> But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly.

There are concrete examples of worker-dominated organizations: schools, public transit entities, etc., where powerful worker unions dominate policy. They are almost universally unsuccessful, as worker interests take precedence over delivering a product to the consumer.

But none of those things are worker owned either; they are generally owned by the public. The success or failure of a school or public transport entity has nearly no impact on the success or failure of the workers (short of catastrophic mismanagement, anyway).

I suppose we have trailed things like worker ownership in early stage startups with high equity compensation. That might be evidence that it works well. Letting workers capture most of the value they create would be at least as interesting experiment for me than Universal Basic Income; but I think UBI has much more coverage as a political idea.

The danger with arguing from first principles is that a lot of real-world failures sound pretty fantastic. Take communism, or the satirical "A Modest Proposal".

If you thought “A Modest Proposal” sounded pretty fantastic, you must have read a different essay by that title than I did. And saying that communism sounds good in theory is also a pretty superficial reading of Marx and others.