> A year later, your old boss calls you up and offers you your old job back. Awesome! Only now the salary is $6K, not $23K--the market wage now that everyone gets $20K.
This requires the rather counter-intuitive assumption that providing an additional source of income decreases the market clearing cost of a unit of labor. The basic rules of supply and demand indicate that it would increase the market clearing cost of labor.
> Work 40 hours a week for an extra $6K? No thanks--you're doing okay with your basic living wage and zero effort. Plus, Rob is getting the band back together!
Work other than traditional wage labor ("getting the band back together) isn't zero effort. Its perhaps very-high-risk, but a major focus of BI is to reduce the incentive to engage in low-risk drudgery over higher-risk activities that might have greater personal attraction but less certainty of financial payoff, including artisitic and entrepreneurial activities.
> And so you remain an unemployed entry level employee until you die.
No, if you choose pursuits other than wage labor -- like independent artistry or entrepreneurship -- you aren't any kind of employee. You seem to be stuck in the mode that everyone must be a drone, and is defined by what kind of drone they are, even going so far as to engage in contradictions that are obvious on their face to further that model (the whole "unemployed employee").
This requires the rather counter-intuitive assumption that providing an additional source of income decreases the market clearing cost of a unit of labor. The basic rules of supply and demand indicate that it would increase the market clearing cost of labor.
> Work 40 hours a week for an extra $6K? No thanks--you're doing okay with your basic living wage and zero effort. Plus, Rob is getting the band back together!
Work other than traditional wage labor ("getting the band back together) isn't zero effort. Its perhaps very-high-risk, but a major focus of BI is to reduce the incentive to engage in low-risk drudgery over higher-risk activities that might have greater personal attraction but less certainty of financial payoff, including artisitic and entrepreneurial activities.
> And so you remain an unemployed entry level employee until you die.
No, if you choose pursuits other than wage labor -- like independent artistry or entrepreneurship -- you aren't any kind of employee. You seem to be stuck in the mode that everyone must be a drone, and is defined by what kind of drone they are, even going so far as to engage in contradictions that are obvious on their face to further that model (the whole "unemployed employee").