program of unconditional cash payments should be avoided, perhaps to protect the potential recipients from their own folly, and certainly to prevent the use of public funds for such purposes. At the other extreme is the view that such a program might well improve the life style of the recipients. The assurance of financial support and the increase in expected income might lead to a modification in attitudes that could, perhaps, be described as the adoption of middle-class values and a reconciliation with the goals of the bulk of society. Such attitude changes might be expected to lead, among other things, to political activity, increased interest in education and quality of neighborhoods, lower crime rates, and reduced neurosis and psychosis. At least two intermediate hypotheses also suggest themselves as possibilities. The first is that a program of graduated work incentives simply does not interfere materially with recipients' life styles, aside from augmenting spending power, and that such a measure neither can nor (perhaps) should be an effective instrument to change people's lives. The second is that a social experiment limited in number of participants and duration, where the range of alternative states is chosen to be rather narrow, is unlikely to show striking effects.