Okay, so I have a question for you.
Imagine a world where the government starts paying you a
salary — just for being alive.
What would you do?
"Hmm."
"I'd spend it on clothes, shoes, junk food."
"I'd probably gone like a a week's long, lazy streak."
"I'd spend money like crazy!
I wouldn't even..."
Sound too good to be true?
Well, let's add some more details.
Imagine the check is for somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars every month.
Imagine you get paid even if you already have a job.
Imagine you can spend the money however you want, no strings attached.
And imagine it's considered an inalienable human right, like
access to water or voting.
Now, this is actually a real idea.
Economists call it the Universal Basic Income, and they estimate
that to make it happen in America, it would cost the government around
3 trillion dollars every year.
That's almost as much as the United States spends a year — on everything.
Okay, now imagine a clock.
Uh, it doesn't have any numbers on it yet, but it's the clock
counting down to the day a universal basic income becomes a reality.
The day we all get paid — just for being alive.
The thing is, when we asked people this question, they all agreed about one thing.
"Would I quit my job?
I don't think I'll quit."
" I'd probably just buy myself more stuff.
But I wouldn't quit my job or anything."
"I don't know.
I I, I could get really bored if I didn't have anything to do.
I wouldn't wanna —" "You'd do something with the money obviously, " "Yeah,
but like travel, you'd get bored..."
So people would keep working.
And to be honest, that's just as well.
Because high school economics tells us that capitalism — the whole market economy
thing — is based on the idea of work.
You need people to make things just as much as you need people to buy them.
When technology improved after World War 2, productivity began to increase.
And we've been enjoying the benefits ever since.
If we all got paid a basic income and just quit our jobs — Well, no work, no economy.
Now, today, more and more of us are lucky enough to find jobs and careers that
we love, but pictures like this show us that for the majority of people in modern
history, work has been a necessity.
A mindless...
repetitive...
necessity.
Which, to be honest, is a bit of a shame.
Because it wasn't supposed to be this way.
Technology was supposed to get better and more efficient and free us all from
work, free us to live a life of leisure.
And these aren't the fanciful dreams of a sci-fi writer.
They're the theories of one of the most important economists of the 20th century.
In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression, he predicted that by
the year 2030, we'd all be working just three hours a day, maybe fewer.
Well, with just 15 years before that date, it feels like we're working more
hours, not fewer, which is ironic.
Really.
We've become trapped by the very thing that was supposed to set us free.
And yet slowly but surely, Keynes's prediction is starting to come true.
Robots work 24 hours a day for free.
They don't take vacations, they don't take maternity or paternity leave.
There's an economic inevitability to all of this.
Last year, Oxford University study calculated that 47% of American
jobs are at a high risk of being automated in the next 10 to 20 years.
Now, a lot of people think technology will create new jobs to replace
the old ones, and that is likely.
But no one seems to think there'll be enough work for everyone.
Keynes called it technological unemployment.
But hey, it's not so bad.
Because machines are so cheap, the cost of almost everything from food
to phones will go down and we'll have an amazing opportunity to
redefine how we spend our lives.
Freed from the nine to five.
"Now, if I told you that you've never had to work again, if you didn't want
to and you never had to worry about money, all of your bills are paid,
what would you do with the time?"
"I'm gonna have fun.
I'm gonna live like I'm gonna have no stress!"
"Gimme more time to serve people, gimme more time to be of service,
gimme more time to be productive."
"I would like probably just like make sure I go to college and
have like a better education."
"I could go play basketball again.
I could start traveling the world again instead of staying in one
place because I have a job."
"That would be wonderful, right?
That's wonderful.
Seriously!"
But all that doesn't explain why this clock is still ticking.
There's one last piece of the puzzle we've missed.
Yes, our market economy relies on people making things and people buying
them, but we always forget one thing.
The producers and the consumers...
they're the same people.
If people can't work, they can't earn money, and if they can't earn
money, they can't buy anything.
And if they can't buy anything...
it's the end of capitalism as we know it.
Unless, unless we can find a way for people to keep spending money,
even if they don't earn any?
Experiments in a universal basic income, are already being run all over the world.
On the other side is a potentially amazing future.
For a start, 45 million Americans would be lifted out of poverty almost overnight.
For many more of us, it would be the chance to pursue our passions and dreams
without worrying about paying the rent.
It does have its problems though; questions we haven't
figured out the answers to yet.
But as long as a future with mass technological unemployment
is likely; a future where most people don't have jobs...
the day when we all get paid just to exist is all but inevitable.