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An argument for UBI is we are relying less on "people's work" and more on automation, globalization, and a winner-takes-all economy.

If more and more contribution is being done by a select few through advanced technology, what is the shrinking working class to do, learn to code?

What are the top winners of the current economy contributing as they disproportionately absorb more and more wealth? Especially as they dodge all tax.

VAT the companies, use it to fund a UBI. That money is going to immediately flow back into the economy as 60 - 80% live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Actually preliminary studies with UBI seem to show that only a small percentage actually quit working.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

UBI is survival money. It's meant as a social safety net. It's not 'thrive' money.

But people want to thrive. So the theory is that people will continue to want jobs to advance themselves and their families.

Just with UBI the absence of a job is way less brutal.

It's also shrinks the government and allows companies to do layoffs with less brutal consequences to the people being laid off, which allows companies to adjust to economic conditions a lot more easily.

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Also, just like hunter gathering and farming ways of life were made obsolete by technology, this concept of a 'job' will potentially be made obsolete by technology in the future.

As automation and globalization increases and the number of jobs declines exponentially in the US and also around the world...the same value is being generated but the gains are only going to a few people.

Were going to have to figure out what to do with a ton of people who want to work but no jobs are available due to this legacy system.

People want to be useful, and people don't want to do the same thing for the rest of their lives. These are statistically true generalizations.

UBI would allow people to expand their career paths since basic survival would not be on the line. Personally I've got minor health issues from being in front of a computer too much, would absolutely love switching it up with a more physicaly demanding job if I had UBI to make sure a drop in wages wasn't threatening my family's basic survival. This also assumes universal healthcare.

"You cannot have both an opt-in working class and an opt-in nonworking class and have a healthy society."

So I agree, but I do not think it would become a real problem. If it does become a problem we could implement a lottery system that swaps workers out every so often.

We already do. The children of the wealthy and influential can just choose not to work.

"The children of the wealthy and influential" is not an opt-in class though. Any healthy society should be resilient to 1% of its population being able to leave the workforce for their lifetime, the issue posed is what happens if 100% could.

I don't think its a concern. Most people want to work, when that work is a source of satisfaction or pride in their lives.

In line with what you were saying above, I was raised to expect to have multiple career changes in my life. What satisfies us changes as we age, and we may not have the skillset for the dominant, high-earning fields as well

I have no problem with people doing nothing and collecting UBI. There are tons of rich people doing nothing today and they're taking in a lot more money than UBI would provide.

The difference being you can't opt to be wealthy. I lean towards UBI myself but "a few rich in society can do it today" is a supporting argument against class division not for why UBI is a sustainable for society as a whole.

The universal nature of UBI is what makes it appealing. That currently only a privileged few are free from a life of labor is a societal problem that UBI helps address.

It doesn't make sense to worry about a fictional labor shortage when there is an excess of profit being captured by the wealthy. If a labor shortage actually existed that differential wouldn't exist, because it couldn't afford to.

Agree it's what UBI sets to solve and the reason UBI is appealing but neither of those were in question.

You're referring to 2 different "labor shortages" at once there. The proposed labor shortage in the question "what if UBI were available at a life sustaining level" and the labor shortage caused by the current wealthy being able to opt out of labor. That the latter hasn't caused societal labor shortage issues is true but as you say it has been capturing a portion of the profit in a negatively impacting way and it's also on the order of 100x fewer participants than UBI would have. With that in mind it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to ponder what negative impact expanding such a concept 100 fold may have.

I think it's a false assumption to make that there would be devastating, society stopping labor shortages with UBI. I will contend a lot of jobs today are useless (or worse, actually harmful). Many things can definitely be automated as well. I'm sure we can come up with janitorial robots, we just haven't because it's cheaper to exploit people.

The goal of society should be to become post-scarcity. All of our technological progress has led in that direction. We currently just live in a period where the majority of the gains have been captured by very few people and that has allowed them to exploit human labor to enrich themselves vs. building a self-sustainable society. Engineered or not, I think that's the inevitable end game of continuing humanity.

I also think elimination of busywork, automation of work, and similar things that make "We rely on people's work to get materials, build and heat homes, grow and distribute food. Society is built upon contribution." an obsolete statement are definitely the path to sustainable UBI. Generally this falls into the techno-utopianism viewpoint.

Apart from needing those technologies to exist before being able to claim them as reasons there won't be a labor shortage with UBI this is still completely independent of rich people existing today without causing a labor shortage. Perhaps it's a funding source to prove out things like automation by redistributing said wealth but the existence of said wealth in the hands of a few is not prove lack of labor in all is sustainable. To do that you must actually prove the alternative means of production out - regardless if the wealthy exist.

The thing is that the unnecesaary work isn't "busy work" but is work that primarily delivers value to the employer by winning in zero sum competitions. Advertising, legal services, lots of software development, lobbying, plus all those services that enable high productivity for zero sum work.

The problem is that we are dependent on these zero sum games to regulate our economy and as a result these zero sum games end up consuming all our our productivity gains and making up a progressively larger share of the economy.