Jared Bernstein

It's not free.

It's not like Medicaid, which is kind of free health care.

But that premium is going to be considerably lower than what you're paying to the private sector.

Well, first of all, the way Senator Sanders talks about it is he wants people to work eight hours less per week but not take a cut in pay.

And that strikes me as unrealistic.

I don't see how that works.

I think that leads to lots of unintended consequences that would be detrimental to workers.

If you wanted to have the option of a four-day week, and people could still be considered working full-time and get those same sorts of benefits, that's a conversation worth having.

But output would go down, and so we'd have less growth, presumably.

And that's kind of a trade-off.

It's interesting because for economists, a lot of time, social welfare, well-being is too easily analogized to GDP.

But if I told you we can have less GDP, but we can work less hard, you might say Europe.

Right.

We drove right past them in our GDP, but when it comes to if you actually look at measures of happiness, they actually kick our butts in a lot of ways, especially around this issue of work.

So the problem I have with the conversation is when it sounds like there's no trade-off.

If you accept that there's a growth trade-off, but maybe you improve social welfare –

Fine.

I'd be willing to entertain that idea.

It's not something I think about a lot, though, these days, and it's not even really on my list of policy ideas.

Why?