oh, I agree with almost everything in this ^, sorry if I came off as confrontational earlier. Your first post read to me like the typical "there is no injustice because I, a well paid software engineer, is willing to work unlike those lazy poors" which reading this was clearly not your point.

To me, the problem is exactly what you identified, that the value is created by jobs we haven't heard about and poor villagers. And also baristas and musicians who are also routinely underpaid. And that value is mostly exploited by whoever the current elite is (currently shareholders and to a lesser extent, software ppl, and lesser still anyone in 1st world countries etc. etc.)

So I think the only difference is a boring semantic problem :p I was defining 'pursuing dreams' as what it means to me specifically - ie. my dream is to do something cool and respected and get paid well for it, which I think jives with why musicians want to be musicians. Making things nicer for people is a major part of it.

All the baristas I know say they like baristaing, the sucky part is that it's every single day and the managers suck, and you have to deal with some awful customers with a smile and you're never doing anything else. But freed from all of that they like making people nice coffee and feeling good about making things better. I hate my job because I'm fiddling with code that (to my understanding) is of no benefit to anyone and is only sustained by mooching off the government and tricking people into things they don't need. Doesn't hurt that we bought all the competition. Pay is nice though.

I think with something like UBI we will be closer to that. Free from exploitation because if the job conditions suck you can quit. But I really believe that most people really do want to be useful and respected and will continue to make value for the world for the pure joy of it. Anyone who is a teacher right now is intentionally giving up almost all possible earnings for the ability to do something directly useful. WWOOFers volunteer on farms. If farmers were respected people would like doing it more. Lots of people volunteer, edit wikipedia, make and share art, etc.

And, of course, ideally this would include all the people in other countries whose sweatshop labor is funding the world economy. I'm rooting for them too. If we can't solve this is our own country it seems unlikely we can solve it for the whole world though, but no reason not to try. I think both fights can (and kinda must) be happening at the same time.