I don’t have a very good grasp of economics, but can anyone explain why it makes sense to give someone $1000 to do nothing when you can pay them $1000 to do something productive, like build a road? Ideas like negative income tax, government supplemented minimum wages, or increasing EITC makes more sense to me.
It's not $1000 to do "nothing", it's $1000 so they can do whatever they want. If they're building some useless road (and many of the public works projects of the past whose aim was to provide "full employment", were busy-work projects moving rocks from one pile to another), then they don't have the time/energy to work on something else that they deem more fulfilling or productive.
That is in fact a fundamental distinction between the Universal Basic Income and the Federal Job Guarantee.
One criticism of the UBI is that being unmoored from production makes it extremely inflationary. That requires high levels of tax to destroy enough money to offset the inflation.
Maybe they've just recently managed to make the technology work and they're still operating at the edge of their capabilities. Earth is just the first zoo they've decided to visit before moving on to more important worlds.
