Class Reunion — A Letter to the Ultra-Wealthy
How UBI Can Bring Us Together
Dear esteemed Sir or Madam.
With all due respect, we should start by acknowledging that you’re rich. It’s just a fact; there’s no two ways about it.
And I’m not talking a decent 401K and a paid-off house. I’m talking wealthy enough that money is never a limiting factor in your decision-making, and to where you know with absolute confidence that neither you nor any of your loved ones will ever want for any material thing or opportunity. Essentially, the only limitations you face are your energy, your imagination, your time, and your talent. I’m talking fifty million dollars or more.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “who’s this guy? I’ve never heard of him.” Well, I’m a pretty regular guy. I’m pretty passionate, pretty opinionated, pretty smart, pretty idealistic, usually pretty broke, and I’m pretty damn experienced with the real world of the American economy at this point, and I’m here to let you know what I think you don’t usually get to hear or see. This is in no way an attack, by the way, pointing out that you’re wealthy. It’s a simple truth, and truths, uncomfortable or not, should be explored openly. Please know first and foremost that I afford you the same benefit of the doubt that everyone deserves.
I presume that you are a good person trying to leave the world a better place for having you in it.
But we have to address the 20 trillion dollar elephant stomping around the room. This economic system is broken. The game is rigged, and it’s rigged in your favor. Even if you worked diligently against incredible obstacles to get to where you are, the reward that you are now reaping is artificially inflated at the expense of everyone else. But you know this already.
And it’s not your fault. If I inherited a fortune from some unknown seventh cousin tomorrow, or if some business idea of mine suddenly took off, I’d be in your exact shoes. I’d be a human being who happens to have a lot of money living in the system we’ve created. I’d be immensely over-powerful, and it wouldn’t be my fault. Would I have instantly become some sort of evil capitalist swine intent on enslaving humanity? Nope. I’d still be me, the pretty ordinary guy who cares deeply for my fellow human beings and our planet. In my work, I have observed that human beings with wealth are driven by the same basic ethics and motivations as human beings without it.
I’m not looking to engage in class warfare. I want to help organize a class reunion.
Toward that aim of organizing a reunion, I’m going to tell you about a solution that you may have heard of by now, but one that most people don’t really understand very well. It’s most often known as universal basic income, or UBI for short. It’s widely misinterpreted in the news, and the national discussion around it is as yet surface-level and riddled with persistent misconceptions, so please leave your current notions of it aside for the moment. Before getting to that solution, though, we must first lay out the scope and shape of the problem in terms of two main things that this country as a whole misunderstands today:
A. Value
B. People
VALUE
Let’s look at three ways in which we’re misunderstanding value:
- Work
- Wealth
- Societal Health
Work
For one thing, work creates value, but today we generally only equate “work” with jobs or sales (i.e. the labor market or the consumer market). In this worldview, work is comprised of whatever tasks either an employer or a customer is willing to pay for. There are many types of work, however, that receive no remuneration from these markets and yet represent an enormous value to society: taking care of sick parents; reading to your kids; pursuing art, school, or a business; volunteering; exercising; hell, even maintaining your general hygiene.
Not all work equals jobs, but all work has value.
Speaking of jobs, they don’t magically spring forth from these beings we call job creators. They are a response to a demand. Employers certainly fulfill a crucial role in the process, and they deserve real credit, but mostly for having the foresight and courage to recognize that demand and fill it. For example, my partner Deia and I are the creators of a documentary series that, all told, will employ around 15–20 people for about a year and a half on the average. I also raised the money and hired a team of web developers and an economist to create a tool called the UBIcalculator. Sounds like we could maybe call ourselves job creators, right?
