You know, Herman, I was looking at the latest labor reports this morning, and it is just wild how much the conversation has shifted in only a couple of years. We used to talk about automation as this far-off thing, but looking at the integration of agentic AI in mid-sized firms throughout two thousand twenty-five, it is really hitting home for a lot of people. It is not just about the fear of losing a job anymore; it is about the fundamental structure of how we support ourselves when the very concept of an entry-level role is evaporating.
Herman Poppleberry at your service, and you have hit the nail on the head, Corn. The speed of adoption has been breathtaking. It is the perfect time for the prompt our housemate Daniel sent over. He has been thinking about the same thing, particularly how we handle the basic needs of survival like food and shelter when the traditional link between labor and income starts to fray. He specifically wanted us to dive into Universal Basic Income, or UBI.
It is a big one. Daniel mentioned our previous talks on rent and tenancy law, and honestly, you cannot talk about one without the other. If we are moving toward a world where a significant portion of the population might not have traditional full-time employment, how do we ensure they still have a roof over their heads? Daniel asked about the history of UBI, where it has been tried, and whether it could actually replace or improve the safety nets we have now.
I love this topic because it is one of those ideas that sounds radical until you start looking at the history and the actual data from experiments. Then it starts to look like a very pragmatic response to a changing world. Most people think UBI is a brand-new, Silicon Valley-born idea, but the intellectual roots go back centuries. Thomas Paine was talking about something similar in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice back in seventeen ninety-seven. He argued that because the earth in its natural state was the common property of the human race, anyone who owned private land owed a ground rent back to the community to support those who did not own land.
That is such a fascinating way to frame it. It is not a handout; it is a dividend from a shared resource. And that ties right into what Daniel was getting at with the additive benefit. It is not just about survival; it is about recognizing our shared stake in society. But before we get too deep into the philosophy, let us address the first part of Daniel’s question. Where has this actually been tried? Because the theory is great, but the practice is where the friction happens.
Right. And we should be clear about what we mean by UBI. It is a periodic cash payment delivered to all on an individual basis, without a means test or a work requirement. There have been several high-profile pilots. One of the most famous was in Finland between two thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen. They gave five hundred and sixty euros a month to two thousand unemployed people.
I remember the headlines for that one. A lot of people focused on whether it made people find jobs faster, right?
That is right. And that is the lens most critics use. In the Finland case, the employment effect was actually quite small. The recipients did not work significantly more than the control group, but they did not work less either. What was massive, however, was the improvement in mental health, confidence, and life satisfaction. They reported feeling less stressed and having more trust in social institutions. From a public health perspective, that is a huge win that often gets ignored in the purely economic debate.
That makes sense. If you are not constantly vibrating with the anxiety of how to pay for your next meal, you can actually think clearly. You can plan. But what about the experiments in the United States? I know there was a big one in Stockton, California, and more recently, that massive study funded by OpenResearch that released its results in late two thousand twenty-four.
Yes, the OpenResearch study was the largest of its kind in the United States. They gave one thousand dollars a month to one thousand people for three years. The data there showed that people used the money for basic needs like food, transportation, and helping others. Interestingly, while they worked about one point three fewer hours per week on average, they were much more likely to pursue further education or vocational training. It allowed them to invest in their own human capital.
That connects back to what Daniel said about honoring the lives of people who want to work. If the safety net is so thin that any mistake or bit of bad luck results in catastrophe, you are not really free to pursue productive work. You are just in survival mode. But Herman, let us talk about the existing systems. Daniel asked if UBI could replace or improve things like unemployment benefits and social housing. This seems like a point of contention even among supporters.
It definitely is. There are two main camps. One camp, often on the libertarian side, sees UBI as a way to dismantle the entire welfare state. They argue that if you give everyone cash, you can get rid of the massive bureaucracy required for food stamps, housing vouchers, and unemployment insurance. They say it is more efficient and gives people more agency.
I can see the appeal of that, but it feels risky. If you replace specialized services with a flat cash payment, what happens to the person who has a medical condition that costs five thousand dollars a month? Or someone living in a city where rent is triple the national average? A flat payment might be a windfall for one person and a death sentence for another if it replaces all other support.
