21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Whichever way you choose to define “basic human needs,” once you provide them to everyone free of charge, they will be taken for granted, and then fierce social competitions and political struggles will focus on luxuries—be they fancy self-driving cars, access to virtual-reality parks, or enhanced bioengineered bodies. Yet if the unemployed masses command no economic assets, it is hard to see how they could ever hope to obtain such luxuries. Consequently, the gap between the rich (Tencent managers and Google shareholders) and the poor (those dependent on universal basic income) might become not merely bigger but actually unbridgeable. For this reason, even if some universal support scheme provides poor people in 2050 with much better healthcare and education than they receive today, they might still be extremely angry about global inequality and the lack of social mobility. People will feel that the system is rigged against them, that the government serves only the superrich, and that the future will be even worse for them and their children.29