What if your 70-year-old mother never had to choose between heating and eating? What if your autistic brother could contribute to the world on his own terms, at his own pace, in the hours that work for his nervous system and still live with dignity? What if the night owl who does her best thinking at 2am didn't have to betray her own biology five days a week just to pay rent?
What if none of us ever had to?
I think about this a lot. Not as a fantasy, but as a design problem. We built the current economic system. We can build a different one. The question isn't whether it's possible, it's whether we have the courage to try.
The talent we're leaving on the table
Here's what keeps me up at night.
Somewhere out there is a mind that would have rivalled Einstein. A person with an unusual way of seeing the world, a thinker who makes connections no one else can make. They're stacking shelves right now. Or they're doing data entry. Or they burned out three years ago trying to fit themselves into a system that was never built for them, and now they don't do much of anything.
We left them there.
Not out of cruelty. Out of indifference. Because the current system has no mechanism for finding that person and saying: your kind of mind matters, and we're going to make space for it.
I know this because I live at the edges of it. Neurodivergent people are five times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. Five times. I don't think that's because something is wrong with them. I think it's because the world keeps telling them there's no place for them in it. No place that pays, anyway. And the threat of poverty is enough to break almost anyone.
Real genius, in my experience, lives at the fringes. The people who think differently, who resist standardisation, who can't make themselves fit, those are often the ones who see things no one else does. We're not just failing them. We're failing ourselves by wasting them.
Economic coercion
The current system runs on a threat. Do your job or face hunger, homelessness, and everything that follows from those. We call this "incentive." I call it coercion, and I find it morally objectionable.
I understand the counter-argument. Without the pressure of consequence, why would anyone do the hard, unglamorous work that keeps society running? It's a fair question. But I think it mistakes fear for motivation.
The people doing their best work, the ones who are genuinely contributing something, are almost never doing it because they're afraid of starving. They're doing it because the work matters to them. Because they care. Because they'd do it anyway.
Fear produces compliance. It doesn't produce excellence. And compliance is the floor of what we should want from each other, not the ceiling.
A Sovereign Wealth Fund
I'm not the first person to say any of this. Universal Basic Income has been discussed for decades. I'm not trying to claim the idea. I'm trying to boost the signal, and add one specific framing that I think clarifies the mechanism.
The proposal: a Sovereign Wealth Fund, funded by a proportional tax on companies (the larger the company, the more they contribute) that pays every citizen the same guaranteed income. Not a supplement. A salary. Enough to live on with dignity.
In a world where this exists, companies don't pay salaries anymore. The Fund does. A company still competes for people's time and talent, but through purpose, environment, and meaning. Not through the threat of economic desperation. People work because they want to, not because they have to.
The fund grows through reinvestment and taxation. Its governance is split across independent branches. Deliberately decentralised, deliberately resistant to capture by any single interest. No government controls it. No corporation owns it. It belongs to everyone.
Objections
People will balk. I get it. Let me try to persuade you.
Motivation: If everyone earns the same, why would anyone pursue excellence? I'd push back on the premise. We already live in a world where the highest-paid people are rarely the most valuable ones, and where enormous amounts of essential work (care work, creative work, community work) goes uncompensated entirely. The current system doesn't reward excellence. Truly incompetent people are rich beyond our wildest dreams. It only requires ruthlessness, privilege, and luck. The question isn't "how do we preserve the existing incentive structure?" It's "what better incentives could we design?"
Transition: How do you get from here to there without everything collapsing in between? Honestly, I don't know. What I do know is that the current system is already strained to breaking point by climate, by automation, by inequality that has reached levels historically associated with social collapse. We are going to face a hard transition regardless. The question is whether we design the new system intentionally, or wait for the old one to fail on its own terms. Choose your hard.
Governance: Who controls a fund with this much power? No one, ideally, or rather, many people with competing interests and mutual oversight. The same problem exists with central banks, reserve currencies, and international courts. It's solved imperfectly everywhere it exists. Imperfect governance is still governance.
Corporations and billionaires would lose leverage under this system. They'll come up with any excuse and entire playbooks to not have to relinquish control.
But I'd ask them to read a history book.
Extreme inequality doesn't end with the wealthy quietly staying wealthy. It ends with revolution. Not always. Not every time. But the pattern is consistent enough across enough centuries and enough cultures that it should be treated as a predictable outcome, not a remote possibility. The question the powerful should be asking themselves isn't "how do we protect what we have?" It's "what are we willing to give up in order to not lose everything?"
My pitch to them is this: you can participate in designing a better system, or you can resist until the people who have nothing to lose decide they're done waiting. That's history for you.
The world I want
I want to live in a world where contribution is possible for everyone, not just those who were born into the right circumstances, or whose minds happen to fit the current template.
I want a world where the 70-year-old woman can rest. Where the autistic brother can work when his brain is ready. Where the genius who currently stacks shelves gets to find out what she's actually capable of.
That world is buildable. We just haven't decided to build it yet.