The Line Below Which No Human Being Should Fall

Last night in New York, I encountered a contradiction that advanced economies have learned to live with, but have not learned to explain.

I had just come from dinner with friends at a Japanese restaurant where fresh cuts of meat are brought to the table and cooked at one's discretion. It had been a long day of sustained intellectual work. The meal was relaxed, the conversation unforced. At some point (almost without discussion) we agreed we had had enough. A few pieces of meat remained in the bowl. We did not put them on the fire. We were simply satisfied.

These were not casual companions. They were people who have become family to me. It was a good evening. An ordinary one.

When we stepped outside, that ordinariness dissolved.

On the corner, a man was asleep in the cold, tightly coiled against the side of a building, using the city's architecture as his only shelter. Later, on my walk back to the hotel, I passed another person (bundled against the winter, face obscured) searching through a trash bin. I could not tell their age or gender. I could tell they were looking for food.

This was not irony, and it was not excess confronting deprivation. It was simultaneity.

Within the same city, within minutes of one another, within the same economic system, human beings were operating at radically different thresholds of existence: one group choosing not to cook more food because they were full, another searching refuse because nothing else was available.

This is not a moral reflection on consumption. It is an observation about design.

The Missing Floor

Such scenes are often described as inequality. That description is inadequate.

Inequality concerns differences in outcome. What this reveals is a difference in floor. One person had shelter, food, warmth, and choice as givens. Another had none of these guaranteed (not because the city lacked them, but because the system does not require that they be universally secured).

This is not primarily a failure of compassion, nor of policy execution. It is a failure of definition.

Modern societies are precise about what they protect: property rights, financial systems, borders, contracts. They are far less precise about what they refuse to allow. They have never formally articulated the minimum conditions of existence owed to a human being by virtue of being human.

They have not drawn a clear line below which no one is permitted to fall.

Markets and Moral Neutrality

Markets are among the most effective coordination mechanisms ever devised. They allocate resources efficiently, price risk accurately, and reward productivity at scale. They are not, however, moral systems.

Markets value output, not dignity. They reward participation, not survival. And when participation fails (through illness, disability, mental health, age, trauma, addiction, or simple misfortune), the market makes no corrective judgment. It simply moves on.

This is not an argument against capitalism. It is an acknowledgement of its limits.

Where societies fail is not in allowing markets to function, but in assuming markets will supply moral boundaries they were never designed to provide. In practice, this assumption allows a quiet but consequential outcome: that those who fall outside economic legibility may be ignored.

When shelter and food depend on employability, the loss of work becomes an existential threat. What follows (homelessness, scavenging, exposure) is treated as social pathology rather than predictable design output.

The Permanent Non-Participant

Every society contains a group that will never fully integrate into the labour market.

Not temporarily. Permanently.

Some are physically unwell. Some are mentally ill. Some are cognitively limited. Some are irreversibly traumatized. Some are unable, by disposition or circumstance, to meet the demands of increasingly complex economies.

This is not a moral claim. It is a statistical one.

Yet economic policy is built on the convenient fiction that non-participation is always transitional. Support systems are therefore conditional, time-bound, and corrective. They assume improvement. When improvement does not come, individuals are treated as failures rather than foreseeable cases.

The result is visible in every major city: people living below any reasonable definition of dignity, not because resources are unavailable, but because no system is obligated to secure them.

Universal Income Reconsidered

This is where the debate on Universal Income has gone wrong.

It is often framed as a response to automation, a labour-market subsidy, or an ideological redistribution project. These framings weaken the case and invite predictable resistance.

Universal Income is not primarily about jobs.

It is about standards.

It is the institutional recognition that there must exist a minimum level of material security beneath which no human being is allowed to fall (regardless of productivity, merit, or social valuation).

Just as societies prohibit slavery, child labour, and inhumane punishment not because they are inefficient but because they violate fundamental thresholds, so too must they prohibit sub-human survival conditions where prevention is feasible.

Universal Income is not welfare. It is civic infrastructure.

It provides the base layer upon which agency, participation, and choice become possible. It does not equalise outcomes. It merely equalises survival.

Why Conditionality Fails

Most social protection systems rely on conditions: proof of need, proof of effort, proof of improvement. These requirements are intended to preserve incentives. In practice, they function as exclusion mechanisms.

They punish precisely those least capable of compliance. They convert assistance into surveillance. They confuse behavioural discipline with economic rationality.

Universal Income dispenses with this pretense. It does not attempt to judge deservingness (a task governments are ill-suited to perform). It establishes a floor and stops there.

Work continues to matter. Productivity continues to differentiate outcomes. Ambition remains rewarded. But survival is no longer contingent.

Evidence from UBI (Universal Basic Income) trials supports this. In Kenya, Namibia, and Finland, work participation remained stable or increased when basic income was guaranteed. People invested in education, started businesses, or sought better employment rather than accepting exploitative conditions. The fear that guaranteeing survival destroys initiative has not materialized in practice.

The Economic Case, Without Sentiment

Beyond ethics, the economic rationale is straightforward.

A guaranteed income floor:

• reduces emergency healthcare and policing costs,

• lowers crime and incarceration rates,

• stabilises consumption at the base of the economy,

• improves labour matching by removing desperation,

• raises labour standards by allowing refusal of exploitative work.

It also simplifies administration. Targeted welfare systems are expensive precisely because they attempt to classify and monitor human worth. Universal systems are cheaper, more transparent, and harder to game.

This is not generosity. It is efficiency aligned with reality.

A Global Question, Not a Western One

This is not an argument confined to wealthy cities.

In developing economies, the absence of a dignity floor is even more destabilising (fueling informality, crime, political volatility, and intergenerational poverty). The mechanisms will differ. The principle does not.

Universal Income need not be uniform in amount or delivery. But the commitment must be universal: no human being should be left to survive by exposure, scavenging, or humiliation in societies capable of preventing it.

Financing mechanisms vary by context: progressive taxation in wealthy economies, carbon dividends from fossil fuel extraction in resource-rich states, digital transaction levies in platform economies, or development finance instruments in low-income countries. The question is not whether resources exist, but whether we choose to allocate them.

Where states lack fiscal capacity, global capital cannot remain neutral. Sovereign wealth funds, development banks, philanthropies, and multilateral institutions all participate in shaping the global system. Responsibility follows influence.

Civilization, after all, is a collective project.

Drawing the Line

This is not a call for protest or rhetoric.

It is a challenge to those who design systems: policymakers, economists, investors, and institutional leaders. The question is no longer whether societies can afford to prevent sub-human survival. The evidence suggests they can.

The question is whether they are willing to define what they will no longer tolerate.

Implementation will be complex. Political obstacles are real. Transitions require careful design. But definition must precede implementation. Until societies articulate the minimum conditions of existence they refuse to allow, policy remains reactive rather than principled.

If a person must sleep in the cold or search trash for food in one of the richest cities on earth, the problem is not economic capacity.

It is that we have never agreed on the line below which no human being should fall.

It is time we draw it.