UBI won’t save us, and the nurse will tell you why

I have a friend who is a nurse. Not the TV kind, with good lighting and a romance subplot. The real kind. She does twelve-hour shifts, she lifts grown men who cannot lift themselves, she cleans up things you and I would rather not put into words, and she holds the hand of someone who is dying while their family is stuck in traffic. Then she goes home, sleeps badly, and does it again. Nights, weekends, Christmas.

Lately everybody is telling me she is going to be fine. Because of UBI.

You know the story by now. AI eats the white-collar jobs first: the programmers, the consultants, the accountants, the analysts, the whole army of people who move information around for living. And once that happens, the answer is supposedly obvious: Universal Basic Income. The machines do the work, the wealth gets redistributed, everyone gets a check, and we all go off (and I’m quoting Sam Altman‘s essay Moore’s Law for Everything here) to “spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good”. He even puts a number on it: about $13,500 a year for every adult in the US, paid for by taxing capital instead of labor.

Sounds nice. Sounds humane, even. And I think it’s broken at the core, and the crack runs straight through my friend the nurse.

AI is very good at a lot of jobs we used to call good jobs. And yes, it’s also good at a lot of bad ones: the call-center seat, the data entry, the bookkeeping nobody loved. But the work it cannot touch is suspiciously concentrated at one end. It cannot empty a bedpan. It cannot calm a frightened child in an ER at 3 AM. It cannot clear a blocked sewer pipe, fix your boiler, wire your house, clean the staircase. Maybe the robots get there eventually. Maybe. But the gap between when the spreadsheet job dies and when the bedpan job dies is measured in decades, not Tuesdays. For one whole working life, somebody human will still have to do the grim stuff.

Now here’s where the believer stops me. “But UBI is universal“, they say. “The nurse gets the exact same check as the ex-programmer. Nobody’s excluding her”. Correct. And that’s precisely where the trap awaits.

Because if she gets the same check, she is exactly as free to quit as everybody else. So she stands there at 3 AM, up to her elbows in someone else’s worst day, and she does the math. The ex-programmer next door is learning watercolors. The ex-consultant is doing yoga at 11 in the morning. The ex-accountant finally wrote his novel, God help us all. Why does she have to keep putting up with the stuff nobody else wants to touch with a remote control?

Call me blind, but I see only two ways this can end. Either she keeps showing up because she can’t just walk out on a dying patient. Or she does the perfectly rational thing the check explicitly permits: hangs up the scrubs, and goes home to paint. And then who bags the soiled linens? Who wipes up the vomit? Nobody. Until we make it worth her while again. Which marches us straight back into the problem we are trying to solve in the first place.

“So pay her more!”, you say. Pay nurses double! Heck, pay them triple! Let the market sort it out. And yes, fine, I’ll give you that one: the same tax on capital that funds everyone’s check can fund her raise too. The money is there. But look very carefully at what we just did. UBI was sold to us as the end of working-to-eat, the great decoupling of survival from labor, so nobody on Earth is ever again forced into job just to live. And the very first thing we do, the instant the dust settles, is dangle a fat paycheck to keep the nurse doing the one job nobody else wants to do anymore. For her, and people like her, we quietly switch the old machine back on. Everyone else gets liberation. She gets a… bribe, if we’re honest, to keep doing the worst work in the building. Yes, she ends up making more money than the ex-programmer next door, but she is the only one on the whole street who still has to earn it. That’s far from universal freedom.

And don’t bet the bribe is even as fat as the fairy tale needs it to be. David Graeber formulated a cruel little law that the more obviously useful your work is to other people, the less you tend to get paid for it. Corona crisis made it naked. We called these people “essential”, clapped to them from balconies, and kept paying them peanuts. The optimist has an answer ready, of course: once nobody is desperate, the nasty jobs must beg for workers, so pay them properly! Fine. But this only works where the world can let the job stay empty. The nurse, unfortunately, is the kind of worker whose “no” the society cannot accept. This freedom would never be universal. It would be borrowed, from the nurse and the others who could not be allowed to walk away.

Now, all of that is theory, my theory, for the better part. But what does hard evidence say? Next to nothing. Three countries actually tried a version of this: Finland, Mongolia, and Iran. And not one of them proved a thing. Too small, too short, or simply gone broke before they could tell us anything. Nobody has run an experiment that would settle it: everybody, freed, forever, all at once. The man who bet biggest on UBI, Sam Altman, who championed it and then sank $14 million of his own money into a $60-million, three-year cash experiment, came out the other side: “I no longer believe in universal basic income as much as I once did”. When the man who used to sell a dream stops buying it himself, you pay attention.

But forget for a moment whether it even works. Follow the money instead. UBI runs on the rents from AI and those rents pool in a handful of places: the few countries that build the stuff, and the rich ones that buy the stuff and tax it at home. Everybody else gets nothing to hand out. No AI industry to milk. No fat capital to tax. And, as a cherry on top, the cheap-labor ladder they were busy climbing just got automated out from under them. So UBI doesn’t abolish inequality. It multiplies it, then freezes it into the map: a few post-scarcity islands where citizens are paid just to exist, and the rest of the planet written off. That kind of a gap between nations we have never seen in our entire history.

The clever people have an answer for this too, of course: make the dividend global. Tax the whole AI windfall, share it with all of humanity. Beautiful. Good luck with that. Sure enough, the United States and China are going to tax their golden geese and wire the proceeds to everybody else, with compliments? Makes for an awesome kindergarten picture book. Whoever owns the machines owns the money, and they are nobody’s charity. The check stops at the border.

So zoom in to one street or out to the whole planet, it simply cannot work. They call it universal. But the nurse still works while her neighbors paint, and whole countries struggle while a lucky few are paid to exist. A world built like that is no utopia. It’s a powder keg with a smiley face painted on it.