Not true.
I stated to include all flavors of employment, including part-time and not working (but everyone still must pay, I do not assume something for nothing):
But I do have an inconsistency in my thought experiment.
I wrote about individuals making choices to “maximize economic output,” but that was unrealistic.
Some individuals may indeed max economic output: work long hours, pursue the highest compensation and give up time spent on other activities, such as leisure time (including family time) to focus on ”work”.
On the other hand, there will be individuals that forgo the highest compensation to instead pursue other activities which we could bucket as ”leisure”.
In general, there will be a continuum of preferences among individuals that pursue some mix of time spent in work vs leisure that meets each individual’s personal utility - the economic manifestation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
So instead of individuals maximizing some dollar economic output, they seek to maximize some individual-specific personal utility (and choose “eo’s” accordingly).
Sure I can.
It’s a thought experiment.
I am trying to isolate the effects of two different effects on individual decisions:
- Unequal costs, certainty and value per dollar betweenEOh and EOu.
- Health care costs.
The premise of the thought experiment is to isolate (1) from (2).
Now anyone can say, “oh, but the real world is so much more complicated, what about factors A, B, C, … and you can’t isolate A from B and etc …“
Well, no one begins to understand a complex world by considering many factors at once.
No one.
Of course, the thought experiment is some model (abstraction/caricature) of the real world (as all of our discussions here are).
But that doesn’t mean it cannot be instructive.
Einstein and peers found thought experiments useful for understanding complex systems.
Now, we may not have Einstein-level thought experiment here, but we can try.