<i>&#x27;How do you expect less people to hold down &quot;traditional jobs&quot;, yet expect traditional measures of production and output to not decrease?&#x27;</i><p>This is interesting.  I can&#x27;t speak for the parent; I would weakly guess that their response would be that they never specified that they were talking about &quot;traditional measures of production&quot; but were specifically objecting to traditional measures.  If that&#x27;s the case, they should have done so more clearly at the outset.<p>That said, I can see a couple ways that <i>could</i> happen that workers might opt out of traditional jobs without a decrease in &quot;traditional measures of production and output&quot;.  I make no particular claim that any of these is <i>likely</i>.<p>One potential outcome is that increased options for workers leads to increased upwards pressure on wages, leading to increased pressure for automation.  Improvements to automation could mean increases in production in the medium term, at the cost of some production in the short term.<p>Another possibility appears if we consider the following model, which may or may not be related to reality:<p>1 Some workers are disgruntled.<p>2 Disgruntled workers, on average, have a negative marginal productivity.<p>3 Because of economic incentives, disgruntled workers must make themselves indistinguishable from regular workers along axes actually used when making hiring&#x2F;termination decisions.<p>4 Given other opportunities, those most dissatisfied with their current situation will be most likely to leave.<p>In this case it would seem that on providing a basic income, we would see those negative marginal productivity workers leave first, which could mean an immediate <i>gain</i> in productivity.