The death of wages is sin

Early (2013) argument against abolishing the minimum wage. Scott grants that minimum wage cuts the bottom out of the labor market, but argues that as technology advances more people's labor falls below a living wage, so abolition would produce masses working 20-hour days at $3/hour -- a 'stable disaster' nobody is incentivized to fix -- whereas mass unemployment-on-welfare is more likely to push society toward a Basic Income Guarantee (a better end state). So job-killing labor regulations may be good precisely because 'too many unemployed on welfare' is a problem society will try to solve, while 'too many miserably employed' festers. Ties to his technological-unemployment and Basic Income themes.

Quality 64 · Strong. A thoughtful early essay with a genuine non-obvious argument (the stable-disaster-vs-solvable-problem framing; minimum wage as a forcing function toward UBI), but somewhat speculative and brief. Strong.

Claude’s paradigm shift 45 · Moderate. Moderate. The 'better an unemployment problem that forces a solution than stable miserable underemployment' framing is a fresh angle for 2013.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A thoughtful early minimum-wage-as-forcing-function-toward-UBI argument; a non-obvious idea engaging economic policy at the discourse level, with no material-world reach → RWI 2.