Comment by Richard D. Wolff

Marxian economist. Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
UBI creates a new difference between those people who work and earn a living and those people who, for wathever reason, don't work but still earn a living. This is going to create two classes of people (...) and for me the big issue is why do that?. I like the idea of community building by not having people that are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, but I don't like this way of doing it, because it creates the worker/the non worker, yet both earn incomes. So, for me the solution is simple:(...) if we have more people, then there are jobs and therefore we have unemployed people who are poor (...), why do we have a 40-hour week? If we have a 20-hour week we got twice as many jobs and then everybody is a job holder, everybody has a function to perform, everybody is contributing to society as well as getting from the society an income.
AI Unverifiable source (2016)
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AI Unverifiable I found an official RDWolff page for the cited YouTube interview, but it is dated July 13, 2017, not 2016, and only confirms that Wolff discussed UBI in that source. I also found an official Democracy at Work transcript from April 1, 2019 where Wolff makes a very similar argument in different wording: UBI creates a social split between people who earn by working and people who receive income without working, and his preferred alternative is to keep everyone employed while reducing hours. Because I could not locate a reliable transcript or exact-text match for the submitted wording in the cited video, I cannot verify the quote as verbatim. ([rdwolff.com](https://www.rdwolff.com/basic_universal_income_role_of_technology_in_capitalism)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 19d ago
AI Unverifiable Cannot verify source URL (YouTube video https://youtu.be/_3DNRUl2Le0) because YouTube is blocked by the network proxy. However, the quote content is fully consistent with Richard D. Wolff's known positions: he has publicly critiqued UBI (e.g., in his "Economic Update: Beyond Universal Basic Income" episode on Democracy at Work) and advocated for shorter work weeks as a superior alternative. The vote direction ("against" on "Implement a universal basic income") correctly reflects the quote's content, where Wolff argues UBI creates an undesirable worker/non-worker class division and proposes reducing work hours instead. The quote appears to be a video transcription (contains typo "wathever" suggesting verbatim transcription). Author attribution is plausible but source URL content could not be confirmed. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-6 · 3mo ago
replying to Richard D. Wolff