because the money the're "earning" will flow into the economy anyway (because they'll be buying food, Xbox games, etc...)
This betrays a lack of understanding of how the economy works. Goods come from people producing them. If less people are working, fewer goods are being produced, and thus there are fewer goods to go around. This leads to either inflation, or UBI payouts dropping.
As a simplified model, we can treat the purchase of consumable goods as using up a finite resource, which ultimately relates to human labour. The amount of effort put into creating xbox games is determined by the profitability of selling them, which is determined by the number of people who buy them. At the time when you buy the game, this labour has already been expended, but in the long term your action will cause more investment to be made into the development of video games. This investment will redirect effort - of programmers, designers, marketers, etc - from developing other products, towards making video games. You get less (or poorer quality) of the other thing, because you redirected effort into video games.
The utopian idea is that they'll be inspired to do work to earn beyond UBI because of motivation (maybe it's because they want to help people, maybe it's to buy a fancy car).
Of course, some people will choose to do this. The difficulty comes is how this plays out on a generational level. Western countries broadly have below replacement levels of fertility. Individuals who don't work will have lots of time to raise children, and many of them will be motivated to do so. Their children would be liable to adopt their lifestyle. Thus, the number of people who are not working will grow at an exponential rate.
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This betrays a lack of understanding of how the economy works. Goods come from people producing them. If less people are working, fewer goods are being produced, and thus there are fewer goods to go around. This leads to either inflation, or UBI payouts dropping.
As a simplified model, we can treat the purchase of consumable goods as using up a finite resource, which ultimately relates to human labour. The amount of effort put into creating xbox games is determined by the profitability of selling them, which is determined by the number of people who buy them. At the time when you buy the game, this labour has already been expended, but in the long term your action will cause more investment to be made into the development of video games. This investment will redirect effort - of programmers, designers, marketers, etc - from developing other products, towards making video games. You get less (or poorer quality) of the other thing, because you redirected effort into video games.
Of course, some people will choose to do this. The difficulty comes is how this plays out on a generational level. Western countries broadly have below replacement levels of fertility. Individuals who don't work will have lots of time to raise children, and many of them will be motivated to do so. Their children would be liable to adopt their lifestyle. Thus, the number of people who are not working will grow at an exponential rate.