If, say, 10% of people opt to participate in "wasted-work", then each will receive 10x the benefit they would get from UBI, meaning that would be able to afford to save up money, or work part-time and still have sufficient money to support themselves while they pursue the "creation of value in ways that are currently economically infeasible".
UBI sounds great, but on a dollar-for-dollar basis it just seems worse than this because the level of compensation cannot be as high.
The notion of creating a market pressure on minimum wage employers is the only redeeming aspect, but gets there in the most destructive possible fashion I can imagine.
Rating: 1/10, would not recommend.
To be clear, though, these are all attributes of the current system. The potential isn't destroyed, it just requires a rational examination of the tradeoffs. And this is assuming that the minimum wage offered here would be far inferior to what someone would get through UBI -- a UBI that amounts to a baseline income of $10,000 a year, for example, is unlikely to inspire hoards of people to become artists or to take classes; they'll likely have to take minimum wage jobs to make up for the price increases that will be associated with the UBI.
Similarly, if the wasted-wage salary level is set to something higher; like if working a 20 hour week would be sufficient to support a family, then I feel like it would provide the benefits that you associate with UBI.
In my mind this is more a question of how much benefit could be provided given that both programs would (theoretically) receive the same funding. Given that most people would not be participating in the "wasted-wage" program, coupled with the reduction in overhead for preventing personal-identity-based fraud, I think bang for the buck you could fund a much higher effective part-time salary with "wasted-wage" instead of UBI.
Both of these are, obviously, lost in a presence-based minimum wage, which also abandons adds additional administrative overhead compared to UBI. AFAICT, this idea is strictly worse in terms of benefit and implementation cost.
The claim that this adds administrative overhead and increases implementation cost and decreases benefit in particular I think is incorrect.
Since most people will not participate in the "wasted-work" program (I need a pithy name for this scheme), the benefit per participant can be scaled up considerably from what UBI could provide on an individual basis.
Administratively I think it's probably close to a wash -- UBI has the administrative difficulty of preventing or detecting fraud (duplicate identities in particular), "wasted-work" has the administrative overhead of employing reliable "doormen" for the centers, and the real estate costs (and maintenance, etc.) of the centers, not to mention any administrative costs associated with attempts to fix the problems I highlighted around "commuting costs".
Both programs have the problem of setting the appropriate level of compensation and updating it to reflect changes in cost of living, but as I mentioned, "wasted-work" can be more sensitive to regional variations in the cost of living than UBI can (without a hugely increased administrative overhead).
Addressing all the addressable avenues for abuse is also going to be a grim looking situation where you're going to be policing people sitting there to make sure they're not sending e-mails from their phones or having conversations with each other or reading books. Lots of peoples' jobs involve studying or having meetings.
That may not sound particularly humanitarian, but keep in mind that this also benefits the "smelly homeless people" likely in ways that the current systems (what good is a minimum wage when nobody will hire you) or UBI (what's your mailing address, sir, where we can send the check, or where's your photo ID?) will not.
The idea would be to have an auditorium, where you would come in and sit and do nothing, and be paid the minimum wage when you leave based only on the amount of time you spent in the room.
Individuals would be free to accept wages lower than the minimum wage for outside jobs, but employers would have to compete with that minimum wage for employees, so any lower wages offered would have to compete in other aspects -- pensions, tips, benefits, opportunities for advancement, etc.
Because this would require physical presence, it would naturally be self-limiting in some aspects of abuse; you can "sit" as many or as few hours as you wish, but you cannot use that time for other productive work, so there's a natural fall-off of benefits as you choose to work instead (rather than an artificial administrative "cliff").
There are other aspects which seem very vulnerable to abuse -- why not just sleep there, what about doing remote work on a laptop, what about setting up shop and selling hot dogs in the room, etc. And there are some aspects which seem logistically problematic -- how do people commute to the room, how many rooms do you need, what about people who have disabilities that prevent them from travelling, etc.
But generally all of these seem addressable, and some of them might just be self-regulating by social norms, so that there is a small but acceptable amount of leakage due to abuse.
It seems administrative simpler in some regards than UBI, in that the uniqueness of a recipient is more easily enforceable, and it doesn't just change the y-intercept of the income curve, but rather semi-truncates it, so might be less vulnerable to attempting to extract the income through rent increases.
It also more easily adjusts to location-based pricing sensitivity -- it's totally reasonable for a place like SF to have a higher "minimum wage" than a less expensive city (just as minimum wages can float from state to state), and the requirement for physical presence makes it harder to game this.