So why would anybody bother to put themselves through school to become something like a doctor or an engineer to build the robots that do all of the work?
In order to maintain status, people will continue to get well educated and 'contribute to society' in some way rather than simply sit and be mediocre.
Granted, if you have a UBI, lots more people can maintain their status by say.... becoming top ranked at a video game, but even then so long as it doesn't lead to societal collapse... does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation?
I'm willing to allow us to improve slower if it means we grant everyone freedom from worrying where their next meal is coming from.
Yes, when you consider the global problems we have with energy, climate, food supplies, water supplies, and general poverty it's pretty selfish to just stop pushing forward.
A basic income is never going to stop someone passionate enough to be an engineer or a doctor. In fact, it would only help them.
I would also argue that the vast majority of engineers became so because it was a "good job" not because they're fueled by some extraordinary passion.
Which wouldn't be such a barrier to entry if medicine were an undergraduate degree (i.e. an MBBS) as in the rest of the world, instead of a graduate one, and residents and fellows were paid market wages instead of government-depressed ones. Creating skilled and knowledgeable doctors does not require stacking a 4 year degree on top of another 4 year degree--a single 5 or 6 year program should be enough.
In addition, those jobs would still be good jobs on top of the UBI. Depending on how the implementation of robots plays out, they may be the only jobs if you wanted to make more than the living wage.
Some people like helping people, some people like the prestige of being a doctor.
Besides, it's ones family background which predicts ones future career path far more than economic insentives. I would imagine the social strata that is now educated will prefer to have their offspring educated in the future.
Human culture is often a far greater determinant of behaviour than any economic cost-benefit analysis done at an individual level.
I would also point out that in the 17th century there was very little financial insentive to pick up natural sciences and people did just because they could and because they were interested.
I for example would gladly work in my current field (software engineering) even if it did not grant financial benefits because I like it so much.
I think americans are so preoccupied with money because everything is so expensive there. There are far more interesting ways to spend ones life than by surviving (if one goes to a job just to survive - i.e. to get shelter and food, one really is just satisgying ones lower needs on the maslows hierarchy of needs).
There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job, which is a long ways out of reach from where the most advanced countries are (let alone the whole world).
There's actually considerable evidence that even "basic survival being top priority" doesn't reflect actual human behavior in some important ways.
> There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job
Well, that depends what you mean by UBI: a mature UBI that can afford to pay a high standard of living will require phenomenal productivity which requires a level of automation which would go far beyond ubiquitous automation of every mundane job.
OTOH, the basic idea of a universal unconditional grant as a replacement for some subset of the existing social benefit system reducing the administrative costs to benefits ratio of the replaced programs and eliminate the adverse incentives of the means-tested programs replaced obviously doesn't require any additional automation than we have now.