Supushpitha Atapattu)
But we didn’t “create” those jobs, if we’re being honest. We found them. We listened and we studied and we saw the space in the market for them. We believed in their value, and we took on the risk necessary to allow them to happen. In the end, though, we are not really even creating these projects. We’re just guiding their creation, and we’ve had a lot of help. Beyond the work of our talented hires, we are indebted to the interstates we drove on and the flights we took to find our subjects around the country, to the cameras we filmed with and the millions of man hours of research and technology that went into them, to the copyright laws that grant us exclusive rights to an idea’s capitalization and control while we develop it, to the very existence of the internet, to the funders and donors large and small who supported us, to a million little favors and connections and lucky circumstances, and much more. If we become fortunate enough to generate a significant financial return from any project, we should absolutely be ready to share it with our collaborators, which includes the generations of taxpayers before us who built the system and made it all possible. It includes all Americans. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, but we’d never call ourselves self-made documentarians. Why then do we always hear about this mythical creature, the self-made billionaire?
Another facet of work that we’ve miscalculated is merit, and we’ve done so by tying our idea of merit almost entirely to dollars. Our national mythology presents the United States as a meritocracy, but do you with your massive wealth and income truly believe that you’re thousands of times more capable and valuable than almost anyone else?
Are your daily efforts a thousand times more valuable than mine, or is a very real part of the equation that you’ve got a lot more capital backing you up? Are you really more “productive” while sleeping than, say, a laborer in Idaho working 80 hour weeks? According to your incomes, it would seem so. In fact, when someone without capital is not selling their time to someone else, but instead is working to build their own projects and pursuits, they often have zero income. So, multiplicatively speaking, you’re deemed infinitely more valuable than the student, the mother, or the fledgling entrepreneur, because they are currently deemed valueless by the measure of money.
If you came from poverty and built yourself up, do you remember the day when you could effectively start “thinking rich,” the day when concerns about how you’d feed yourself and pay your rent faded away and you could focus all your attention on your business or your passion? When was the day you knew that you were ok?
I remember the day I had my first glimpse of that moment as well as any single other moment in my life, probably as much as my wedding day. It was the day we finally secured a large funder and I knew that our documentary project would succeed, that we had escaped disastrous personal consequence with our ambitious and idealistic risks, that we’d probably never have to move in with family because of it and that I could do what I know needs to be done and spend the amount to do it that is wisest. I still happened to be in debt at the time, and remained so for quite a while, but from that point on I felt more able to “think rich.” We were finally approved, trusted, and verified. Before that day, we lived with the constant fear that we just might be ruining our lives for what we believed in, because maybe nobody with the power to make it happen would ever believe in us enough to allow it to happen.
I often think about how much better, faster, with how much more focus, and with how much less unnecessary stress we could have put our projects together if we weren’t also cobbling together side gigs to survive, from bartending to random edit jobs, seriously sapping our time, energy, and productive bandwidth. I think about how incredibly fortunate we were to have access to a decent amount of credit and parents who more than once could give us some temporary support to keep the lights on.
I also think about the years I lost between discovering what I wanted to pursue and being able to actually pursue it, a decade of my life at my most inspired and energetic, gone, poured out by the pint with every beer I served behind the bar, waiting for my chance to give what I knew I could.
I think about how many millions of worthy ideas and talents must be out there, unpursued for the paralyzing fear of financial insecurity and the lack of access to support. I think about how many Nikola Teslas, Oprah Winfreys, JK Rowlings, Bruno Mars, and Bill Gates are stocking shelves or flipping burgers full time, waiting until they can just catch up enough to invest their time into their ideas and abilities, but watching that light at the end of the tunnel slowly recede into the distance. I mourn the immeasurable cost to society.
Wealth
Another form of value that we often misunderstand is our wealth, and specifically its impact on the world. Much like we each leave a carbon footprint based on our consumption, we also each leave a socioeconomic footprint based on how our use of money affects the economy and the people in it. Now don’t get me wrong, I highly admire those of great vision and talent who can successfully lead a business or other pursuit, but in terms of net impact for the ultra-wealthy, things become more complicated. If you’re extracting $10M per year in interest and capital gains and donating $100,000 back to great causes, it can be very difficult to take a hard look and realize that, despite those great causes, you might very well balance out in the negative. Much like an oil giant can’t make up for decades of dumping CO2 into the air by planting a few million trees, a 10-figure foundation that spends 5% of its capital annually on saving lives might do far better for the world, by the numbers, by simply not having extracted all that capital in the first place. I know this is going to make some wealthy people angry, but I’m saying that you might be hurting us, despite your efforts to the contrary.
