This article seems to assume a particular archetype of unemployed person, a sort of romanticized peasant who's good at working with dirt but unsuited to industr

This article seems to assume a particular archetype of unemployed person, a sort of romanticized peasant who's good at working with dirt but unsuited to industry. Most writings about UBI seem to fall into similar traps, where they pick some particular type of people (struggling musicians, say) and design a perfect system for them. But there are lots of different types of people. The system has to work for all of them. That's why you need large-scale studies, to figure out whom a given system works for and whom it doesn't. Nobody can do this in a thought experiment, because nobody can conjure up every type of person and predict how they will interact with the system.