The problem I have with your viewpoint is that it's contrary to what we've seen empirically. Sub-cultures where people don't work, but have their basic needs met aren't exactly flourishing. Work doesn't just give people purpose and dignity, it creates essential social structure without which communities dissolve.
I think it's quite possible that we could organize communities around something other than work. Colleges, for example, are a pretty good example. But I think proponents of basic income ignore the vital necessity of having some alternative before pulling the rug out from under people.
I think it's because such subcultures are self-selecting - why would a Wall Street banker (of which most seem to be terribly motivated) become part of such a group?
There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish.
Basic Income needn't provide luxuries- as long as it eliminates the threat of physical harm out of the job market (thus allowing everyone to walk away from any given job at a given rate), it works as designed IMHO.
To add drive to people who aren't self-motivated, there's still societal status and its symbols, some of which will naturally cost more than BI can afford - otherwise they won't be status symbols for long.
> There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish.
Can you provide citations? I've suggested this kind of experiment as a proof-of-concept for BI, but I've never actually heard of it being done except for That One Neighborhood In Montreal or wherever it was.
What I mean to say is that if the need to produce material things vanishes, people don't replace that need by producing art and culture and placing increased emphasis on family, friends and community. By "flourishing," I don't refer to material production, but social prosperity.
Having seen both, a ghetto in a U.S. inner city is objectively much more materially prosperous, partly thanks to government support, than a village in Bangladesh, yet if you look at crime, social cohesion, family cohesion, etc, the latter is more socially prosperous.
What makes a third world village different from a first-world ghetto? It's not resources, the village has less of those. It's not education, the village has less of that. What I see is that the village has social structure. Work creates roles for people, it creates hierarchies of authority, and it binds families and the community together into a common purpose.
I don't work is the only way to create social roles, hierarchy of authority, and common purpose, but I think most proponents of basic income err critically in assuming that those things are unimportant. It's so ingrained in first world culture that all people need are resources and education that people assume that if you give those things to people you will get prosperity.
If you compare an inner city ghetto to a village in Bangladesh though, there are other key differences.
Number one, there's no war on drugs in a Bangladeshi village to disrupt family units and create black market violence. That factor alone causes a huge amount of misery in inner cities in the United States.
Then there's the fact that communities may not be as supportive and tightly knit. This makes things much harder on working parents and their children. People have this image of people in the ghetto sitting on their asses and not working but the truth is there are a lot of people working more than one jobs and being stuck in poverty. Objectively the standard of living for those people may be higher than the Bangladeshi village resident, but the cost is that those folks probably have a harder time raising a family.
Either way I totally agree that basic income cannot ignore the role of the community as well as cultural and social constructs. Not to mention the criminal justice system.
> Having seen both, a ghetto in a U.S. inner city is objectively much more materially prosperous, partly thanks to government support, than a village in Bangladesh, yet if you look at crime, social cohesion, family cohesion, etc, the latter is more socially prosperous.
There is social and family cohesion in the inner city, but it doesn't look like middle class cohesion. Keep in mind that racial and class de-facto segregation is really high in the inner city, police more heavily target your community and are more likely to arrest you, and economic opportunities are limited in a variety of fashions (esp. property and business ownership). Things like gangs and grey market economies are a result of those conditions and they do provide real value for people even if it is associated with cycles of violence and things that are generally bad.
> Work creates roles for people, it creates hierarchies of authority, and it binds families and the community together into a common purpose.
Work does not inherently create hierarchies of authority, there are many models of work and social structure that have different results when it comes to hierarchy. Work also doesn't necessarily create or enhance communities and can sometimes even be deleterious to them.
The picture you seem to be drawing of ghettos doesn't much resemble American ghettos as I know them.
American ghettos are not places where unemployed people have all their needs provided for them and live in carefree leisure. Ghettos are places where society's traditional support structures have failed and, in order to stay afloat, a significant portion of the populace has turned to jobs so heinous and net-negative to society that they would be repellent in any other context. They're some of the first victims of the "bad jobs" that Stross warned in the OP that people would be forced to take in the face of poor employment prospects. Ghettos are a prime example of the harm that comes from our dependence on conditional money to live.
As a counterexample, retirement communities are generally much nicer than ghettos — even though gainful employment in those communities is even lower than in ghettos. This is because the people in retirement communities aren't desperate. They don't have infinite money, but they generally don't need to worry too much about money. So what do these people do when they are relieved of the need to work for a living? Oh, they work on personal projects and put an increased emphasis on family, friends and community.
I do think you're bringing up an important point. Most people haven't considered the social implications well enough, and there is a somewhat unsupported assumption that it would go smoothly. But I don't think ghettos are all the relevant, because financial independence is very much not the big problem there. And I also think you're glossing over the point that the employment crisis Stross mentions in the OP will cause major societal changes whether or not we institute a basic income — I just think the changes will look a lot more like a ghetto and less like a retirement community if we don't have something like a basic income in place.
I think it's quite possible that we could organize communities around something other than work. Colleges, for example, are a pretty good example. But I think proponents of basic income ignore the vital necessity of having some alternative before pulling the rug out from under people.