Hopefully I can intervene a little here - I think the argument he's making is that nothing is stopping someone from, say, receiving UBI -AND- also working on an

Hopefully I can intervene a little here - I think the argument he's making is that nothing is stopping someone from, say, receiving UBI -AND- also working on an organized public-works project. There's a sense that if we have UBI, it'll take a huge number of people out of the workforce, but I think the only real rationale for that is the notion that a number of people hate working enough that the moment they get "sufficient cost-of-living" income they'll quit and veg out. There's a counter-argument that a huge number of people would instead still work really hard, but would pursue different jobs (often jobs that pay terribly right now) if they didn't have to worry about financial security. There's a huge swash of jobs I'm actually personally interested in, in the trades, that I can't rationally touch because it's a massive pay cut - which wouldn't be so bad, except that our society has no safety net, particularly for end-of-life care, so squirreling money away is the only way to get an approximation of one. It's really the unbounded end-of-life/healthcare costs that force me towards a soft income-maximization path. I don't have to be too crazy about it, but if one possible career path (programming) has a reliable guarantee of earning 3-4x another one (construction), I can't reasonably pass that up. I think if UBI dropped in, we'd see a mass exodus from "bs jobs" that provide no value to society, but I think a large number of jobs which do something meaningful would retain a surprisingly high percentage of their employment. There would probably be some major wage adjustments, but they'd draw a surprising number of people from the "now that I don't 'have' to do anything, what do I 'want' to do?" crowd. Doctors, food-industry, construction, mechanics, etc, would all remain surprisingly hirable. Quite a few other things like sales and management would dry up really hard.