A few days ago, The Atlantic published a piece on a guaranteed basic income (what I usually see called a universal basic income, or UBI). I’m a proponent of a basic income, the best system that I think is realistically possible in the short term in the United States, and I think the article does a pretty good job of exploring some of the reasons why.

For those unfamiliar with the idea: The way most universal basic income schemes work is that the government provides everyone in the country with some amount of money that meets the minimum requirements for living, usually either through a negative income tax or (my preferred solution) simply cutting everyone a check. Such a system would entirely replace existing forms of welfare, social insurance, and government incentives (such as tax breaks for things like having kids).

Many experts believe that, unlike in the 20th century, people in this century will not be able to stay one step ahead of automation through education and the occasional skills upgrade. A recent study from Oxford University warns that 47 percent of all existing jobs are susceptible to automation within the next two decades. Worries about robots replacing human labor are showing up more frequently in the mainstream media, including the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Recent books, such as The Second Machine Age and Who Owns the Future, predict that when it comes to robots and labor, this time is different.

There are a few reasons that I think a basic income is desirable. I believe it would be both more efficient and fairer than what the United States has today. Many welfare systems are riddled with corruption, paternalism, and incompetence (and also lots of hardworking and conscientious people, I know). The USA has a confusing and overlapping system of over a hundred different agencies providing some form of social payments or incentives. People think of “welfare” as a thing the government does for the poor, but by far the most significant benefits go to middle and upper class families, often at the expense of the poor. I’ve seen various estimates about how much a program would cost, to being slightly more than the existing American welfare system to costing much less, thanks to the reduced need for bureaucracy and the gains from things like eliminating tax breaks or new efficiencies like decoupling health insurance from employment. Even if it cost slightly more, I think the gains from streamlining the system and eliminating the human costs of our current system would be well worth it.

But I am a historian and this is sort of a history blog, so I should emphasize the historical reasons for this. The United States (and the developed world, and after that the rest of the planet) will soon be at a point where really mass job reduction is going to be a reality. Robots and automation and outsourcing are going to take most people’s jobs, and it will only accelerate. For a long time now, distributing sufficient access to the basics of life, at least in rich countries, has been a moral or political question more than an economic or material one – we have plenty of food and clothes and housing, but getting it to the people who need it is the problem. Such distribution is going to become a greater and greater concern as this process accelerates, and I worry about who will benefit and who will pay the costs of the transition to what should be a post-work or post-scarcity society. We know that automation can end jobs, and we know it can be done in a harmful, even disastrous way. It happened in American agriculture, most intensively in the 1920s-1960s. It doesn’t make me optimistic.

A small subset of farmers did very well in the mechanization of American agriculture. They did so because they had more money and connections, and they had the support of the federal government. A much larger number of farmers did not do so well. They were forced to leave the land or live in what amounted to rural ghettos, with many of them or their descendants still doing so. They failed because they did not have access to the resources necessary for large-scale, mechanized agriculture: the capital for machines, the know-how to buy and use them, the support of the federal government and corporate hierarchy. Some of them found new jobs related to the transition, but most of them did not. The benefits of mechanization did not land equally. Capital-intensive agriculture ran roughshod over rural culture, and we as a nation lost a lot in the transition. Thousands upon thousands of marginal people – the poor, racial minorities – never got their share of the prosperity that this was supposed to provide.

People think of this and similar historical processes as something like natural events, the way that things just happen: creative destruction. Technology changed, and it increased agricultural productivity, so people just decided to quit farming (either because they found other, more remunerative jobs or because they But that’s not true. There were explicit programs, starting in the 1930s and definitely the 1940s, aimed at a revolution in American agriculture, and it was intentionally not to benefit everyone. (You can learn more about this in my book or Pete Daniel’s excellent Dispossession).

Without some mechanism to ensure that the benefits of economic and mechanical transitions are shared at least somewhat equally, wealth and position will further concentrate among the already wealthy and well-positioned. Instead of automation ending jobs in just agriculture, it’s going to be ending jobs everywhere. Where are those people going to go?