>>socialist economy collapsing simply due to mass underemployment
The problem here is not underemployment. Underemployment is a situation where people want to work, but don't have jobs. The situation I mentioned systematically disincentivizes working making it very easy to get by life without work. The net situation is people feel they are entitled to free stuff without doing any work for it. And its always somebody else responsibility to provide for them, while they do nothing at all to contribute anything back.
>>Most socialist ex-economies collapsed primarily due to the effects of the end of the cold war.
Cold war was the perfect test of which country could retain their best. There were barely any incentives to stay in socialist countries. At any given point of time a minority was slogging till death to feed the remaining mouths in their countries. Why do think you so many people from countries like India(Largely still socialistic society) want to move to US?
Robbing Peter to feed Paul only works that long.
>>They were generally already devastated by WW2. It is by no means certain that a capitalist economy would have fared any better.
That's strange since none of the socialist economies did better even those which didn't participate in the world wars.
>>The fact of the matter is that there has never been a country-scale attempt at implementing a basic income.
Sorry, you say- since nothing like it with 100% match existed before we should discard cases with 99.99999% match.