Money and Work Unchained

de Charles Hugh Smith

The current conventional-wisdom view of our soon-to-be future is rose-tinted: automation will free millions of people from the drudgery of work, then by taxing the robots doing all the work, we can pay everyone Universal Basic Income (UBI), enabling a life of leisure and artistic pursuit for all. The result: A future of Universal Happiness. But is this accurate? Is this what UBI is actually capable of doing? More importantly, is this what we want? And even more importantly: will this “future” be our best future? Will it account for and manage the practicalities of work, money and automation, given the limits of endless growth on a finite planet? Money and Work Unchained drags the now-popular concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) from the shadows of Pundit blather into a harsh, illuminating light, and in doing so presents an entirely new view of the future that upends our conventional understanding of work and money. This book lays out a practical pathway that realigns work, money and human fulfillment into a sustainable system that sheds the inequalities and injustices of the status quo in favor of a human-scale way of living.