And that's exactly the situation UBI is intended to solve because that's where automation is taking us. In the near future, only the very intelligent or machines will work because the machines will put most people out of work leaving only room for the very skilled.
> The obvious solution would be to not get into this situation in the first place, to heavily invest into education and training.
That is not a solution because it assumes wrongly that everyone is capable of performing knowledge work; they aren't. A very large minority of people simply won't be able to do anything worth paying them for, they won't have the capacity to do anything we can't get machines to do for far cheaper. When the machines take over blue collar work, and they will, the economy will have to change to something like UBI for it to continue working.
- being punctual
- staying healthy
- staying positive/motivated, not making excuses
- presenting and speaking well
- importance of attention to detail and initiative
Anecdotally, I did work as a kid, didn't learn anything useful, did not learn responsibility, a bit of money I didn't really need, and it felt like a waste of time and left a bad taste overall.
I fully believe that in many, possibly most cases, work is beneficial for kids (as long as they're not from poor families in which case there will be too much pressure to overwork, affecting school/homework and taking away whatever little time they have to enjoy childhood).
On the other hand customers may not value the work enough and the job is just not viable, there is no market. Then you have to either bring the costs down by improving efficiency or automating it, or the job has to go away. Not paying a livable wage to the employers is just exploitation, giving benefits to the employers just means subsidizing the business owners and customers.
I am a bit unsure about the scenario when we just let the job go away and have a new unemployed we may have to support with benefits. Wouldn't it have been better to just subsidize the job a bit instead of having to pay for a new unemployed? But that of course creates incentives to underpay employees and take advantage of subsidies. It is probably harder to reason about this case because it is now a dynamic scenario and it is not obvious how things will turn out.
I am still struggling a bit to follow your thought process but I think you may have a point. I will probably have to add something later.
If we are in a situation where a part of the population is plainly unable to perform any work that pays for a living and we are unable to improve their skills, then we are really is some kind of trouble. They would essentially be like handicapped people. In analogy we would have a moral obligation to support them and it seems better to let them do some work not paying for a living and provide benefits on top of that instead of just having them fully on benefits. Kind of contradicting what I wrote above. And we are also back at the point from above of creating incentives to underpay employees.
The obvious solution would be to not get into this situation in the first place, to heavily invest into education and training. But if that is not good enough? How does reality compare to this scenario? What is the outlook? It is also not obvious to me whether a universal basic income or minimum wages and a conventional welfare system would provide better incentives. But I think I now at least understand the argument.