Universal Basic Services

The policy Yuval Noah Harari poses as the counterpart to Universal Basic Income in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century: instead of handing people money to spend, “the government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth.” Harari labels the two options as paradises with different parents — UBI is “the capitalist paradise,” UBS “the communist paradise” — and argues that even if the communist plan to start a working-class revolution is outdated, “perhaps we should still aim to realize the communist goal by other means.” Both are framed as responses to mass technological unemployment as AI pushes humans out of the job market.

Harari’s deeper point in the book is that the choice between the two paradises is the easy part: “no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what ‘universal’ and ‘basic’ actually mean.” He also warns that either form of basic support can succeed at improving objective conditions while still failing to make people “subjectively more satisfied with their lot,” because human expectations balloon to match improvements — tying UBS back to the book’s Future of Work and meaning-after-work threads.

Context: Universal Basic Services is a real policy proposal — most prominently developed in a 2017 report from University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity — advocating free or heavily subsidized access to essential services (housing, food, transport, information) as an alternative to cash-based universal basic income.

Where this appears

• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Harari contrasts UBS (the “communist paradise”) against Universal Basic Income (the “capitalist paradise”) as responses to AI-driven unemployment, then argues the hard problem is defining “universal” and “basic”