Author: Wang Chao
Lee Jae-myung, the new president of South Korea, has many labels: the Suwon mayor, a 20-day hunger striker, an idol, a live-streamed parliamentary gate-crasher. Beyond these widely known labels, if one looks closely at his political experience over the past decade, another important label emerges: a money distributor. From Seongnam City to Gyeonggi Province, from supporting 24-year-old youth to farmers and artists, and now proposing support for all citizens.
Lee Jae-myung spent ten years transforming a seemingly crazy idea into reality. The question he wants to answer is simple: In the AI era, does everyone have the right to unconditionally share social wealth?
Basic income refers to cash income periodically distributed to everyone, on an individual basis, without economic status investigation or work requirements. Usually called universal basic income or unconditional basic income, abbreviated as UBI.
UBI seems advanced, but it is actually a concept discussed for centuries. As early as the 16th century, Thomas More proposed a similar idea in "Utopia". In the 1960s, Nobel Economics Prize winner Milton Friedman proposed the "negative income tax" theory, and Martin Luther King called for establishing a "guaranteed income" system in his last book. In the 1970s, the Nixon administration almost passed a family assistance plan similar to UBI. Entering the 21st century, with the development of artificial intelligence, more and more people from Silicon Valley tech elites to Nobel Economics Prize winners have begun to seriously discuss the possibility of UBI. Dozens of countries have launched UBI pilot experiments to explore the practical feasibility of this concept.
In South Korea, Lee Jae-myung is the most active UBI advocate and practitioner.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the entire text, maintaining the original structure and translating all text outside of XML tags.]In an era of immense material abundance and technology capable of replacing human labor, what is the ultimate measure of social progress? When machines take over production lines, Lee Jae-myung's exploratory questioning asks us: Can humans transcend passive adaptation and actively shape a future society that belongs to them, with dignity and value?
This may be the most profound political legacy he could leave behind—not a definitive answer, but the eternal proposition of how humans can maintain dignity and value in the torrent of technology.