That is the big fear. The other camp argues that UBI should be a floor, not the entire building. It should be additive. But Daniel’s point about social housing is especially relevant to our previous conversations. If we just give everyone an extra thousand dollars a month without addressing the housing supply or tenancy laws, does that money just end up in the pockets of landlords?
That is the landlord’s tax argument. If every tenant suddenly has more money, and there is no increase in the number of apartments available, landlords might just raise the rent by that exact amount. It is the same thing we see with some student loan subsidies or first-time homebuyer grants. If the supply is fixed, the subsidy just inflates the price.
That is it. This is why many UBI proponents argue that UBI has to be part of a broader package. You need rent controls or a massive investment in public housing alongside it. However, look at the Denver Basic Income Project results from two thousand twenty-four. They gave cash to people experiencing homelessness, and it led to a massive increase in people securing their own housing. It turns out that when people have cash, they can navigate the existing housing market much more effectively than when they are waiting for a specific government-assigned unit.
So it provides mobility. It is the difference between being trapped in a specific social housing project and having the means to choose where you live. That is a powerful shift in perspective. But let us look at the AI angle Daniel brought up. We are sitting here in February of two thousand twenty-six. We have seen the first wave of white-collar displacement. We have seen entry-level coding jobs and basic paralegal work significantly reduced because the models are just that good now. This is not just about the safety net for the traditionally poor anymore. This is about the middle class.
That is the shift. When the people losing their jobs are the ones who were making eighty thousand dollars a year and had a mortgage, the political pressure for a real solution becomes immense. Those people do not want a handout; they want to contribute. But if the market value of their specific skill set has dropped to zero because of an algorithm, what do they do?
UBI gives them the time to retrain. It gives them the ability to take a risk on a new venture without the fear of losing their home. But I want to go deeper on the additive benefit Daniel mentioned. Beyond just the money, what does a society look like when survival is decoupled from market labor?
It changes the power dynamic between employers and employees. Think about it. If you have a basic income, you have the power to say no to a toxic boss or a dangerous work environment. It gives every worker a permanent strike fund. That is a massive shift in human dignity. It forces employers to make work more engaging and better paid because they can no longer rely on the threat of starvation to keep people in line.
That is a profound point. It is funny, people always worry that UBI will make people lazy, but maybe it will just make work better. If I do not have to take a job cleaning toilets for minimum wage just to eat, the person who needs their toilets cleaned is going to have to pay me a fair wage or automate the process. It drives innovation and it drives up the quality of life for the most essential but undervalued roles.
And it values the work that the market currently ignores. Think about caregiving. Taking care of an elderly parent or raising a child is incredibly productive work for society, but it has a market value of zero. A UBI recognizes that value. It says that your contribution to the community is not just defined by what a corporation is willing to pay you for.
I think about all the artists, the community organizers, and the people who spend their time maintaining open-source software. Our modern world runs on this unpaid labor. If those people had a basic floor, how much more could they contribute? But we have to talk about the elephant in the room. How do we pay for it? Especially now, when we are talking about potentially millions of people needing this.
This is where the technical details get really interesting. One of the most common proposals is a Value Added Tax, or VAT. If you have a ten percent VAT, you capture a piece of every single transaction in the economy, including the ones done by AI agents and automated systems. That money gets redistributed as the UBI. It is basically a way of taxing the productivity of the machines and giving it back to the people.
Another one I have been reading about is the Land Value Tax, which brings us back to Thomas Paine. Instead of taxing the building or the work done on the land, you tax the unimproved value of the land itself. Since nobody made the land, the value belongs to the community. It is a very efficient tax because you cannot hide land in an offshore account, and it encourages people to use land productively instead of just sitting on it as a speculative asset.
And then there is the idea of a data dividend. Every time we interact with an AI, we are providing the data that makes that AI more valuable. Right now, all that value is captured by a handful of massive companies. A data dividend would tax that value and distribute it to the people whose data created it in the first place. It is a more modern version of the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Ah, the Alaska Permanent Fund. We should mention that for Daniel’s question about where it has been implemented. For our listeners who do not know, Alaska has been giving every resident a yearly dividend from its oil wealth since nineteen eighty-two. It is not quite a full UBI because it is only once a year and the amount varies, but it is a real-world example of a universal payment that has been around for decades.
And it is incredibly popular. Even in a very conservative state like Alaska, the dividend is seen as a right of citizenship. It has been shown to reduce poverty and improve child health outcomes. It proves that once you give people a stake in the shared wealth of their environment, they will fight to keep it. It changes the social contract.
