Most unskilled jobs today are not "make-work" and do need doing.

In India, there's a job creation program that guarantees a paid job to anyone who wants it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar...

Unsurprisingly, most of the job is the "dig a ditch today, fill it in tomorrow" variety.

We could let them build housing like the Chinese do but houses need more than just labor. They need materials. Wasting the materials to build a ghost town can backfire.

Subsidizing salaries for private jobs may backfire through corruption.

So digging the hole and filling it back it is.

If there's so few real jobs in India that that program actually makes sense to have, then maybe UBI does make sense there. But there's plenty of unfilled jobs in the US, so UBI doesn't make sense here.

> there’s plenty of unfilled jobs in the US, so UBI doesn’t make sense here.

The point of UBI is to make it easier to fill productive jobs by (1) reducing the marginal disincentive to work posed by the funding structure of means-tested welfare, and (2) putting a bunch of people back into looking for productive jobs who are currently working in government welfare bureaucracy doing jobs that duplicate functions performed in the tax bureaucracy and/or serve the nonproductive purpose of maximizing the disincentive to additional work by welfare recipients.

The rapidity with which they're being replaced by stupid kiosks and robots in countries with strong minimum wage laws says otherwise.