Those pseudo-jobs are a necessary evil in lieu of some sort of UBI imo.
Plus they're useful for sabotaging your competitors' TTM.
Plus they're useful for sabotaging your competitors' TTM.
Even if you oppose consumerism and building stuff or whatnot, that wasted effort could be directed towards making products more sustainable or making better recycling supply chains or building nuclear power plants or whatnot.
If someone can get by on $500/month, and not feel the need to make the effort to live better, it would be a service to all to give that to them.
And on the other hand, a small fallback that makes it easier for individuals going through a rough spot to come back also helps the overall economy and individual businesses.
Finally, if we had a basic program like this started, the number could go up with overall economic productivity. Slow at first, but as the AI/machine economy takes off, especially with practical accessibility to off planet resources, a tiny fraction of the economic output would make everyone rich by today's standards, just at the time when human labor's economic value heads to zero.
There definitely exist some people who do these sort of jobs in a way provides a negative/roadblock only type of contribution. This isn’t to say nobody produced a positive contribution in these jobs. And it isn’t to say these people who produce negative value are, like, bad (everybody needs to eat and they didn’t ask to get born into a capitalist society).
But, there are definitely some folks who we’d be better off paying to not do anything.
An even better idea: simply don't hire such people.
They aren’t dumber than the folks who really want to do engineering and make neat stuff, just differently motivated. And if those two groups get in an office politics battle, the group that isn’t distracted as much by engineering wins, right?
I am also very motivated to convince you to give me, say, 10,000 EUR or USD, will you hand me over the money? ;-)
Seriously: if you see no value in giving me this money, you clearly won't do that. Also: if the person you could hire does not bring more value for the company than he/she costs you, you won't hore the person, no matter if he/she is motivated or not.
Even worse, they may in some way be compensated based on the number of people or teams they manage, in which case the incentives of useless hires and hiring managers are unfortunately all too aligned.
Wiser than the average wisecrack.