&gt; How will those non-rich people buy consumer goods if they have no money?<p>How will those rich people sell consumer goods if the poor don&#x27;t have money?<p>&gt; Our current economic system does not work in an age of increasing automation. The gains in wealth are being further concentrated in the hands of a few.<p>Absolutely true. I&#x27;d like to think that you and I are both as clueless as the agrarian citizens at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And maybe we are. But something about this wave of automation seems quantitatively different than the last one—as though there&#x27;s no new economic sectors to replace those that are being automated away<p>&gt; There is an answer to this dilemma -in the form of a guaranteed living income for all - but we seem to be rapidly moving in the opposite direction.<p>I like to frame that as a negative income tax, rather than a guaranteed income. It seems like less of a &quot;government program&quot;, which might help it sell. The beauty of a negative income tax is that it can be easily† adjusted as needed to suit an evolving economy. It&#x27;s not a separate program that is established and lives on. If (US) brackets are [10, 15, 25, 28, 33] (i think?), the new brackets could be [-50, -10, 0, 10, ...], with a 20k starter. So if you do absolutely nothing, you get 20k. If you make an additional 5k a year on the side, you&#x27;d be &quot;taxed&quot; at -50 on that and end up with 27.5k. At some level as your earnings increase, the subsidy fades off and is replaced with taxes.<p>†Technically-speaking, maybe not politically. But then again, this whole thing is a pipe-dream at present.