Why universal basic income still can’t meet the challenges of an AI economy
Eduardo Porter
December 15, 2025
Andrew Yang’s revived pitch suits the automation debate, but UBI can’t fix inequalities concentrated tech wealth drives
www.theguardian.com
Universal basic income (UBI) is back, like a space zombie in a sci-fi movie, resurrected from policy oblivion, hungry for policymakers’ attention: brains!
Andrew Yang, whose “Yang Gang” enthusiasm briefly shook up the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 promoting a “Freedom Dividend” to save workers from automation – $1,000 a month for every American adult – is again the main carrier of the bug: offering UBI to save the nation when robots eat all our jobs.
This time Chat GPT, Yang hopes, will help his argument land: if artificial intelligence truly makes human labor redundant, as so many citizens of the tech bubble in Silicon Valley expect, society will need something other than employment for all of us to make ends meet.
Yet while the warning rings true, the prescription still falls flat. We will need something big and new to spread money around if some super-human intelligence comes for all the jobs. But a UBI, as contemplated by its current cheerleaders, does not start to address the real challenges of an economy that has moved past human labor.
Ask a truck driver (Yang was worried about truck drivers) to live on $1,000 a month. A two-parent, two-kid family on the “Freedom Dividend” would be pretty deep under water, living on 25% less than needed to poke through the poverty line.
The bill to provide every adult a guaranteed income worth, say, $53,000 per year, equivalent to the median earnings of American workers, would add up to over $14tn, about 45% of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). Good luck to the politician running on a platform to fund this brave new world...
