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You learn a skill, do good work and support your family. Then a machine can do the work for less. The business still has customers. Your household still has bills.
If AI and robotics make that experience widespread, a growing economy could produce more goods while providing fewer paychecks. How would ordinary families participate in its prosperity? And who would control the terms?
In Universal High Income: A Conservative Case for Prosperity in the Age of AI, Randy White takes those questions seriously without giving up his commitment to private property, free markets, limited government and individual liberty.
Universal High Income, as he proposes it, could eventually support a comfortable ordinary life for eligible adult U.S. citizens without requiring wage employment. That possibility depends on dependable abundance in housing, energy, food, medicine and other essentials. A larger bank balance cannot substitute for a home that has not been built or electricity that has not been generated.
White explains the monetary argument in plain language, tests the physical limits of the abundance hypothesis, and outlines a conservative model with private production, market prices and accountable public administration. He confronts the danger of government control alongside the danger of protected companies closing markets to everyone else.
He also asks what greater material security could make possible: more room for family, enterprise, learning, faith and service. Those opportunities would still require human judgment and responsibility.
The book invites readers to consider an ambitious possibility and the demanding conditions it would have to meet. If an age of abundance becomes possible, a free society should be ready to shape it.
Print edition, 132 pages, 6 x 9 inches. Includes eighteen chapters, a plain-language economics glossary, and a subject and name index. Published by Dispensational Publishing House. ISBN 978-1-961110-52-6.