Having said that, I'd start by simply funding as many small, <18 month road projects as I could. That'd suck up a lot of labor, tighten the labor market quickly and easily.
How many devs out there writing framework (or insert your idea of re-inventing the tech wheel again here) of the week at a job only because VCs are willing to burn up their capital for that lottery ticket?
"Useless" is highly subjective.
Consider this simplified case. I hire you to sweep the floors in my apartment, and I pay you by the hour. I have a vacuum cleaner, but I don't offer it to you, because then you'd have done the job much sooner, and would be paid less - and I want to pay you more.
Do you see the absurdity in this arrangement? I hope it's fairly obvious. The moral choice in this case is, of course, to let you use the vacuum cleaner, but pay you the same amount as for manual sweeping (minus any amortization costs for the cleaner). I don't lose anything this way, since I've parted with the same amount of money. You have gained, because you've got the same money for less back-breaking work - and now you can either enjoy some extra rest, or perhaps go clean someone else's house and earn more money.
The difference in amount of work you performed in the first case vs the second case is the "useless work" here - and there's nothing subjective about it.
The difference in amount of money paid for a manual sweep and for vacuuming, if you were paid at the same rate for both, is the welfare, because I didn't have to pay you more than the market price of the hour of your work.
Note, I do not consider the term "welfare" to be in any way negative. I just wish we recognized it for what it is, and consciously designed our economic policies around it, instead of pretending that it's something else - in this case, by forcing people to do useless work for it just to satisfy our sense of "propriety" (that they shouldn't "get it for free").
In a way, this applies to most software work. While each company is just trying to survive, the world is rewriting hundreds of thousands of ERP, CRM, databases, OSes, libraries...
But, uh, seriously, what kind of vacuum is it?
Back on topic I think many people that goes to higher education does not valuate the work of people that clean or do other manual laybour. I have done quite a few different jobs like cleaning, transport and servicing machines and it differs a lot between workplaces how much you feel appreciated. A school for example would not be able to stay open if noone was sweeping the floors every day...
I've got a C3, which I mainly bought to keep the pet hair and allergens under control. My only regret is that I don't vacuum nearly often enough.
I will do some research on dyson though.
(As long as you don't have small carpets, it's so powerful it'll actually lift them up)
I think the difference between job and hobby more lies with enjoyment and something that one would consider doing regardless of paycheck. Housework doesn't often reap a paycheck, but few actually enjoy it. That qualifies as work. Arts and crafts is usually a hobby, but some folks make it into a job with a paycheck. Few adults would look at being a cashier or janitor as a hobby. A small subset can be truly both - programming, for example.
I think the much bigger distinction between job and hobby isn't so much that the job is useless (as most jobs aren't quite so), but the demands it places on your life and family. You can stop your hobby to go to your kid's play, but can't always take off work to do the same. Some jobs give much less control over your lifestyle - like trucking - yet refuses to give back enough benefits to compensate. Fast food, retail, and others have other methods of not giving back. I think these are the jobs that are basically welfare in disguise.
I don't think the distinction is inherent in the job but in the freedom and income that are generally associated with it.
I know a number of people who would be perfectly happy as cashiers if the cashier job had the same flexibility as my programming job. And to harp on UBI again: UBI by giving extra leverage to the employee might actually turn some jobs that are currently low status inflexible drone jobs into something that people will willingly do because they will have more control.
There are plenty of people who have a love hate relationship with their job because of the inflexibility imposed on them by the employer rather than anything that is fundamentally wrong with the core activity.
I don't mean that all employers are evil, they too are constrained by the current reality.
Planting trees might only be worth $5/hour for the local lumber company, but the existence value of a new forest to the population generally might be many times that.
I suspect that the amount of potential work that fits into this category is enormous.
Broadly speaking, though, I agree. This is one other case where we can do better - instead of constructing a "broken window" in the private sector and have the person repair it to keep them busy, directly utilize their labor for a socially productive task that may not be market-efficient.
But I'm not sure that there's enough of that kind of useful work (i.e. the kind that actually makes a difference) to keep everyone busy. It also feels like it's mostly easy to automate.
Perhaps we should not worry about that until all the useful work has in fact been done.
Maybe that's so trivial that it doesn't even matter?
You might say it depends on whether it pays or not... but if there's a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it's just welfare in disguise.