I grew up in a house with domestic violence.

Sometimes, as a child,

we didn't know from day to day if our mother was going to live or die.

If my birthmother - or my stepmother, afterwards - had money,

they could have left and taken me with them.

Or I'm certain

the power dynamic in the house would have been different,

as it would've been known,

there would've been more respect

knowing that they had the freedom, the options to leave.

Freedom is what we'll buy ourselves, as a society,

if we can implement a universal and unconditional basic income

in the form of monthly cash payments going to every citizen.

Do we really have freedom if we don't have options to choose,

the option to say no to an unsafe environment,

whether it be in the family, or the workplace,

or against your own government?

The means to protest, to stand up,

or to walk away, or in some cases to run?

Now, I've no regrets about how I was raised.

I love my father, and I'm lucky to have two women I can call mother.

We've done a lot of healing work to get to where we are today.

But I'm really worried

because I can see how financial pressures

played a triggering and an enabling role in the violence.

I'm very worried,

because I'm seeing that job displacement

is pushing an increasing number of families in Western countries

into worse financial pressures than I went through.

[Job Displacement]

Technological job displacement

is when the cost of your job, of your work,

trends down to an unfeasible level,

maybe because you're competing against machines or offshore labor,

so much so that if you get fired, you can't find that job anywhere else.

It no longer exists.

Families, communities that are relying on your incomes

start to shrink and are damaged,

because in most cases, people whose jobs are displaced

end up taking lower income work or not working at all.

I'm here to tell you that technology is the brilliant child of capitalism.

It created the middle class, but now it's destroying it.

I think universal basic income

is how we can preserve and expand the middle class,

but only if we can come to see that technology is our shared inheritance.

Most of human history was like "Game of Thrones."

Most of us lived in miserable conditions,

while a few of us hoarded all the wealth

and anointed themselves with birthright privileges.

The middle class was a creation

of the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution -

just a blip in human history, very recent, very fragile -

which chased people from low-income work to higher-income work

allowing us the means, the income for some comforts,

but more importantly,

for the political power to shape governments

to invest more in the needs of the common man.

What we call the modern middle class was created during a period

that economists are fond of calling "The Golden Age of Capitalism."

This was a period when wages were growing together with productivity.

Imagine that.

The more businesses needed to sell, the more they needed to hire people

to produce the things that they were making,

that put upwards demand on wages,

which meant people had more money to spend back into those businesses.

This was also a period

when the top one percent of us were actually seeing a decline in income

every year after year, for decades in Western countries.

Imagine that.

The bigger the economy got,

the more of those gains went went to the majority of us.

Sounds fair, right?

I believe it is this period of inclusive growth

that has given us our idea that working hard will get you ahead.

Because in that period, it did.

For a brief period in human history,

the majority of the gains from technological advancement

were going to the majority of us.

But what if the rise of the middle class is just a coincidence in time,

a coincidence for when people were so essential

to the work of delivering all these new technological advancements?

[Coincidences?]

I believe that we saw these coincidences start to break down

around the early 1970s,

shortly after mainframe computers were making their way

into Western companies, corporations everywhere,

as manufacturing robots were making their way onto factory floors

shortly before, and with the advent, of personal computing.

This period of time is called the great decoupling.

The great decoupling that decoupled the value of human work from productivity.

Clearly, humans were less valuable as computers could do more and more

of the repetitive work that careers were made of.

And much of the work we do is repetitive and routine.

So it's not that over a period of decades that many people were fired,

as businesses became more productive, but rather how many were never hired,

which created the absence of that upwards pressure on wages

we saw during the golden age.

Technology created globalization,

the global economy, the globalized supply chain,

which also put downward pressure on wages

because we couldn't complete with hundreds of millions

and now billions of people around the world

that can do the same work we can for less than can be lived off here.

My father and uncle had their careers displaced

in Ontario's automotive manufacturing parts sector

shortly after China entered the scene in the mid-'90s.

We couldn't compete with that, and the businesses that remained,

the tool shops that remained after the carnage,

were the ones that were managed to automate, to stay competitive.

That's why during that period,

six times more jobs were lost to automation than trade.

But the globalization of today is beyond the reach of tariffs.

The globalization of today is about online jobs.

Even small businesses can hire virtual assistants in the Philippines

for four dollars an hour.

Businesses like mine would not have existed 25 years ago.