Every one of us wants to heft our own weight, but if you have extreme wealth in this system as we’ve designed it, you’re too heavy to stand on your own feet, because while each dollar is light and nimble, the combined inertia of many millions or billions of them is such that everything else you do becomes inconsequential by comparison to the extractive force that such wealth represents. It’s impossible for any individual to carry that burden, and so it falls upon the rest of us to carry it for you. If I were rich, I’d be heavy too.
Another burden of great wealth is that of false worship. The constant barrage of positive reinforcement from society makes it impossible to maintain an entirely grounded worldview. It works unceasingly to rob you of both humility and perspective. You become forcibly elevated.
Even criticism often elevates you. Whether people blindly worship you or rabidly vilify you, the tacit implication is that your wealth has made you something other than human. People see you as deities, whether all-knowing and benevolent or capricious and tyrannical. And so you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to hold onto your understanding of your own worth as a human being among human beings.
You may be wonderful and talented, but you can’t be an expert on everything, especially compared to those fighting on the front lines who may be coming to you for support. You must continue to remind yourself that you lack perspective simply due to your position in the world and the circles you inhabit. You don’t have all the answers, and neither, for that matter, do McKinsey analysts or other such high-powered consulting firms, especially when it comes to solving problems in poverty and social justice.
If you wish to maximize your impact, you will need to trust in those with direct and lived experience. To be blunt, you need to find ways to provide your support and get out of the way. You must let go of the urge to control. In the end, that kind of humility is the only way we’ll create a system in which you are not alone up on a pedestal, a world in which those with capital aren’t the de facto gatekeepers of all progress and decision-making, receiving both the acclaim and blame for where society stands at any given moment.
Societal Health
Ok, now to get off your case and back to society at large. Another crucial thing we seriously screw up as a society is measuring the success of the economy as a whole. We generally point to the GDP, the stock market, and the unemployment number, but all of these measures are woefully inaccurate or inadequate.
GDP essentially measures total sold productivity, but it doesn’t account for who’s making or selling the products, it doesn’t account for externalities like public health trends or pollution, and it completely ignores any work or value that is done pro bono, as an in-kind exchange, or otherwise outside the labor market. It also doesn’t account for how much of that production is increasingly being done by machines and software, putting human beings out of gainful employment and concentrating more of the returned prosperity into the hands of the owners of those machines.
As for the stock market, 50% of it is owned by 1% of the population, and 84% is owned by the top 10%, so the stock market mostly reflects the outcomes of the shareholder class and doesn’t much matter for most Americans, the majority of whom can’t afford a $500 emergency, let alone a portfolio of stocks, without taking on debt.
The unemployment number is perhaps the most perverse metric of the bunch, a measurement seemingly designed to help administrations look better. It’s true under Trump, but it was also true under Obama and before him back down the line. Notably, the unemployment number doesn’t account for: people who’ve given up looking for work, people whose unemployment benefits have ended, people who went on disability never to return, people who are in prison, or, morbidly, those we’ve lost to overdoses and suicides, all of which are skyrocketing, particularly in middle America. Did you know that the labor force participation rate is at or around its lowest since the 70s? You might wonder: how can we have both record low employment and record low unemployment at the same time? The reason is that at least one of these numbers is, well, bullshit. Perhaps worse in scale than any of these omissions the unemployment number makes, though, is that it doesn’t account for underemployment and low quality employment. A person who used to make $70K/yr with benefits as a 40hr/wk employee might now be cobbling together three gig jobs, working an inconsistent 20hr/wk, making an unreliable $20K/yr with no benefits, unable to feed their kids reliably, but the unemployment number counts them just as employed as before.
With such distorted measurements, we’re peering into a funhouse mirror. And as a nation looking to the future in turbulent times, it becomes incredibly important to see clearly and in context where we stand and where we may be headed.
