And you're making the argument that the effort of aspiring novelists is wasted. It's not. Or else we would have no novels.
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.
How do you know you suck at writing novels until you try?
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.
Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.
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.
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.
...have you talked to your sales guys?
They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do.
Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.
In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?
Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.