I dunno... I think, UBI may actuall ydrive change in those very awful professions where they become more attractive either through quality of life improvements or through the pay rise. Otherwise, yep, I think having people not to go to a soul crushing job because they are secure is a better thing than grinding lots of them down generation over generation.
If you want to help people, improve minimum wage
In other words, not implementing their UBI version is simply a way to punish unemployed people for not having a job. You can still argue that unemployed people should be unhappy, but you no longer have any basis for saying that unhappines will make them more likely to get a job.
Really this is just basic economics though. Money has decreasing marginal utility. The first stack of cash you get pays rent, then food, then later on luxuries. For low income workers, the opportunity cost of not working is not being able to afford basic things. If that’s covered, there’s no reason to do a crappy job for low pay. You don’t even need to assume laziness. If cashiers now have their basic needs covered and want to go invest their time into improving their education, then the cost of cashiers goes up. If the cost of cashiers goes up, the cost of food goes up. If the cost of food goes up, the original UBI is now too low, so the cashiers need to stop pursuing education and get some money again. If an equilibrium exists, it’s going to be at the point where poor people need to work, because somebody needs to clean the toilets.
No, it didn't make them significantly lazier short term.
Like, just to push a point, with medical care, the prices are so absurdly high that a poor person with UBI who had to pay a large medical bill would effectively just lose their UBI to medical debt payments and interest. And now they’re back where they began. It’s an entirely different problem.
We NEED low skilled labor. Bioshock proved this years ago.
Would we stop importing this labor from other (poorer) countries? I imagine only people with a SSN would get the UBI benefits. Immigrants would still come here to do low-skilled jobs as they would be ineligible for UBI, no?
This wouldn’t evade the problem of increasing the cost of low skill labor and thus increasing the cost of goods.
To your point, it would force the poor without UBI into even harder poverty.
People like to point out that techies would feel more comfortable building start ups, and that’s probably true. But for people with low skills and low opportunity costs to doing nothing (of which there are many more people), I don’t see a reason why they would work relatively shitty jobs for low income. Who is going to work minimum wage to be a janitor to get basically no substantial benefit. Maybe you think people deserve better wages then- but then uh oh, it’s even harder to justify not doing things in China wherever possible.
UBI benefits society when it’s given to a person with a high ability to to positively impact society (let’s say skilled workers and parents). And that’s before considering any effect on prices or whatever.