The "dubiously authoritative", as you put it 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work' is far far better than the idealistic "the cultural changes will take care of it in the end". Our cities require a large amount of tedious unfulfilling unfun work to maintain. All the articles on the living wage I've seen either handwave or outright ignore the question of how this work will be performed at the service level comparable to what we have now.
I'm still not settled on whether I think it's a good outcome, but my understanding is that we'd have to pay more to get people to do these jobs and I'm not sure that's altogether a bad thing.
If you've got a tedious job that you need doing, at the moment there are four options:
* Pay enough that someone wants to do it.
* Make the job sufficiently interesting that someone wants to do it.
* Do without.
* Rely on someone needing the money enough that they'll do it anyway.
Basic income removes the last option, adding extra incentive to the others. I've never been in a position where I've been forced to take a job doing something I hate for too little money just to get food on the table, and I'd very much prefer never to be put in that position. I don't want to put other people in that position either.
You are 100% right that the reality is somewhere in between extremes.
However you've fallen into the trap I described - you seem to believe that our cities (I assume you live in the US or EU) need or should be preserved in their current state, and/or that they would be a requisite to such a change.
My gut feel is UBI / end-of-work / etc - involve a tacit understanding that we'd reverse the trend of the past century, and decentralise. I think, but have not thought deeply on the subject, that many of the problems people immediately respond with when first exposed to this (or indeed UBI) are irrelevant in a less urban, less concrete, less centralised society.
Actually, the amount of work required to, e.g. remove waste/provide drinking water & food and provide access to essential services & information is greater in the "less urban, less concrete, less centralized" environment. Someone still has to do this work.
Not to mention that by losing the convenience of highly urbanized environment you force the more productive members of society to waste considerably more time on the things they are un-productive in (e.g. driving 2 hours to a doctor instead of taking a 15-minute detour on the way from work).
Even allowing that it is, the distinction to my mind is that the work is distributed amongst many (in the case of a less urban environment), and the imperative / compensation balance is tilted in that environment more towards the individual, as they have a greater interest in maintaining water and food supplies, handling waste etc.
To suggest that one of the advantages of work is that you can visit a doctor on your way to work ... well, I'm not sure if you're being funny with that one.
A less centralised or urban society doesn't necessarily mean that you're further away from someone with medical skill. You may acquire more skills yourself, people with those skills may also be keen to escape the centre of cities, technologies may provide a mechanism for you to obtain mostly remote access to the relevant knowledge and skills, etc.
Plenty of non-urban citizens of western countries have sufficient and satisfactory access to doctors, for example.
Aside, and I realise this sounds snarky but the intent is not -- would you mind defining (or at least providing some examples of) the 'more productive members of society' in your assertion there? I'm guessing you don't mean the health professionals that they are consulting.
