[dbsmith83]

There are jobs for all the things you mentioned. There are people who are paid to take care of the elderly, to grow healthy food, and there are even jobs for taking care of the environment.

Also, I think you missed the point about novelists. It is more about if you suck at writing novels, sitting around and writing one for yourself isn't very valuable for society. There are some people who have natural talent, but the average Joe sitting around not working and instead writing a novel for fun will likely not be producing much value--at least, not as much as if he were working.

[eggsmediumrare]

Most jobs like this pay minimum wage and are seasonal or part-time. At least with UBI, you can do it on your terms.

How do you know you suck at writing novels until you try?

[dbsmith83]

Sure they might pay low, but you dont get to just decide the value of your work on your own. At least in a market you get paid for your time put in and there is pressure to deliver value vs. you just deciding to get off of your couch once in a while and still getting paid ubi.

For the writers, I didnt say dont try. There is a difference between trying during spare time while off work vs. doing it as a hobby while not working and thus not contributing to society yet taking money from it.

[eggsmediumrare]

I think we just disagree about what value means. I'm of the opinion that you can easily find a job to be paid to create no value, or even destroy value, and you can easily create value that no one is willing to pay a living wage for. I have no trust in the market to determine what is or is not actually good for society... Because the activities I listed in an earlier comment would be paid well in that case.

[dbsmith83]

If they are so valuable then why are they not paid well? Markets are just people deciding what value is with their money. Perhaps you think a service is valuable, and you can pay for it. But if no one else wants it and will not pay for it, then it is by definition not valuable to society.

Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.

[eggsmediumrare]

I think we're starting to see all the various ways the market can completely screw up the relationship between price and value (in my definition, that being how much an activity contributes to the wellbeing of society). See, for example, the lack of pollution pricing or the insane low price of meat. If you view value as something external to "whatever the market decides," the market is a terrible way to create a hierarchy of value. Why do CEOs get paid so much? It's not because they're contributing the most to society.

It should be very obvious that raising children well or taking care of the elderly are hugely valuable activities, yet the market almost completely ignores them.

[dbsmith83]

I agree that pollution pricing is a good idea, and that meat may be over-subsidized. I think those have to do with corruption rather than something intrinsic to markets. Regardless of what system is in place, corruption will always be a problem to reckon with.

And yeah, raising children and taking care of the elderly are certainly important. I know that in tech cities that childcare can be very hard to find and incredibly expensive, so maybe it is becoming more valued? But the key is that the value of the service itself is not based solely on how 'important' it is, but also how many people are performing it and how much is needed (supply&demand). Or maybe a better way to say is that importance is also a function of supply and demand. Take oxygen, for example--super important, but I'm not buying tanks of it.

Software development is pretty hot right now, but if almost everyone in the world were trained to do it, the price of that labor would be quite low. This is another feature of markets--it helps to allocate resources (jobs) to what is needed at the moment. With UBI, I think you would be missing out on that to a large extent.