"Advanced economies must still make things, but there's no rule that says that those things have to be made by people." There is indeed such a rule, although p

"Advanced economies must still make things, but there's no rule that says that those things have to be made by people." There is indeed such a rule, although perhaps it is currently unnamed or not elucidated clearly/consistently. The economy is made up of people and those people come from families and those people and their families are at different levels of maturity and capability. You don't take a 5yo child to an R-rated movie. You don't take a 10yo out drinking. Similarly: You do not take an unskilled J6P from a broken, or barely functional family background and just slot them into a STEM fast track and expect a robotics programmer to pop out the other side - even if it's all subsidized and paid for. You do not take a family/clan/social group right out of (relative) poverty and unsophistication and plop them right into sunnyvale and instruct them all to go get technical jobs and start living like good upper middle class folks. Running an economy that has people in it (the only kind I know of) without ladder rungs on the bottom is as silly as running a grade school with only 5th and 6th grade. No amount of subsidies or social welfare or coaching or lunch programs are going to let you slot a 6yo into 5th grade. In the same way, we have people and families and groups in any society that just aren't ready to walk into the googleplex and start coding. They aren't ready socially, they aren't ready economically and they aren't ready intellectually - and I mean this on a multi-generational scale. They need more than one lifetime to make this leap and the way they do that is within an economy that has decent, meaningful work for everyone. If you take those bottom rungs away you should absolutely expect the same kind of chaos and dysfunction as you would find in an elementary school with only the 5th and 6th grade.