You may have heard about a number that keeps getting cited in conversations about American prosperity (a euphemism for wealth consolidation). Productivity in the United States has increased by roughly 60 percent since 1979. Worker compensation has grown by about 18 percent over the same period. That yawning, decades-long chasm between what workers produce and what workers receive was intentional; it was the goal.
Plainly stated, it’s how corporate capitalism works: gains belong to capital, rather than people. The risk belongs to labor. The arrangement has been so thoroughly normalized that pointing it out still sounds, to some ears, like radicalism.
That’s one of their tricks, making us feel like pointing out arithmetic is radical.
The consolidation of wealth upward wasn’t a singular dramatic moment, it’s been planned in quarterly earnings calls and trade negotiations and shareholder primacy doctrines and the systematic dismantling of unions across four decades. It happened when “efficiency” became a euphemism for headcount reductions that padded executive bonuses while eliminating benefits and pensions. It happened when the same companies lobbying against minimum wage increases were simultaneously issuing billions in stock buybacks to inflate share prices for a class of people who already owned most of the assets.
By the time the 2008 financial crisis arrived — a crisis built on products so complex and fraudulent that the architects themselves sometimes didn’t understand them — it was clear the playbook was to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. The banks got bailed out; the workers got foreclosure notices.
Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage since 2009.
Consider a single data point that makes the entire arrangement legible: the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. Not once. A full-time minimum wage worker earns $15,080 a year. Congress earns more than eleven times that. The people paid to represent workers have spent fifteen years deciding, repeatedly, that workers don’t need a raise.
For a long time, the implicit social contract was that if you worked hard enough, you could still find your footing in America. That contract is now being shredded by the very companies that profited most from it.
Let’s talk about what the AI industry actually is.
The large language models, image generators, music synthesis tools, and coding assistants that now power a trillion-dollar industry were not built from scratch. Without providing compensation, consent, or credit, they were built by ingesting the accumulated intellectual and creative output of millions of human beings. Writers. Visual artists. Musicians. Coders. Journalists. Forum posters. People who put their work into the world and, in doing so, contributed to the substrate from which these systems learned to simulate human thought.
The companies that did this are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The people whose work made it possible got little to nothing.
That’s not a metaphor or an overstatement, it’s what happened.
The artists who discovered their distinctive styles had been reproduced and remixed without their knowledge were told, in various ways, to get over it. To adapt. To find new value propositions in a market that had just strip-mined their primary one. The legal system is still working out whether any of this was theft. The moral question should have been easier.
The AI situation is categorically different than past technological disruptions that came from raw materials like iron ore or cotton. It was (and continues to be) human expression. Our capacity to create meaning, to tell stories, to communicate across time was vacuumed into a training pipeline and monetized without so much as a thank you.
And now the machine they built on your back is coming for your job and your dignity.
Corporate America did not spend the last decade pouring money into AI research because it believes in the liberating potential of technology. It did so because artificial intelligence is the most powerful labor-cost-reduction tool ever developed, and labor cost reduction is the most reliable path to margin expansion that Wall Street rewards.
The same companies that have spent decades resisting living wages are now racing to replace the workers demanding them. Customer service departments hollowed out. Paralegal work being restructured. Marketing copy, graphic design, basic coding, medical imaging analysis, financial modeling — all of it being absorbed, at least partially, by systems that don’t require health insurance, don’t take breaks, and won’t organize.
This is being framed, as these things always are, as progress. And in some limited technical sense, it is. But progress for whom? When a company uses AI to eliminate 30 percent of its workforce and passes exactly zero percent of the resulting savings on to its remaining employees or its customers, depositing it instead directly into share buybacks and C-suite compensation — it’s the same old heist with different language and tools.
The gap between productivity and compensation that opened in 1979 is about to get dramatically wider. The economic pressure on workers who aren’t in the thin tier of AI-adjacent roles is about to intensify, and the social contract, already frayed, is about to be handed a pair of scissors.
Universal Basic Income is not a new idea. It’s been championed across the political spectrum from Milton Friedman’s negative income tax to Martin Luther King Jr.’s guaranteed income proposal to the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has delivered annual dividends to state residents since 1982. The philosophical underpinnings are solid, the pilot results are largely encouraging, and the objections are mostly variations on a theme of “but what if people stop working,” which has not, historically, been what people do when their survival anxiety is reduced.
But the argument for UBI has never been stronger than it is right now, in this specific moment, for this specific reason: the wealth being extracted by AI systems was not created in a vacuum. It was created by everyone. The training data that makes these systems function is, in the most literal sense, a collective inheritance of human thought and expression accumulated over centuries and harvested over the last decade. That commons is now generating extraordinary private profit.
If the raw material is collective, the returns should be, at least in large part, collective too.
The story of AI as individual entrepreneurial genius is a useful fiction for the people it benefits. OpenAI did not write the internet. Meta did not paint every image its models have ingested. The humans who produced that content did. And while we may not be able to individually compensate each of them, we can ensure that the windfall doesn’t flow exclusively to the equity holders of half a dozen San Francisco companies.
A UBI funded by a tax on AI-generated revenue and the profits of companies deploying automated labor would do several things at once. It would provide a genuine floor for people whose economic footing is being destabilized by automation. It would return a portion of the value created from collective labor back to the collective. And it would establish, as a matter of policy, that the benefits of technological progress are not automatically the private property of whoever built the software.
It is also worth being clear-eyed about the political obstacle: a Congress that has refused to raise the minimum wage for fifteen years is not going to champion universal basic income without enormous public pressure. The same captured legislature that has decided, annually, that $7.25 an hour is sufficient for the working poor will not suddenly develop a conscience. The case for UBI is inseparable from the case for a political class that is actually accountable to the people it represents.
We can’t afford it.
The United States has, in the last fifteen years, found trillions of dollars to bail out banks, cut corporate taxes, fund multiple wars, and subsidize an industry that is now worth more than the GDP of most countries. The question is not whether we can afford a basic income, it is whose income we’ve decided matters.
It will cause inflation.
This is an empirical issue, and the evidence from existing pilots is more nuanced than the objection suggests. A well-designed UBI, particularly one funded by taxes on concentrated wealth rather than money creation, is not inherently inflationary. Some price pressure in some sectors is a real concern; millions of people unable to meet basic needs is a larger one.
It will kill the incentive to work.
Pilot programs don’t support this. What they do support is that people, when freed from pure survival anxiety, tend to make better decisions about their own lives — including working, starting businesses, pursuing education, and providing care for family members in ways that are economically invisible but socially essential.
The disruption being described here isn’t hypothetical or a decade away. The layoffs are already happening. The automation of white-collar work is accelerating. The companies posting record profits while reducing headcount are doing so this quarter, not in some projected future scenario.
And the people who built the systems enabling all of this — not just the engineers, but every writer whose sentences were parsed, every artist whose work was classified, every human who ever left a digital trace of their inner life — are being handed the bill.
A universal basic income will not solve every problem created by the concentration of wealth and the reckless deployment of technology in service of that concentration. But it is the most direct available answer to a direct and urgent question: when the machine takes the job, who gets paid?
Right now, the answer is the shareholders.
It doesn’t have to be.
If you found this useful, share it. If you disagree, make the argument. The conversation we’re not having loudly enough is the one that will determine what the next twenty years actually look like for most people.