I hope you were being sarcastic... but in case you weren't, why would we ever create meaningless work instead of just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution than "put everyone to work digging holes and filling them in again".
OP likely was sarcastic, and I agree with you that basic income appears to provide a better solution. That said, they're also extrapolating from existing trends. An inordinate amount of office work today (including a lot of software development) exists solely to keep people busy.
While that might sound absurd, consider the following:
* Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale.
* Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process.
* Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count.
* Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person.
* Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.
But the cynicism is well-founded. We might create meaningless work because it would protect the income of the richest (the most politically influential). There is a strong historical precedence for this. It's socially accepted to some degree, due to our widespread belief in the cargo cult of "jobs".
>>just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution
Because recent history suggests, when offered money/stuff/income gurantee for free:
a. In the eyes of the individual receiving money, the value, importance and the perceived hard work that had to be done to earn it, as time passes, tends to zero.
b. A vast majority of people tend just take the money and chill doing nothing, while wanting others to work and make more free stuff/money for them.
c. Because a few people tend to do nothing and keep the status quo going, other people who like to break the norm and make value/money are immediately perceived as heretics who break the 'equal misery for all' norm and are perceived as evil.
d. Brilliant, hard working and creative people like to work with people of their own kind and generally go and live at places where they can find them. And such places always exist.
e. 'Right to free stuff' generally becomes the norm after a while and people who the real work are expected to make over the skies sacrifices and offer bulk of what they do 'for greater good of society'.
f. Equality for all in general tends toward, equal misery for all. Over big periods of time.
Aside from being generally inaccurate, your points completely ignore the fact that we are talking about the future, not the present. Specifically, we are talking about a future in which there is simply no useful "work" for most people to do.
Could you be a little more specific? What "recent history" are you talking about? As far as I am aware some basic income experiments proved to be successful. See Mincome for example.
My point was that employment is not something to be overly focused on. The idea of creating millions of jobs by outlawing the combine is absurd to most people, as should be the idea of ever trying to "create jobs" via policy.
In a dynamic economy there will always be lots of demand for labor. At the margins, some labor is priced very low, which is a separate social issue for which I favor some kind of welfare system.
We should be wary of the idea that anyone "deserves" a job or a particular wage, since the next thing we know we are all being required to pay for something we don't want or need. Imagine how much a loaf of bread would cost if we outlawed the combine and required all the workers to be paid minimum wage.
I strongly support a social welfare system to help people adapt to changing economic conditions, but in my opinion it does not make sense to try to pretend that the economy is something it is not. Just because we may nostalgically want manual wheat harvesters working on honest day for an honest wage, someone will come along and invent a combine that drastically increases society's productivity because it frees up that labor for some more productive purpose, benefitting us all.
Some of us in the course of our careers will be forced to find another line of work b/c someone invents a "combine" for our industry. There is nothing noble about holding a job that exists only because some politician outlawed that combine.
Fearmongering about massive economic shifts is particularly silly b/c never before in history has it been so easy to learn new skills, and never before have there been so many low cost ways to obtain education.
