How will people be compensated relative to their work value?
edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
You're really stupid.
Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.
People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.
The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.
Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.
You wind up in a world where freedom vs slavery is a distinction without a difference.
I’d wager the marginal returns from moving beyond feeding yourself for free to feeding a nation are slim, to none, and very likely negative.
I think it'd be nice to have the option to not work, because then people could take risks and pursue things they otherwise couldn't... I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job. However if we could take a lifestyle hit (but still survive) and I could try out some business ideas or other career options that I've been thinking about maybe society as a whole could be better off.
I can't say I've thought this through entirely, but it's certainly an idea that intrigues me.
"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.
Work is an important value. Whatever economic viability the U.S. has to experiment with weird social ideas, it's because of generations of people who believed in work as a moral imperative.
All art adds to our social wealth?
Like anything else, some art does, lots probably doesn't. And how do we decide what is bringing us value? Which art should be promoted and which is just a scam, a big pile of poop put in a mason jar?
We circle right back to capitalism. Giving the populace a mechanism to vote for what has value and what doesn't. Money. Attention. Time. Esteem. Fame.
Something that adds value. That isn't a commodity. That would be hard to copy.
Innovation's biproduct is profit.
Really, the vast majority of profit is from non-innovative friction.
For instance, in order to fund CalPers, we need a lot of people to do productive work. That's on a multi-decade timer.
We have a couple of problems - a lot of the things we need most (dedicated time from doctors, teachers, etc.) are affected by Baumol's cost disease and in other categories, like housing, we have legally mandated shortages (it's illegal to create enough homes near transit, amenities, and jobs) so we will, by definition, never have enough.