Too Early, But Inevitable: UBI, and the Future We Pretend Is Not Coming
UBI isn’t a 2025 policy. It’s a 2075 inevitability.
In the 2020 presidential cycle, a guy almost nobody had heard of showed up and changed the conversation. An Asian American entrepreneur named Andrew Yang launched a long shot campaign for president after announcing his run in 2017. He was not a senator, not a governor, not a general. He was “that UBI guy.”
Andrew Yang’s signature idea was simple. Universal Basic Income. One thousand dollars a month to every American adult. The Freedom Dividend.
If you read his books or listen to him talk, he has a lot more on his mind. Automation. AI. Jobs. Wages. A wealth tax. Social Security. Healthcare. The mental health crisis. The hollowing out of small towns. He sees the whole system fraying.
But everything he talks about keeps circling back to one central idea. Universal Basic Income.
And I will be the first to say it. Andrew Yang was intriguing as hell.
Not only was I endorsed by the Forward Party, but Yang and his movement donated to my first run for Congress. I bought both of his books. I read the first one cover to cover more than once. I have a lot of respect for how far he pushed the conversation.
But I told him this directly, in my Forward Party interview and when I met him in person.
UBI is too early.
And I was right.
At the same time, I think UBI is inevitable.
Both of those things can be true.
What It Means To Be Too Early
Being too early does not mean you are wrong. In fact, it usually means you are right before anyone else can see it.
Being too early means:
The idea is correct.
The trend is real.
The future is coming.
But the world is not ready yet.
The technology might not exist at scale. The culture is not prepared. The business models are not stable. The political imagination is still too small. The markets, the voters, the institutions, the timelines, all of it says “not yet” even while your brain is screaming “this is where we are going.”
You see the future clearly. Everyone else thinks you are nuts.
History is full of people who were right too soon.
Da Vinci, iPhones, and Electric Cars
Leonardo da Vinci sketched flying machines and helicopter-like designs in the late 1400s and early 1500s. He understood lift, blades, and flight dynamics centuries before the Wright brothers ever left the ground. The idea was right. The world just did not have the engines, materials, or math to make it real. He was hundreds of years early.
Touchscreen phones are another example. Apple did not invent the touchscreen phone. There were touch capable devices, PDAs, and phones with styluses and clunky resistive screens long before the iPhone. They existed, but most people hated using them. They were slow, imprecise, and frustrating.
BlackBerry ruled that era because people trusted physical keyboards. I was one of the people who thought the iPhone might fail. I could not imagine people giving up keys for glass. It was not until I picked one up, felt how responsive it was, and saw what it could do, that it clicked. Apple arrived at the exact moment when the technology, the software, and the user expectations finally aligned.
Electric cars are the same story. They are not some brand new invention from the 2000s. Electric vehicles existed in the late 19th and early 20th century. For a while, they even outsold gasoline cars. Then batteries, infrastructure, and range limitations killed them off.
We saw waves of electric vehicle interest again in the 1970s during the oil shocks. Then again in the 1990s with cars like the GM EV1. Time after time, the tech, the cost, and the market did not quite line up. It was not until Tesla produced the Roadster and especially the Model S in the 2010s that electric cars finally landed as a mainstream, desirable product.
The idea was never wrong. It was early.
UBI Feels Like That Same Pattern
Universal Basic Income falls into that same category for me. It is not a wild fantasy. It is a future inevitability.
Automation is already here. AI is already here. You do not need a science fiction imagination to see where this is going. Robots are already building cars, stocking warehouses, moving packages. AI is already drafting documents, analyzing data, coding, answering questions, and doing work that used to pay people’s rent.
Now extend that out a few decades.
Agricultural robotics.
Automated construction.
Factory lines that never sleep.
Self driving logistics networks.
Layer in materials science, biotech, and advances in energy and manufacturing. It is not hard to imagine a world that moves from scarcity to something very close to abundance.
Food production that is highly automated.
Housing construction that is massively cheaper.
Goods that are produced with almost no human labor on the line.
In that world, you do not need every human being working forty hours a week in order for society to function. At some point, the question becomes:
If machines and code are doing more and more of the work, how do humans get money to live?
That is where UBI walks back in.
UBI is not a magic solution for 2025. But it might be a necessary solution for 2050 or 2075.
Why UBI Is Too Early Right Now
For today’s economy, most of the criticisms of UBI are valid.
It would almost certainly be inflationary at current production levels.
We still need a lot of human labor to keep systems running.
Our tax structures and budgets are not built to sustain it.
We do not have the political will or trust to administer it fairly.
The culture still ties dignity and identity to work.
Right now, if we dropped a UBI into the current system, it would interact with housing speculation, healthcare price gouging, student debt, and corporate power in ways that could make a lot of things worse before they even maybe got better…. and i did say maybe.
UBI is not a good fit for this economy.
But this economy is not going to last.
That is the part people do not want to talk about.
The Writing Is On The Wall
Unless there is a global catastrophe that knocks civilization back a hundred years, we are heading toward a world of much higher productivity with fewer people doing the work.
And if we do get knocked back a hundred years, that is not a clean reset. That is mass death, collapsed systems, and a total reordering of global power. Nobody in their right mind should be rooting for that just to avoid a hard conversation about the future of work.
So if we avoid catastrophe, we are on the path to:
More automation.
More AI.
Higher output with fewer workers.
Cheaper goods and services, at least on the production side.
In that world, we will either let the gains pool at the very top and watch inequality skyrocket past anything we have seen, or we will build systems, like UBI or something like it, to give everyone a claim on that abundance.
UBI is not ready now.
But we need to start planning for when it will be.
What We Should Be Doing Right Now
I am not saying “pass UBI tomorrow.” I am saying this:
We need to start having adult conversations about:
How to structure a future UBI so it does not just feed inflation and rent extraction.
How to phase it in as automation and productivity rise.
How to tie it to real-world output, not just government money printing and hoping.
How to keep people engaged in meaningful work, craft, and contribution, even if survival is no longer tied to a job.
We do not have to resolve all of that today.
But we do have to stop pretending the question is not coming.
Andrew Yang was too early.
That does not mean he was wrong.
If anything, it means we need to catch up.
Because if we wait until the automation wave has wiped out millions of jobs and destabilized entire regions, it will be too late to have a calm, rational, well designed conversation about how to keep people housed, fed, and secure.
UBI is not for now.
It is, however, for the world we are building whether we admit it or not.
Are you an ANGRY DEMOCRAT? If so, the please share with other Angry Dems.
Very thoughtful and sensible. How should we cast the UBI experiments communities are currently creating?
And here is why a “liberal education” may be more essential than currently popular to advocate. (You wrote we need to know “How to keep people engaged in meaningful work, craft, and contribution, even if survival is no longer tied to a job.)
I’d also like to see children raised by people who love them (instead of people who feel ego or cash driven and so leave that most important job to daycare & all-day schools).