i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money.
i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
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.
Are we measuring work by time?
If you code for 100 hours a week, and I code for 40 hours a week, who's working more? We care about the productivity, not the hours worked.