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Let’s be honest for a second, because if you look closely at your bank account after a grueling forty-hour workweek, the math just isn’t mathing anymore. You can spend all week framing houses, fixing burst pipes, or sweating over a hot line in a kitchen, and still find yourself sweating through the grocery checkout line trying to figure out which basic necessities to put back. Meanwhile, algorithmic day-traders, speculative crypto influencers, and reality stars clear millions by clicking a mouse or reading a scripted line into an iPhone.
We are living through a weird timeline where the actual builders (the people who physically construct, maintain, feed, and hold up our society) are treated like an absolute afterthought. At the same time, the people who manage digital paperwork, extract financial fees, or dish out online entertainment get rewarded like royalty. It feels backwards because it is backwards.
Whenever you point out this obvious imbalance, the tech elite and corporate political circles love to pitch the exact same shiny silver bullet. Universal Basic Income, powered by an AI-driven deflationary boom. They promise us that artificial intelligence is going to automate every task under the sun, plunge the cost of goods down to zero, and that the government will simply hand out a monthly digital check so we can all sit back and relax.
If that sounds a little too convenient to you, your instincts are spot on. What they are pitching isn’t some starry-eyed blueprint for the future. It’s a very old control mechanism dusted off for the digital age, and we need to talk about why relying on it is a massive mistake.
The Roman Playbook and the Mirage of Free Bread
This whole dynamic isn’t a new story. Over two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal looked around at his decaying republic-turned-empire and coined a phrase that perfectly captures our modern political trap. The phrase is panem et circenses, or Bread and Circuses.
The Roman elite figured out something fundamental about human nature and power. If you strip away the working class’s economic independence, inflate the cost of everyday living, and concentrate all the real wealth at the very top, people get furious. Angry citizens organize, and organized citizens demand real political reform. To keep that from happening, the Roman emperors didn’t actually fix the underlying economic structures. Instead, they handed out free grain through the public dole and hosted massive, free gladiator matches at the Colosseum. If you keep the population fed just enough to survive, and keep their brains flooded with cheap dopamine, they won’t organize to demand structural power.
Fast-forward to right now, and the formula looks eerily familiar. Just replace the imperial grain dole with a monthly government app transfer, and swap out the Colosseum for infinite doomscrolling, streaming subscriptions, and outrage algorithms. When big tech executives push for a state-funded basic income to solve AI-driven job displacement, they aren’t offering us a path to freedom. They are buying political insurance against a public backlash. They get to keep ownership of the productive assets, the data centers, and the core algorithms, while the rest of us get a managed baseline allowance to spend directly back into their proprietary digital ecosystems.
The Great Divergence and the Deflationary AI Myth
The core promise underlying the Silicon Valley narrative is that AI will spark a wave of hyper-deflation. The theory goes that if intelligence and labor become virtually free, the cost of food, housing, clothing, and medicine will drop to near zero.
There’s just one problem with that line of thinking. We’ve already run this experiment, and that’s not how our economic system reacts to massive technological leaps.
Look at what happened during the computing revolution over the last few decades. Worker productivity skyrocketed thanks to personal computers, the internet, and global supply networks. But according to detailed historical tracking from the Economic Policy Institute, while net productivity grew by over 90% between 1979 and recent years, typical worker pay only grew by a fraction of that. The gap between what workers produce and what they actually get paid widened into a massive canyon.
When tech makes production vastly cheaper, those savings almost never trickle down into across-the-board price cuts for consumers. Instead, those excess margins get absorbed as corporate profits, stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages.
When you dive into the long-term datasets on the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) platform, a clear pattern emerges. The prices of non-negotiable real-world assets (like housing, healthcare, and higher education) persistently outpace average wage growth. Generating a instant AI movie for pennies or buying cheap plastic goods from an automated factory doesn’t help a family whose rent eats up 60% of their income. Without changing who actually owns the underlying productive tech, AI won’t make real life dirt cheap. It will just further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few companies hosting the server farms.
Flipping the Script to Reward Real Builders
So how do we fix an economy that gives millions of dollars to digital noise while the people holding up the physical infrastructure barely get by? It comes down to moving away from financialization and attention economics.
Over the past forty years, our economic incentives shifted sharply away from production (making tangible things that people actually need) and toward extraction, which means monetizing user attention, building complex financial instruments, and charging digital rent. The platforms that dominate human attention capture almost all the financial rewards, creating a world where spectacle pays infinitely better than substance.
If we want to build a system where fair wages exist and real creators are praised, we have to stop offering band-aids like UBI and start making core structural changes to how value and ownership work.
First, we need to talk about broad-based ownership of technology. If an automated system or an AI model replaces a chunk of human labor, the financial gains shouldn’t just flow to a board of directors in San Francisco. Workers need direct equity in the automated tools of production. Whether that happens through worker-owned tech cooperatives, mandatory profit-sharing, or decentralized protocols, the people doing the work need a real piece of the upside.
Second, our tax and labor policies need to stop favoring financial speculation over physical work. Right now, capital gains from passive investments and high-frequency trading are often taxed far more favorably than the hard-earned income of a laborer, painter, or mechanic. Rebalancing those scales to lighten the tax load on physical labor while taxing algorithmic and speculative capital returns would instantly redirect value back to the people who build things.
Third, we have to fight for open-source technology. If the most powerful AI models, robotics platforms, and data infrastructure remain locked inside proprietary corporate walled gardens, independent creators and small businesses will always get squeezed out. Supporting open, decentralized tech infrastructure ensures that productivity-enhancing tools remain a public utility rather than an engine for corporate feudalism.
Reclaiming Value in a Digital World
Money isn’t broken because we lack the resources or technology to create a thriving society. It’s broken because our systems have spent decades decoupling monetary compensation from actual human contribution.
We don’t have to quietly accept a future where the majority of society is placed on a digital allowance, kept quiet by infinite algorithmic feeds and an endless stream of cheap entertainment. True fairness doesn’t mean handing people just enough bread to keep them from complaining. It means building an economy where the people who chop the wood, lay the block, cook the meals, and maintain our communities own a direct share of the prosperity they create.
It’s time to look past the modern circus and start demanding a world where real value, real labor, and real creation are finally given the respect (and the compensation) they deserve.
Thanks for reading everyone! Visit my site to learn more about me and explore what I’m building at Learn With Hatty. I have not been able to update my websites in a while. Hopefully soon I will have more time. Time is our worst enemy. I hope everyone has a great day and as you know, stay curious and keep learning.
