[mrob]

Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person.

There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.

Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.

This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?

[neilwilson]

"and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. "

The trouble with that is that there is a fallacy of composition there. The only thing you can have in that system is more money. You can't have more stuff because by definition there is no more stuff being added to the pubic value pool.

And if you have more money, but the same amount of stuff, then all that happens is prices go up. Unless you believe more people than now value money for its own sake.

Trying to hide a transfer using a money illusion only works for so long. Then people work out they are being fiddled and have the system shut down politically. Which is historically what has happened in every single case it has been tried.

Alms to the poor is resented not just by those forced to provide the alms but by the poor themselves who resent being patronised and seen as useless.

Such systems are generally put forward by those who believe they can value signal to their peers by being the ones handling out the alms.