So what you're saying is that your "unemployed-only" solution will make the words "We'll quit" into a more credible threat, and employers will meet their demands because employers are too stupid to call their bluff?
If a single employee threats to quit, it's not credible, just like if he or she threats to strike. If they many employees threat to quit, and they have the means to support themselves without a job, then the threat is credible.
You do recognize there are benefits to being employed other than the wage, right? Health care, networking, friends, knowledge, experience, etc?
If health care isn't free then it should be at least included in the unemplyment benefits. The other stuff are real benefits, but they aren't necessarily decisive to make the threat empty.
And, as I suggested before, what if the employees are paid well above your "unemployed-only" solution but wish to strike for shorter hours or a safer workplace?
If they are payed well above the unemployment wage then they can afford to strike. And basic income wouldn't make much differnce to them anyway.
You are making up increasingly contrived scenarios.
Nope. We're not talking about signalling "I'm poor" to the cashier at the supermarket. We're talking at the level of policy. You know, Washington D.C. and all that. By the way, maybe you should have looked at a SNAP card before going all scarlet letter on me. Look at this mountain of shame. And here's a film about the people who carry such cards. Maybe the film will help you stop calling them "filthy poor and social parasites." Even Tyler Cowen praises SNAP.
What is your point? Are you going to argue that food stamps are not low-status?
Randomized control trials (here's one for example) indicate that basic income encourages work.
So if you give starving people cash, then maybe they don't starve and improve their condition. How surprising...
Are there any RCTs for your idea? If no, why? As it turns out, the Negative Income Tax RCTs decades ago were probably the closest to your idea, since it tapers off as you earn more (similar to Viliam_Bur's suggestion in this thread). The results inspired mixed reactions, with many critics claiming a drop in labor.
These weren't unemployment benefits, but anyway it's unsurprising that giving away money, in whathever way, reduces incentive to work.
As I've stated before, basic income has its implementation problems. But it's nowhere near the level of complexity of your idea, which you insist is not that complex, because you haven't spent much time actually thinking about it. This brings me to my main complaint against you.
Oh, come on. If the government can collect taxes, then it knows how much each of its citizen makes, with the exception of criminals, who face the risk of legal prosecution.
Yes, unemployment benefits would have implementation costs. Still, these costs are probably less than the costs of the subsidy to Walmart, McDonald's, et al. that basic income would impose on the government.
On topic, because I'm actually the one keeping the level of this discussion high, just like in past encounters. See, when I pointed you to this article last year, I discovered that you didn't actually read it, and you went right back to ridiculing cryonics advocates.
A desperate person forfeiting the last months of her short life by starving herself to death, for a most likely misguided hope in a pseudoscientific and quite prossibly fraudulent procedure is not something I would call ridiculous. "Tragic" seems a much more appropriate description.
Anyway, you are arguing ad hominem.
Just to give you a taste of your own medicine, if I were to lower myself to the this level of discourse I could say that since you buy into cryonics, which is bunk, then your general ability to form rational judgments on any topic is probably deficient, therefore you are probably wrong on basic income. I suppose that this would make sense from a Bayesian point of view. But that would be an ad hominem, hence I'm not going to make that argument.
I understand you may be pressed for time, so instead of inefficiently talking past each other, let's just exchange some links to books of our respective ideas. I'll go first: here's a huge anthology of Basic Income research. Your turn.
Here's another Wikipedia entry. Search "Argument by verbosity".
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.