Modern agriculture is a highly skilled job done with millions of dollars of capital equipment. Unskilled laborers are more hindrance than help, and will be sent off to the "back 40" to indulge in mindless busywork.Subsistence farming that's augmented to produce a little surplus can be an only somewhat skilled job that can be done by everyone with relatively little capital. Pre-potato famine Irish peasants and many pastoral peoples throughout history demonstrated that subsistence farming can be done for basically nothing.
Unskilled laborers are more hindrance than help, and will be sent off to the "back 40" to indulge in mindless busywork.
If granted land, such unskilled laborers could probably satisfy most of their needs. The Pareto principle would rear it's ugly head again, and the top 20% of such farmers would out-produce and could be paid to "redistribute" food.
From the article: From some psychologists’ points of view, one of the worst things you can do to someone who is suffering from addiction or loss of hope is to give them no-strings-attached money, when what they really need is regularity and the responsibility that comes from having a purpose, even if its simply a job or a station.
Another thing that the an early 1800's Irish model might indicate, is that such a model might have serious problems. There is a far cry between the culture of German expatriate famers or the self-reliant farmer of colonial New England on the one hand and the early 1800's Irish peasant from the same time. Huge social problems accompanied the potato famine Irish diaspora. Up to and including unimaginable squalor, neighborhoods where sewage and garbage sat stagnant and out in the open, where police were afraid to travel in groups of less than 6, and the rule of law was abridged by shadow criminal/terrorist governments that could even conduct their own trials and executions.
From the article: This is not the kind of thing you can catch with a UBI pilot, but it is the kind of thing that you can answer by asking a more obvious question: Are wealth and poverty inter-generational? Of course they can be. As a society, we should be careful to not put a system in place that accidentally entrenches poverty when the initial goal was to alleviate it. A child growing up in a Basic Job household almost certainly has a better shot at life than a child growing up in a UBI household, with parent(s) who might have never worked.
The article might be putting the cart before the horse. People who have been given the right human capital through their culture can pull themselves up in a few generations. (This is the case for Chinese immigrants all over the world throughout history.) People who do not have that human capital must then gain it through a process of cultural transmission or assimilation. This assimilation does not have to be complete, and the group can still retain their cultural heritage and distinctiveness. Again, the story of the Irish diaspora is a good model for this. The power of culture is tremendous, and the cultural transformation will not be easy.