> by paying people, we could encourage more work that benefits society
Generally, incentives have no effect on creativity (as measured by a panel of judges), or at most, slightly reduce it as they distract the person from the creative work: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-015-9440-5 And obviously fiscal pressure (loans, bankruptcy, etc.) would have a negative impact. But beyond that it's hard to see any correlation between payment and outcome, hence the argument for a basic income.
Payment only makes sense for the non-creative, "manual" aspects of society (which are responsive to incentives). As more of these manual tasks are automated, capitalism makes less and less sense. That's kind of what Marx was getting at when he said capitalism was "self-defeating", although he too got a little sidetracked by power structures. I still have no real evidence that power structures even exist; they're a nice theory but basically unmeasurable. E.g., Trump is president, the effect on society/culture/business/daily life seems basically nil: http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/trump-win-changes-nothing...http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-do-nothing-presidency-2...
If the only way to earn living is to do manual work, creative people will end up manually working. Because they need to eat and their children need to eat. On a large scale, creative industrise happen when money happen to flow that way.
Moreover, while creativity matters in programming, large chunk of it is closer to manual work - you add features, you add tests, you test manually, you document, you debug etc.
Generally, incentives have no effect on creativity (as measured by a panel of judges), or at most, slightly reduce it as they distract the person from the creative work: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-015-9440-5 And obviously fiscal pressure (loans, bankruptcy, etc.) would have a negative impact. But beyond that it's hard to see any correlation between payment and outcome, hence the argument for a basic income.
Payment only makes sense for the non-creative, "manual" aspects of society (which are responsive to incentives). As more of these manual tasks are automated, capitalism makes less and less sense. That's kind of what Marx was getting at when he said capitalism was "self-defeating", although he too got a little sidetracked by power structures. I still have no real evidence that power structures even exist; they're a nice theory but basically unmeasurable. E.g., Trump is president, the effect on society/culture/business/daily life seems basically nil: http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/trump-win-changes-nothing... http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-do-nothing-presidency-2...