Do you think people should die if they refuse such offers and better ones aren’t available?
No, but this is a strawman in any case. To a very good approximation, no one dies of hunger in the USA except some anorexics and victims of child abuse. That includes people who refuse such job offers; they do not die.
I would not necessarily be opposed to your proposal if it were fleshed out in a reasonable manner. I am not saying that we cannot do some specific things to make things better. That is different from attempting to replace the whole market system with a different system.
One thing you cannot do, however, is to make sure that only effort is rewarded and that luck is either evenly distributed or distributed only to poor people. Many people currently make efforts to put themselves in a position where they have a better chance of good luck, and if luck will not be rewarded, they will no longer make those efforts, so average utility will be lower.
I think a free market combined with benefits for poor people could go a long way in mitigating the “money-weighted utility” problem. It wouldn’t be neat, but we’re trying to optimize a complex thing. How much happiness should be given for free, and how much should be used as a carrot to make people create more happiness? That’s a question about human nature and there might not be any mathematically clean way to answer it.
No, but this is a strawman in any case. To a very good approximation, no one dies of hunger in the USA except some anorexics and victims of child abuse. That includes people who refuse such job offers; they do not die.
I would not necessarily be opposed to your proposal if it were fleshed out in a reasonable manner. I am not saying that we cannot do some specific things to make things better. That is different from attempting to replace the whole market system with a different system.
One thing you cannot do, however, is to make sure that only effort is rewarded and that luck is either evenly distributed or distributed only to poor people. Many people currently make efforts to put themselves in a position where they have a better chance of good luck, and if luck will not be rewarded, they will no longer make those efforts, so average utility will be lower.
I think a free market combined with benefits for poor people could go a long way in mitigating the “money-weighted utility” problem. It wouldn’t be neat, but we’re trying to optimize a complex thing. How much happiness should be given for free, and how much should be used as a carrot to make people create more happiness? That’s a question about human nature and there might not be any mathematically clean way to answer it.