Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:

Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.

> get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization

This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.

You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?

Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.

Some references: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25574/living-wage-vs-minimum-...

user:	malignblade
created:	September 24, 2024
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