The basic income (BI) involves regular and unconditional cash payments to all members of a political community, without the requirement or expectation to work in return. Whereas the BI is increasingly discussed by political parties, organizational practitioners, and in other academic disciplines, the field of industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology has so far remained silent on the concept. In this article, we first explain why there is a growing interest in the BI and outline potential reasons why the BI, despite its topical relevance, has not been discussed by IWO psychologists. Next, to initiate the needed discussion on the BI, we outline the most important background information on the concept, including its definition, history, financial aspects, main criticisms, and potential advantages. We further provide first answers to common questions about the BI from an IWO psychology perspective, such as “(Why) would people still work if they received a BI?” We conclude with a discussion of potential positive and negative consequences of the BI as well implications for future theory development, empirical research, and practical applications.

During the fourth century, the amount of money Athenians got from the polis for volunteering to sit on a jury and for attending the assembly diverged significantly. Jury pay remained at 3 obols a day, despite inflation, while the pay given for a principal (kyria) assembly eventually rose from 1 obol to 9 obols—outpacing inflation and overcompensating most citizens for their time. What demographic reconstruction of the jury can explain why the real value of jury pay never declined to the point that too few Athenians volunteered? Self-reliant citizens (penêtes) must have dominated the jury pool, and penêtes with young adult children would have volunteered most often. Having an additional source of household labour reduced the opportunity cost of jury service for these Athenians and made their participation more resilient in the face of the declining value of pay. Citizens who faced greater opportunity costs probably participated less over time, meaning that fourth-century juries gradually became less diverse. By contrast, the growth in assembly pay can best be understood in terms of the ‘Lycurgan’ agenda of the 330s and the 320s. Greater pay helped to ensure that the assembly's newly expanded meeting place on the Pnyx was filled to capacity with citizens from all over Attica. The result was a massive spectacle that celebrated a threatened democracy and stimulated the polis economy. Since the courts lacked the same capacity for spectacle, there was no political motivation to pay jurors more.

In this address, I distinguish and explore three conceptions of wages. A wage is a reward, given in recognition of the performance of a valued task. It is also an incentive: a way to entice workers to take and keep jobs, and to motivate them to work hard. Finally, a wage is a price of labor, and like all prices, conveys valuable information about relative scarcity. I show that each conception of wages has its own normative logic, or appropriate justification, and these logics can come apart. This explains some of the debate about wages and makes the project of justifying a wage simpliciter difficult. I identify which logic we should choose, since we must choose, and say what this means for how we should think about the justification of pay.

This paper describes the diffusion of computer use among jobs in Britain, and shows that the technology is having notable effects on the labour market. By 2006 three in four jobs entailed job-holders using computers, while for two in four jobs computer use was essential. Computing skills have a significant impact on pay but, in 2006, much of this effect is interactive with what we term ‘influence skills’. The average effect of a unit increase in the Computing Skills index (which ranges from 0 to 4) is to raise pay by an estimated 5.3 per cent and 6.0 per cent for men and women respectively. For men there is an additional 19.2 per cent boost to pay in establishments where at least three quarters of workers are working with computers, compared to establishments where no one uses computers. These effects are greater for those people in jobs with above-average influence skills requirements. Our estimates allow for education, a large number of other generic skills and other conventional controls, which makes them more robust to the critique that they are overestimates because they might suffer from omitted skill bias. IV estimates show only small differences from the OLS estimates. We also find that the direct and interactive effects of computer skills and influence skills have risen over the decade, indicating increased scarcity.