We are in the midst of transitioning into the digital age, and a couple decades from now our society and economy will look wildly different than what we see today. To expect otherwise is naive. The fact that things have been operating more or less one way for five or ten decades does not alter this fact. We should not make the mistake of leaning on recent performance to predict future outcomes. History repeats itself until it doesn’t, and then we call it a revolution or a catastrophe, which, if we take a longer view of history, is itself quite a cyclically recurring thing. Funny, it often seems to happen right around whenever inequality gets up to around where it is today. But rather than ushering in this next great societal shift with another violent and pitchforky revolution or resource war, wouldn’t it be nice if this time we could engage in a more proactive and peaceful evolution, without the bread lines, class struggles, world wars, and wide open opportunities for new forms of corruption to step in and assume power?
PEOPLE
Now that we’ve covered value, let’s dig into three crucial things our society is failing to understand about people:
- The meaning of freedom
- The reality of our current system for most Americans
- The truth about human nature
Freedom
Freedom, to me, boils down to that classic trio of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and these in turn all hinge around freedom from domination.
A person is free if they have the agency to both say “No” to a bad situation or “Yes” to a good one without risking major personal harm, including financial catastrophe. If your boss or your spouse is abusive, you need to be able to walk away from that job or that partner and know that you and your kids won’t go hungry or homeless. On the flip side, if you encounter an opportunity that doesn’t pay right away but helps you to pursue your best self, you should be able to pursue it with that same knowledge of your basic safety and needs. Anything less means that you are beholden to those with money for your security — you exist at their permission — and what we get as a society is a prettied-up form of indentured servitude.
And what is that minimum level of security? Food, shelter, and health (you know, the things you can’t live without). You can’t have Life without food, shelter, and health, and you can’t have Liberty or Pursue your Happiness without that basic security backing up your decisions. The fact that we let even a single person, let alone tens of millions here in history’s most abundant society, go without these things is a travesty of morality and common sense.
Playing the Game that We’ve Built
I thought I knew a little about bureaucracy and living through hardship just through my own circumstances, but after spending the last several years traveling every corner of this country, talking to both experts and regular people, I didn’t know the half of it.
The system is just plain absurd for people who lack capital. Welfare, for one thing, is far more perverse than almost anybody realizes; we’ve made it essentially unwise to play by the rules. We put a ceiling on poverty, with welfare cliffs to punish those who seek to lift themselves up by taking work, all in the name of making sure that those in poor circumstances don’t misuse the assistance being provided. It’s micromanagement, and it’s both wasteful and humiliating.
I experienced it personally when I was laid off from a job while also going through school. I was suddenly collecting unemployment, and though the schoolwork was intense, I wanted to make a few dollars and feel like I was contributing, so I found a catering gig. My first week, I worked a 6-hour shift dressed as an elf at a holiday party for some Manhattan bankers and their kids. It wasn’t my least humiliating hour, but it was honest work, and I was ok with it. At the end of that week, my paycheck after taxes was around $90 and they docked something like $84 from my unemployment check. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t do elf work for a dollar an hour. It was made crystal clear to me on that day that I should just ride out my unemployment and focus on school.
My case was mild. I met a home health aide in the Bronx who lost her food stamps one week for working an hour too long. She had gone in to work anyway, even knowing this would happen, because her patients need her. She was being punished for her integrity and her contribution. I met a lawyer in San Francisco who told me about groups of lawyers running pro bono trainings to teach people in poverty who had come into a little windfall money how to “spend it down” most effectively so that they wouldn’t lose their benefits. Heaven forbid they hold onto a little cushion of savings for a time, but when that happens, their aid gets cut, and they might not get it back when the money’s gone in a few weeks. And so these lawyers were donating tens of thousands of dollars of their billable time teaching people to invest in things like washers and dryers (that will at least save them a little money in laundry costs), instructing them on how best to stay poor so they wouldn’t become destitute.
We’re playing a game in which one parking ticket can lead to a downward spiral that puts a hardworking person out on the street, when that unpayable parking ticket leads to a tow, leads to being fired for being late, leads to unemployment, leads to eviction, leads to homelessness. We’ve designed a game in which it’s expensive to be poor, with bank fees for not having enough money and an enormous helping of stigma and shame for the crime of being short on cash. And in a person’s hour of greatest struggle, when they are the most stretched thin and out of time, we instruct them to stand in line, fill out paperwork, wait weeks to qualify, and submit to testing and monitoring all when they’re supposed to be out doggedly looking for work and keeping up with their many other responsibilities. Meanwhile, we give tax breaks to people with capital gains, and we allow loopholes for those who can afford tax attorneys. We’re essentially giving people money for having money and fining people for not having it.
One really has to go searching to see the extent of these realities in action, because we’re separated by our bubbles of location and friends, especially with today’s social media algorithms designed to reinforce what we already think we know. We see each other through prisms of the media we consume, the circles we inhabit, and the pundits who bend our ear. We see those existing outside our circles as not much more than statistics, and eventually as threats, leeches, liabilities, or tyrants.
But we’re not really seeing each other clearly. It’s a lack of perspective that’s unavoidable unless you actually go out and spend a great deal of time in different places with different people, sharing their day-to-day experiences. I’ve now had the chance to witness American life all along the spectrum, from the Summit Series to a Sioux reservation, from penthouses in midtown Manhattan to projects in the South Bronx, from state prisons to rural sustenance gardens, from the fancy seats at Yankee stadium to the ritzy parties at Sundance to a block party in LA to the deadly protest in Charlottesville to a children’s hospital in Montana to the forgotten floodplains of North Carolina in Hurricane Florence’s wake. The dichotomies are stark, and once you’ve seen enough of these contrasts up close and personal, any talk of physics-defying bootstrap maneuvers or the fabled American Dream is liable to evoke a gag reflex. We live at a time when the Dream is dying for most Americans.
Human Nature
For many, when hearing people question the feasibility of the American Dream as I just did, the assumption is that individuals who are not achieving it must be lacking in a specific way. Beyond discrepancies in natural talent, which our national morality is more inclined to condescendingly forgive, this lack is usually chalked up as being one of character. We have largely come to believe that the nature of many people is rooted in laziness and selfishness, and that at the core of their drives is a desire to get as much as possible with as little effort as possible. We split human beings into two categories, the takers and the makers. We talk of welfare queens, video gamers, drug addicts, criminals, fraudsters, and lottery ticket buyers, and we see them as a different species than entrepreneurs, investors, job creators, volunteers, philanthropists, and laborers.
While it is true that the behaviors of individuals in today’s American economy vary widely, that some are far more productive than others, and that some lean far more heavily into vices, I have come to see that these differences are not the result of an inherent genetic separation. They do not indicate two different types of people, but rather they illuminate the diverse types of reactions that this creature the human being demonstrates under various combinations of circumstances and experiences. The human animal itself, homo sapiens, from the billionaire to the beach bum, from the skateboarder to the senator, from the Afghani to the Argentinian to the American, is universally driven by a singular motivation: to matter.
A while back I read about a study of infant development in a David Graeber book (Bullshit Jobs — 2018) that helped synthesize everything about the human nature puzzle that I’d been trying to make sense of. At some point early on, when a baby is learning that it is a discrete entity apart from other objects, she’ll maybe move an arm or leg and bump something on the table, causing that object to move in some way. And then she’ll do it again, and the object will move again, and this tiny human will realize that she has the ability to “be a cause.” This moment is always accompanied by elation at the realization that one can have a tangible impact on the larger world.
I believe that, from that day forward, for every human being, the primary motivation in life is to achieve this feeling of causality as much as possible, to shape the world around us, to gain control of what we can and thereby to thrive, grow, and matter. We usually call this “purpose.”
The problem is, we’ve designed a society that actively squashes the pursuit of purpose for so many, both by ascribing to a narrow definition of value and by restricting access to the basic tools needed to freely pursue meaningful impact. So, as human beings grow into adulthood and attempt to join society, and as their desires and plans and abilities become more complex, many of us run face first into the wall we’ve systemically placed in our own path, the limiting of our ability to matter in a way that we see as meaningful, robbing us of that joy of being a cause, relegating us to the role of passive entities existing only to survive another day as cogs in a cold machine.