But let us talk about the anxiety Daniel mentioned. The fear that people will lose their sense of purpose. We live in a society where so much of our identity is tied to what we do for a living. If I am no longer Corn the analyst, who am I?
That is the most difficult psychological hurdle. We have been conditioned for centuries to believe that our value as human beings is tied to our economic productivity. But that is a very recent historical development. For most of human history, people worked to live; they did not live to work. UBI gives us the chance to rediscover what it means to be a human being beyond being a unit of labor.
I think about it like this. When we were kids, we would spend hours building things with blocks or drawing, not because anyone was paying us, but because humans have an innate drive to create and solve problems. We do not lose that when we grow up; we just get it squeezed out of us by the necessity of the grind. If the grind is gone, or at least lessened, maybe we see a renaissance of craft, of education, and of local community engagement.
I love that. It is the shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. In a scarcity mindset, you see your neighbor’s success as a threat to your own. In an abundance mindset, supported by a basic income, you can be happy for your neighbor because your own survival is not at stake. It could lead to a much more cohesive society.
But let us be realistic. There are huge risks. If you set the UBI too high, you could trigger massive inflation. If you set it too low, it does not actually solve the problem of poverty. And there is the political risk of a future government deciding to cut the UBI as an austerity measure, which would be catastrophic if people have structured their lives around it.
That is why the implementation has to be robust. It probably needs to be a constitutional right or tied to a dedicated fund that politicians cannot easily touch. And we have to be careful about the transition. You cannot just flip a switch overnight. It would likely start as a smaller payment that grows over time as the economy becomes more automated.
I also think about the global perspective. If the United States or Israel or Finland implements a UBI, what happens to the billions of people in countries that cannot afford it? Does it create an even wider gap between the haves and the have-nots on a global scale?
That is a huge concern. AI is a global force, but the tax revenue from it is mostly captured by a few wealthy nations. There are proposals for a global UBI, perhaps funded by a global carbon tax or a tax on international financial transactions, but the political hurdles there are even higher. However, if we do not find a way to share the benefits of this technology globally, we are looking at unprecedented levels of migration and instability.
It is a lot to process. Daniel’s prompt really gets to the heart of the two thousand twenty-six dilemma. We have these incredible tools that can create immense wealth, but our systems for distributing that wealth are still stuck in the nineteenth century. UBI feels like one of the few ideas that is actually scaled to the size of the problem.
It is. And it addresses that core human need for shelter and security that Daniel mentioned. Imagine if your basic rent was covered, no matter what. How would that change your life? You would still work, because you want a nicer car, or a better computer, or to travel, or just because you enjoy the challenge. But the fundamental fear of being on the street would be gone.
It would change everything. It would change the way we treat each other. It would change the way we think about the future. Instead of the future being something to fear, it becomes something to build.
Precisely. And to Daniel’s question about whether it is a better-fitting policy for the challenges humans face today. I think the answer is yes, because our current challenges are no longer about a lack of resources. We have enough food, we have the technology to build enough housing, and we have the energy. Our challenge is now one of distribution and meaning. UBI solves the distribution problem, which then allows us to focus on the meaning problem.
It is a bold vision. I am curious what our listeners think. Have any of you been part of a UBI pilot? Or do you work in an industry that is being disrupted by AI right now? How would a guaranteed floor change your perspective on your career?
We would love to hear your thoughts. This is such a critical conversation for the next decade. And hey, if you are enjoying these deep dives, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who are interested in these kinds of weird prompts.
It really does. We read all of them, and they help us shape the show. You can find all six hundred and twenty-eight episodes of My Weird Prompts at our website, myweirdprompts dot com. We have the full archive there, and a contact form if you want to send us your own thoughts or questions.
Huge thanks to Daniel for sending this one in. It is something we talk about around the house all the time, but it was great to sit down and really look at the data and the history. It is a complex issue, but the more you look at it, the more it feels like an inevitability if we want to maintain a stable, flourishing society in the age of AI.
I agree. It is not a question of if, but when and how. And the how is where all the interesting work is going to happen.
Well said, brother. I think that is a good place to wrap it up for today.
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Until next time, stay curious and keep asking the weird questions.
Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye.