We make income all over the world.

We're completely remote, no offices, and because of that, we can hire anywhere.

So half of my staff is employed in developing countries.

Why? Because I can afford more people that way.

[Unions Leverage Weakened]

Unions lost their leverage

because of the combination of automation and globalization together,

and their unions were always pivotal in increasing wage growth.

Now I'm really worried,

because if you could look at the share of national income,

the amount of the income produced every year in the United States -

or in any country, any Western country's quite similar -

you see the share going to the top one percent of us

increasing year after year since the great decoupling.

I'm a beneficiary of that as a member of the one percent,

and this really bothers me.

If you look at the green line, it's going down.

The bottom half of us are making less and less and less

of the share of national income every year.

With that green line going down, we see a parallel line

of decreased annual economic growth, a slowing of growth.

We also see, I believe, a decrease in political power

as governments no longer have to prioritize

the needs of common men, of common people.

So, it's not at all an exaggeration.

If you draw those lines out a few decades into the future,

I'm afraid to consider where that will lead us.

The top one percent could be making 35 cents of every dollar,

the bottom half of us could be making 6 cents.

That's not capitalism anymore, folks - that's feudalism.

That's right back to the Game of Thrones that we left.

That's right back to there'll be

a new global peasant class that has smartphones,

but a new nobility that has all the power and shapes governments in their image.

We should all be very concerned about this.

[Artificial Intelligence]

Artificial intelligence will just make it go faster,

and no one is predicting the creation of a lot of high-paying jobs

to replace, to create a new middle class to step into

as in the golden age.

In fact, many economists are saying

we're going to have so many productivity enhancements,

but we're going to have a lot more low-paying jobs.

Frankly, it is this theory

that explains the economics of the last 40 years.

The middle class has been hollowing out.

The world's top economists in the world

are very concerned about the hollowing in middle class,

and I'm able to show it to you in pictures.

This is a study showing the City of Toronto between 1970 and 2005.

In 1970, the yellow represents middle-class neighborhoods,

the blue represents high-income neighborhoods,

and the red is low-income neighborhoods.

2005, you can see the hollowing in the middle class,

mostly low-income neighborhoods.

The middle class almost disappeared -

they didn't go anywhere, they were displaced.

And the blue-income neighborhoods got bigger,

as of course there are more high-income jobs,

but not enough programming jobs,

nor can everyone be a programmer.

What we see here, this pattern in Toronto,

is replicated across the world,

between cities -

some cities have been on the losing end of automation and globalization -

and between regions.

It's funny -

look at the blue, imagine you're thinking of the blue states,

San Francisco, New York, LA, where all the brain power is going;

and the red is the red states,

how they've been on the losing end of automation and globalization,

and they're angry.

We can see the impact of that by seeing an increase in deaths of despair

among white middle-aged people in the United States

whose jobs have been displaced.

The coincidences in time,

when more high-income work was being created

to replace low-income work,

are starting to break down.

I think a universal basic income is part of the solution,

because it will preserve and in fact expand the middle class.

Expand the middle class not in terms of us having two car garages,

but things that matter,

where everyone can have psychological safety,

the ability to make long-term plans,

the ability to afford healthy food for their children.

We should just implement this basic income and then just wait it out.

Wait it out as money is appearing in our bank accounts every month

just enough to cover basic needs,

provide us with that middle-class way of thinking,

because eventually technology makes everything cheaper.

Everything from the cost of food, transportation,

pretty much consumer goods;

it's already been getting cheaper over decades.

We can all enjoy a middle-class way of life.

And the existing middle class will also be preserved.

Why? Because basic income is an economic stimulus.

Those who have the least spend the most of the share of what they have.

All that money goes right back into the economy,

stimulating corporate revenue, stimulating job creation.

We can have all this, but we need to see basic income

not as a social program that helps people in poor circumstances,

but rather a public utility that helps us all.

How having a healthy economy is a need common to us all.

We should see it as the water in the pipes,

circulating money to keep our economy healthy for everyone,

expanding the middle class and bringing wellbeing to everyone.

So while the first golden age of capitalism was called that,

in part because it created the middle class,

this next evolution of capitalism may also be called the golden age.

Why? Because we will have expanded the middle-class lifestyle for everyone.

But only if we can come to see that technology is our shared inheritance.

It's meant to uplift everyone.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes -