Rather than argue about whether or not we should be able to come up with something, I think the virtuous thing here would be to try and actually come up with something for at least five minutes. (I am proud to call myself a rationalist and have been successfully insultsniped by the implication there is a thing we cannot think about.)
So, I think I can come up with lots of jobs people could be paid to do that wouldn’t be busywork. They wouldn’t be efficient jobs - if it was worth it to pay them to do it, the market would probably already be doing it - but if we have the money to pay them a universal basic income, then we have the money to employ them doing a job which is paid a salary identical to universal basic income. And that might be a legitimately better idea, because it gives them a sense of being Upstanding Hardworking Members Of The Community that is necessary for a lot of people’s self-esteem.
They could work on big public infrastructure projects, they could build monuments, they could build houses, but those things cost money for the bricks involved. Better ideas might be… they could sweep roads and clean public buildings and dig ditches.
But even with that kind of stuff, there’s a limit to how much busywork we can come up with. What I think might work is to give them jobs caring for each other.
My first idea was that caring work is genuinely important work that isn’t busywork, and doesn’t cost money to pay for bricks, and you won’t ever run out of. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to help elderly people get to the shops and back, or help disabled people move around. And if we had a huge army of state-funded carers, we might be able to provide carers not just for elderly or physically disabled people, but for students who want someone to help them get out of bed in the morning, hassled teachers who want a hand carrying piles of books around, dyslexic people who want someone to read aloud to them so they don’t have to read, lonely old people who just want someone to chat to… we might create a society where you request a bit of help, and someone on the work-for-universal-basic-income-program shows up and gives you a bit of help.
But, like, I recognise that not everyone is as Hufflepuff as I am, and some people won’t find carrying an elderly disabled person’s shopping for them meaningful and fulfilling, they’ll find it demeaning.
So then I thought: give them jobs as community-builders. Pay them to run soup kitchens that bring people in their communities together to eat. Pay them to organise quiz nights at the pub and football tournaments on the local green. Pay them to organize town hall meetings. Pay them to run a local chess society. You kill two birds with one stone: you improve their communities, and you give them fulfilling work.
Separately, something else we might consider is a land program.
I have no idea if this has ever been tried, but imagine taking all the rural parts of the country, and also taking all the working class people who want jobs, and dividing up the land among the people. Each of them might get a pretty small plot - like a kilometre squared or something - but it would be theirs. If they want to take pride in something, and do hard work, and feel like they’re contributing something, well, there’s their land. They can build a house on it, they can farm it and sell the goods, they can join together with a bunch of adjacent landowners and try to build a theme park. Most of them will fail, but we don’t care, because the point of the employment wasn’t for them to be successful, it was for them to feel like they do something. Some of them may succeed and be awesome for the economy.
There’s a bunch of obvious issues with this, including the cost of acquiring the land from whoever currently owns it and isn’t using it, and monitoring the environmental impact of whatever they do to the countryside we give them, but you come up with something better.
I think one issue might be that these people don’t just want jobs, they want to feel like the jobs earn them something. They want to feel like because they’re doing a job, they’re better off than a welfare recipient. But while “if we have enough money to pay them universal basic income, we have enough money to pay them a salary equivalent to universal basic income in exchange for busywork employment” is trivially true (since we don’t actually care about whether the job gets done well so we’re not exactly going to pay for much oversight), “if we have enough money to pay them universal basic income, we have enough money to pay the people who do jobs slightly more universal basic income than the people who don’t” might not be. And I’m not OK with forcing all UBI recipients to do the busywork - some of them won’t be capable of doing the busywork. A lot of people who end up unemployed are unemployed because they can’t work, whether because of disability or whatever else.
I don’t know if they would be satisfied with jobs that pay a salary exactly equivalent to what they’d be getting if they were on UBI. I think it might plausibly be worth paying them a little extra to do the job, even though we don’t actually want the job done and this is a giant waste of money, because… it’s not a waste of money to give people a sense that they’re doing something fulfilling, any more than it’s a waste of money to provide them with healthcare or education or the UBI we were planning on offering them anyway. They’re human beings, they have needs.
