The Path to Progress: From Scarcity to Stewardship
We began on the left side of the human story, where time was survival. Every waking moment was spent scraping together enough to eat, shelter, and endure—subsistence living, built on trading time for necessities through favors and mutual dependence.
Then came our first great hack: money. It let us trade with strangers, scaling cooperation and unleashing a surge of creativity, growth, and connection. But it came at a cost. We tied dignity and identity to paychecks—a fragile bond that fractures under pressure. As some climbed the ladder toward civic engagement, generosity, and innovation, others remained trapped on the left by desperation, coerced labor, and a fraying safety net. The left-side problems—homelessness, hunger, crime—form a scarcity trap, cycles of joblessness and despair that cash could break, if deployed wisely. But we failed to do so. Instead, we leaned on patchwork fixes: minimum wage laws, welfare programs, and charities that demanded too much time from those on the right to shore up the left.
As more escaped survival’s grind, new, complex problems emerged—not just philosophical, but tangible and global:
How do we feed everyone without exhausting the planet?
How do we deliver clean water to every community?
How do we prevent and treat disease at scale?
How do we educate billions effectively?
How do we power progress without destroying the climate?
Tackling these global challenges required more than elbow grease—they needed capital, scale, and shared risk. So we invented our second great hack: capitalism. It channeled countless hours through the power of money, enabling distributed innovation. It worked. These challenges birthed new industries—healthcare, clean energy, global education—shifting “basic living” rightward. Life expectancy rose, literacy spread, and technology connected billions.
But progress came with trade-offs. Modern efficiency devalued individual time, leaving many working full-time yet unable to thrive, trapped in a system that demands their hours but doesn’t reward their needs. Those on the left had to keep selling their time into a system they couldn’t escape. Capitalism slid toward autocracy disguised as opportunity, with costs hidden in burnout, poverty traps, and wasted potential. Worse, markets got distracted—optimizing hedge funds and addicting us to screens while solvable problems like food distribution, affordable housing, and mental health lingered. We sidelined the market’s efficiency and tried to compensate with complex, top-down safety nets—when many of those “easy” problems were begging for bottom-up, market-driven solutions.
Meanwhile, the right-side challenges grew more personal and pressing:
What does it mean to live with abundance?
How do we reclaim purpose in a world of plenty?
What legacy do we leave for the future?
If paid work no longer guarantees survival, what is work for? What is time for?
Enter Hack 3: Almost Basic Income
Almost Basic Income (ABI) is a small, universal, unconditional cash stream that locks in our gains and buys back time. Imagine a magic poker club, where everyone receives chips each month just for showing up. These chips let them play the game—trade, create, participate—and as they do, the very act of playing generates more value. But some can’t afford to sit at the table. ABI gives them just enough to stay in the game—like a stack of chips that lets them ante in. It’s not about replacing effort; it’s about unlocking participation, where the magic happens.
ABI seeks the “sweet spot”—enough cash to spark opportunity without dulling ambition, balancing freedom and responsibility. It ensures that the tools we’ve built—clean water, healthcare, education, connection—don’t just exist, but reach everyone. ABI makes past innovation durable and future innovation possible.
Why “Almost” Basic?
Because the market is a powerful tool—but only for certain problems. ABI is designed to fund the needs the market is best at solving: food, shelter, health access, connectivity—needs where individuals know what they need, and providers compete to deliver it efficiently. For example, cash can solve hunger by empowering people to buy food, letting markets optimize distribution instead of charities patching gaps.
Problems just outside the market’s reach—like trauma, addiction, or unstable housing—can’t be solved by cash alone. They require tailored support, delivered by people who understand the full context. These are best handled by local organizations, not algorithms.
Problems far to the right—purpose, identity, legacy—can’t be solved by the market at all. In fact, we risk losing those things entirely if we let market logic creep too far.
A full basic income might be too much. It could push us to ask the market to solve things it shouldn’t—encouraging optimization where we need reflection, or consumption where we need connection. “Almost” keeps us grounded. It gives the market the jobs it’s good at—and reserves the rest of our time for what truly matters.
ABI Also Frees Two Kinds of Time
Time for those stuck in survival, so they can reengage with opportunity.
