Money for a Post-Work World

In May 2017 Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at Harvard University and used his commencement address to call for something that even a few years earlier would have been regarded as radical, at least coming from a capitalist billionaire: Governments, he said, should start giving everyone a regular paycheque, no strings attached. “We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful,” Zuckerberg told his audience. “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”

Zuckerberg is far from the only member of the Silicon Valley zillionaire class to advocate strongly in the past couple of years for governments to provide some form of guaranteed minimum income to their citizens. Citing the spectre of artificial intelligence-driven automation, Elon Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai last year that “there will be fewer...