It’s no wonder people give up, check out, and turn to escapism through substances, screens, and other addictive or self-destructive behaviors. And then we accuse them of laziness, of trying to get as much for themselves with as little effort as possible, because the only thing we’ve allowed ourselves to believe can matter to them is the accumulation of wealth and material things, of leisure and pleasure. We believe this so fully that we seek to monitor each other at all times to make sure nobody is slacking off.
But human beings are not just accumulation machines. We want to contribute, but we can only shine and present our best selves if allowed the power and freedom that we need in order to do so. Permitting for and encouraging this behavior doesn’t require management. It simply requires trust and humility. If we find it in ourselves to embody and act upon that trust and humility, that faith in our universal humanity, then we will learn that we are a singular, unified species, and there will be no stopping us from accomplishing what we set our collective mind to do. The only thing blocking the way is the system we’ve designed for ourselves. It’s a cage. It’s a cage with a low ceiling. A privileged few get to stand on top.
Once we realize that we are all the same creature, we can finally begin to see each other. We can begin to understand people in poverty and their drives, just like we can begin to understand people with wealth and their innate goodness and humanity. We just have to start from the premise that everyone wants to matter. Take any person you encounter from any walk of life and start from that single assumption with an open mind, and you will have a basis to understand why they are who they are.
The solution to all of the struggle we face cannot be to blame the poor for existing and it cannot be to task the rich with solving everything. Neither is reasonable or fair. We must come together in a spirit of trust and understanding to share these responsibilities. We must take a systemic approach. We must redesign the mechanics of the game.
How UBI Can Address these Misunderstandings
One thing I will say for you of the wealthy class is that you are very solutions-oriented. You think in terms of investments rather than costs. You think in the long term. It’s something I appreciate as a former engineer. And I won’t beat around the bush: the more market-based the solution, the more you seem to like it. I’m with you guys on that. I believe in the power of markets. Why reinvent the wheel when we can optimize it?
Well, there’s a simple, elegant, market solution that addresses all of the aforementioned misunderstandings to one level or another. It’s a design hack that can go very far in restructuring the system and in reuniting our classes. It’s nowhere near the only thing we need to do, but it’s perhaps the most important.
Most people don’t know this, but the game Monopoly was originally called “The Landlord’s Game” and it had two modes of play. Monopoly was the gameplay mode designed to demonstrate for us exactly what we shouldn’t be doing as a society, namely creating a system in which one person ends up owning everything and everyone else goes broke. Apparently, that’s the version that caught on. The other version was called Prosperity. The winner was defined as the player who had the most money when the player in last place reached a certain level of success. What a concept, this idea that there can still be winners in a game in which all prosper, that we don’t need to have paupers in order to have princes, that nobody needs to fight over scraps!
So, how do we translate that prosperity mechanism to our real world economy?
One good thing about both versions of “The Landlord’s Game” was the money each player collected for passing Go. In Prosperity, that added wealth to society was partially taxed and then used to gradually subsidize the utilities and railroads for all and then eventually to increase the amount of money collected for passing Go.
Without Go — without that regular influx of capital — either version of the game would quickly grind to a halt. More important even than the starting off money that everyone gets is this heartbeat of income that allows each player, even when they have no accumulated wealth, to keep playing the game, to keep participating in this Monopoly or Prosperity society. Importantly, this money was not dependent upon the players completing any other tasks aside from continuing to play, continuing to exist on the board.
This brings us to universal basic income (also commonly known as unconditional basic income, basic income, or UBI). A no-strings-attached dividend — a share of the national prosperity large enough to subsist on if needed and granted to every citizen on a regular and permanent basis — UBI is the money for passing Go. It’s the guaranteed access to a minimum level of capital that allows every citizen to keep actively playing the game. It is continued buying power in every player’s wallet that will allow them to more accurately represent their demand in the market. Without this guaranteed floor of income for all, domination and corruption are a certainty. Much more than they’re human flaws, they’re systemic design features. With UBI, however, and the freedom of choice it provides, the market can behave more organically and justly, and the tasks and obligations of our society can be democratized and shared. People can build their lives, their families, their communities, their businesses, their projects, and their passions without permission from the wealthy class. It means that all people can have some power to take care of and invest in themselves on their own, even when misfortune rears its ugly head.
