What do prime-age ‘NILF’ men do all day? A cautionary on universal basic income

What do prime-age ‘NILF’ men do all day? Nicholas Eberstadt, Evan Abramsky. AEI, Feb 8 2021. https://www.aei.org/articles/what-do-prime-age-nilf-men-do-all-day

To date, most of the debate about [the Universal Basic Income] has centered on its affordability—i.e., its staggering expense. But a scarcely less important question concerns the implications of such largesse for the recipients themselves and civil society. What would a guaranteed income mean for the quality of citizenship in our country, given that a UBI would allow some—perhaps many—adult beneficiaries to opt for a life that does not include gainful employment or other comparable work?

As it happens, an experiment of sorts is already underway to help us answer this very question. Thanks to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have detailed, self-reported information each year on how roughly 10,000 adult respondents spend their days—from the moment they wake until they sleep.1 These surveyed Americans include prime-age men who are not in labor force (or “NILF” to social scientists), ordinarily in their peak employment years, who are neither working nor looking for work. By examining the self-reported patterns of daily life of these grown men who do not have and are not seeking jobs, we may gain insights into the work-free existence that some UBI advocates hold to be a positive end in its own right.

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The portrait of daily life that emerges from time-use surveys for grown men who are more or less entirely disconnected from the world of work is sobering. So far as can be divined statistically, their independence from obligations of the workforce does not translate into any obvious enhancement in their own quality of life or improvement in the well-being of others.

To go by the information they themselves report, quite the contrary seems to be true. Though they have nothing but time on their hands, they are not terribly involved in care for their home or for others in it. They are increasingly disinclined to embark on activities that take them outside the house. The central focus of their waking day is the television or computer scree, to which they commit as much time as many men and women devote to a full-time job. So far as we can tell, moreover, screen time is sucking up a still-increasing portion of their waking hours.

There would seem to be no shortage of anomie, alienation, or even despair in the daily lives of men entirely free from work in America today. Why, then, would we not expect a UBI—which would surely result in a detachment of more men from paid employment—to result in even more of the same?

Arguments can be made, of course, that UBI would attract a different sort of “unworking” man from those who predominate the prime-age male NEET population today. But the patterns we have presented on the daily routines of existing work-free men should make proponents of the UBI think long and hard. Instead of producing new community activists, composers, and philosophers, more paid worklessness in America might only further deplete our nation’s social capital at a time when good citizenship is already in painfully short supply.