Here is an interesting op-ed in the New York Times about unemployment insurance. It examines some of the economic assumptions behind the value of unemployment insurance and issues it may create in the labor market. It clearly examines the outcomes that we are worried about – that people on unemployment insurance will not want to work, but it doesn’t examine why we think this way.

This type of underlying social assumption about incentives and work behavior is directly related to much of what we have been doing in class in introduction to sociology. We make assumptions about how policies work, not based on the evidence, but based on our assumptions about what should be. We want hard work to be the solution for all things.