Automation is already taking over every sector---it triggers economic collapse.

But what if no one needed a job? What if you had enough income to live on and never had to work another day in your life? That, in essence, is the promise of universal basic income (UBI). The government gives everyone cash with no strings attached. It is an old idea with a new application. . Today, the idea has been given new life as one answer to the biggest problem we face as digitalization destroys jobs — how will people buy things? The UBI answer: simply give everyone enough money to live on. They can still work if they can find a job, but they don’t have to work to stay out of poverty.

Support for the idea is coming from all quarters. Libertarians support it as a much easier and simpler way to alleviate poverty and shrink the federal bureaucracy at the same time. Socialists and progressives support it because of its effect on poverty and the view that UBI can unleash new forms of creativity among the public. Labor leader Andy Stern, the former head of SEIU, supports it in his newest book Raising the Floor, as a way of addressing new joblessness among working people. Even leading capitalist investors like bond king Bill Gross see basic income as a new reality and one that will be good and necessary for the economy.

The UBI Concept

UBI is easy enough to grasp conceptually. The government simply gives people money without regard to work. In the United States, one idea gives $1,000 per month to every adult in the country. Married people net $24,000 per year from the government. Although not quite middle class, the amount is enough to keep people above the poverty line. Bolder proposals would give more money to help ensure people can be in the middle class.

For those of us conditioned in capitalist morality, this idea is an abomination. Give everyone something for nothing? No way! We’d create a nation of sloth! Everyone would quit working, and then what would we do? Yet the idea has come to the fore again as the world stares down a juggernaut that is going to prevent most people from working anyway. Digitalization, roboticization, automation, and artificial intelligence are going to replace most jobs. While this is easy to see, the consequences of such a change are not.

As many have asked, what are all these people going to do when their jobs are automated or robotized? How will they occupy their time? How will they obtain money, food, and the necessities of life? How will they keep their homes? Millions of people will be without jobs in a short period of time. Right now, the lowest wage jobs in the world are being replaced with robots. Bangladeshis are losing their jobs because shoemakers like Adidas are automating production by replacing people with robots. More and more manufacturing is being replaced by robots, but so are service jobs of all kinds. Here are a few highlights:

Driverless cars will soon be eliminating taxi and Uber drivers, and 

The only job category that is immune requires the physical presence of a human being — think of live musical performances or sporting events. One can watch them on television, but actual presence changes the experience. The point is to be with the person you are with because of what they provide as an experience for you — and no robot or media will replace that. Beyond this category, it is hard to see a sector of the economy that is safe from automation, AI, and robotics.

A Solution: Universal Basic Income

Basic income is being touted as the answer to this problem, and in the short run, it probably is. UBI provides cash so that people can meet their basic needs. With enough income to provide basic needs, work is a choice rather than an existential coercion. People would be free to create and grow businesses without the threat of homelessness, but they’d also be free to choose to do nothing. As a society, we would need to accept this reality.

On the other hand, if the jobs do not disappear all at the same time, the $24,000 per married couple could dramatically increase purchasing power. It would function at the family level like a $24,000 per year raise — that much more money for spending, saving, investing, or purchasing durable goods. Economic growth would take off because, unlike tax cuts, most of the money goes to people who will spend it.

If UBI does not come into being as the transition to an automated, robotized future occurs, there are some unattractive alternatives. One possibility is the enormous swelling of the social safety programs currently in place — the precursor of which we saw in the substantial growth of social security disability benefits following the 2008 financial crisis.. At the time, unemployment ran out and there weren’t any other programs available, so people have turned to the only program they could find.

But, there is more. Obamacare created huge subsidies for health insurance. The COVID pandemic created the largest Republican-driven spending spree in history in the form of universal cash payments, enormous forgivable loans to businesses of all kinds, and large unemployment subsidies to individuals, many of which rivaled or surpassed what people were making in their jobs. It also generated the now short-lived child tax credit. I’m not judging the worth of any of these programs, only signaling their growth in size and complexity so we can compare that to the simplicity of UBI — writing monthly checks to all Americans.

Another alternative would be an economic collapse and the casting of millions of middle-class Americans into poverty. While this idea may be ideologically pure to those who felt there should be no intervention to solve the financial crisis back in 2008 or the COVID crisis of 2020 to the present, casting millions of people into poverty has a moral repugnance that most people find objectionable. It also hits the elites where it counts — in their pocketbooks. People in poverty can’t buy much. No one wants to see millions of people in poverty, empty grocery store shelves, and general economic malaise. America can do better, we think to ourselves, and we should.