With the permanent and unassailable knowledge of unconditional income security at a basic level, every citizen could enjoy both the feeling of support from their society as well as the enhanced responsibility and accountability that comes with trust granted. With much of the daily existential fear unshouldered from the masses — each human being now able to lift their eyes, look around, look ahead, and participate actively in the shaping of our society — our economy and our democracy would be unleashed to flourish like never before, the burden no longer on the wealthy to single-handedly solve the world’s problems and drive the marketplace, but instead deputized to every individual to make the necessary changes at the most local of levels: their own lives.
Applying UBI
If we take a quick trip down that list of things we’re currently misunderstanding or getting wrong, UBI can help us to address every single one at a fundamental level:
Work
Under a UBI, all human work would be valued and compensated to some level. Not only would every single job in the labor market receive a de facto universal pay bump (about $6/hour on a full-time basis under the commonly proposed $12K/year UBI), but also, volunteers, activists, students, fledgling entrepreneurs, artists, and even people doing the daily work of staying out of trouble, staying healthy, raising nicer kids, and on and on would be supported in all of those essential and valuable forms of work. Everyone’s personal work would be presumed worthy enough to be invested in at a survival level without oversight. And those who have limited capacity due to disability, yet who wish to work when and where they’re able, would no longer be disincentivized from contributing what they are able.
Wealth
Under UBI, everyone could “think rich” to a degree, meaning they could literally think about what they want to achieve in their lives in terms of what’s a good investment, without the overwhelming need to play it safe. Every person could take those measured risks, accept that internship, make the investment that they’re eyeing with the full knowledge that, if it fails, they would not end up hungry on the street. In short, they could roll the dice and play the game. And those of wealth could enjoy the knowledge of this when it comes to their impact and their legacy. If nobody is in extreme poverty, then your success is no longer tainted by its cost to others. We all succeed together.
For you of wealth, this does not represent a demotion from deity to human being, but a promotion from false idol to human being. We’d all be elevated to the status of human being, as both poverty shaming and wealth worship could begin to melt away.
Societal Health
Not only would UBI give us an excuse to focus on much more productive and representative measures of national health and performance like poverty rates, number of business startups, health outcomes, labor market participation, and reported happiness, it would also generally result in improvements in those very outcomes.
Freedom
I would combine UBI and universal healthcare, and say definitively that if you have your health and enough money to access your basic needs guaranteed, then you are free. Full stop. These two pillars, UBI and universal healthcare, together represent the most important human rights fight of the foreseeable future.
Human Nature and the Game We’ve Built
It is said that money is the root of all evil, but money is just a tool. Scarcity and insecurity, or the deprivation of access to that tool, are the real roots of evil. It’s the lack of money and the possibility of having zero that gives rise to the corruptive forces twisting our natures and behaviors. UBI removes the worst of scarcity and insecurity, replacing them with agency.
Our ultimate agency and our joy in the ability to be a cause are what elevate the humans above the critters. Without it, we’re cornered animals, running on adrenaline and necessity, reacting to our surroundings rather than creating them. Without it, the game is flawed and unsustainable. UBI is the rewrite. It is the money for passing Go. It creates a solid and level floor that we all can stand and build upon.
UBI is Power to the People, distilled to its simplest and most efficient form.
Jumping in
And so, esteemed sir or madam, I’ll put it to you as one simple question:
What if we ensured every human being a chance to show us their full potential by stripping away their most basic fears?
What do you think would happen? Can you picture that society?
When you take time to really sit with it, you might realize that UBI isn’t just unconditional money. It buys so much more. It’s unconditional love, trust, respect, dignity, power, time, hope, opportunity, security, resilience, and agency, and it can help bring us all back together as people.
I look forward to the reunion. See you at the punch bowl!
As a helpful tool for when you’re ready to take the powerful weapons that are your wealth and your good heart and re-engage in the fight for our future as a maximally-effective change-maker, whether in UBI or another cause, here’s a short (5 min read) Philanthropist’s Field Guide to keep with you.
Want to read more? Here’s a handy list of links to all my Medium pieces on basic income.
