The meagerness of the payments is related to attitudes toward production. If production is all-important, then there should be no source of income that is a close substitute. People should be required to work and produce—or else. And, in fact, nothing has so haunted the discussion of social security legislation as the specter of the worker who lives amiably off his unemployment compensation check and contributes nothing to society in return. So payments have been kept at levels relevant to survival rather than to comfort.
