That confuses two points. Employees sell labour hours. At the basic living wage those hours are interchangeable between all people offering them. Even to the extent of age or infirmity. That’s what “unskilled labour” means.

The conversion of those hours into labour services is why the private sector is allowed to profit. If they want “better quality hours” then they have to bid up the price of those hours.

That should be market determined, rather than being administratively set as the gap between unemployment benefit and the minimum wage. You’ll be surprised how well the private sector can use hours once they see people doing the basics of turning up on time and doing something.

When we sentence offenders to “community service” we give them a job as rehabilitation, along with all the support mechanisms to straighten out lives. If we can do that for offenders, we can do that for everybody.

Yet the state pension tells us that isn’t the case. The state pension is a UBI allocated by age rather than physical area. We have millions of data points showing that when people receive sufficient to live on they stop working.

The result is political pressure to remove the state pension or increase the age at which it is received.

If UBI worked as you suggest then the resulting increase in productivity would drive the state pension age down not up.

The evidence is against you. Giving people money reduces productivity and makes it more difficult for firms to get the labour they require, and at huge cost to the state that uses up the finite taxation space there is available.

Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer.

The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.

If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.

You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a guaranteed income.

It’s up to you if you take up the state’s offer or not.

The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything into volunteering. The result is a rise in the “reservation wage gap” - the amount the private sector has to pay to get people to work for them.

The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero - which is more economically efficient.

Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business loans.

Yes, but that's the point.

We're not writing code in a computer language any more, we're writing specs in structured English of sufficient clarity that they can be generated from.

The debugging would be on the specs.