Time for those fixing broken systems, so they can focus on innovation and meaning.
That time is the raw material for solving the next wave of problems—not just survival, but sustainability, equity, and purpose. ABI doesn’t fix right-side challenges directly, but it creates the room for creativity, risk-taking, and generosity—the conditions where lasting solutions emerge.
Not Just Kind—Rational
Critics often worry that people will “waste” the money, but those concerns are rooted in four flawed assumptions:
Exploitation: That we must extract value from people’s time.
Coercion: That we only give help with strings attached.
Paternalism: That others know better than the person in need.
Fear: That people can’t be trusted to meet their own needs.
ABI rejects all four. It’s not just compassionate—it’s efficient. Instead of deciding who “deserves” help and how they must use it, we trust individuals to know what they need. This isn’t charity—it’s a streamlined allocation of resources. And when people’s needs are met, charities can shift from handing out food to healing trauma and nurturing connection.
The Laziness Illusion
Some fear that giving cash to people who are struggling will cause them to “check out”—to rot on the couch, scroll endlessly, and contribute nothing. But hunger and so-called laziness aren’t neighbors on the spectrum. They’re on opposite ends. What looks like laziness is often just despair: a nervous system stuck in shutdown, a spirit too depleted to engage.
We don’t introduce a right-side problem by solving a left-side one. In fact, we often avoid it. When people are no longer hungry, no longer in constant fear of eviction or humiliation, they begin to stabilize. The middle is where momentum builds—where people move not out of desperation, but from possibility.
Almost Basic Income doesn’t cause disengagement—it prevents it. It helps people lift their heads, make plans, and reconnect with the kind of purpose that can’t be found when every day is a crisis.
Built to Evolve
ABI isn’t a fixed formula—it’s a starting point. We can launch small pilots, track results, and scale wisely. Programs like Stockton’s guaranteed income experiment show promising outcomes: reduced stress and increased stability. We’ll test and tweak to find the sweet spot, ensuring ABI evolves with our needs.
And that flexibility is a feature, not a flaw. ABI is built to adapt—just like the country itself. We don’t need to get it perfect on day one. We need to start, learn, and improve. That’s how innovation has always worked here.
But ABI must stay within bounds—avoiding the trap of asking the market to fix things it can’t. That’s why it must remain almost: just enough to unlock dignity and opportunity, but never so much that we forget to choose how we use our time.
Because ultimately, meaning must come from impact—from mentorship, stewardship, and creation—not just a paycheck. And when wealth leaves basic problems unsolved, it casts a fog that drags even those on the right downward. ABI clears that fog, freeing time to ask the questions that really matter.
The Fork: Two Endings
We stand at a tipping point. Abundance is within reach, but the path splits:
If we wield abundance well, we’ll unlock:
Co-creative trust: People collaborating without gatekeepers, building solutions together.
Time-rich productivity: Working on the right things, with room to think and breathe.
Intergenerational uplift: Passing on opportunity, support, and a foundation to grow.
Distributed philanthropy: Everyday people—not just billionaires—giving back with means and motive.
We’ll move toward:
Mentorship: Sharing knowledge to help others level up.
Stewardship: Actively caring for the planet and future.
Deliberate legacy-building: Lives shaped not by careers, but by lasting impact.
But this future requires time to build. Right now, we’re too busy fixing the left to explore the decentralized platforms, cooperative models, or civic frameworks—like reimagined education or community-driven innovation—that could guide us there.
If we fail, abundance backfires. We drift into lethargy, status obsession, overconsumption, and identity confusion. Comfort breeds stagnation. Time is no longer lost to survival—but to distraction.
History warns us: empires like Rome collapsed not from scarcity, but from squandered surplus. ABI is a critical start, but without cultural guardrails—redefining contribution, fostering shared purpose—we risk the same fate.
This isn’t a utopia. It’s a story about allocating time and tools to meet needs and pursue wants. With time, tools, and trust, we can build that future together. Almost Basic Income is the lever that makes that shift possible. It buys time to solve easy problems with markets, tackle hard problems with minds, and co-create a future worth inheriting.
Maybe it’s easier to see in this view. Red is where we are. With (Almost) Basic Income we can move to the green boxes.
