Where the Lever Never Was

I. The Western Question

In “Utopia without Leverage” we asked who is to enforce a basic income for all once the machines do the work. Until now the many had two levers, their work and their role as soldiers. The deserted hall takes away the first, the deserted battlefield the second. What remains is the ballot.

That is a Western question. It presupposes that these levers existed and that there is a ballot that achieves something. In large parts of the world this is not, or no longer, the case. Whoever wants to know where automation leads must therefore look there too. Three cases are particularly instructive, because they show three different answers to the same question.

II. China: Performance instead of Elections

No country automates as fast as China. Of the roughly 600,000 industrial robots installed in factories worldwide in 2025, 354,000 went to China, almost six in ten. Germany managed just under 25,000. Robotics has been part of the state’s industrial strategy for a decade and has gained further weight in the new Five-Year Plan.

At the same time, youth unemployment in China’s cities stood at 18.9 percent in August 2026, higher than ever since the current method of counting was introduced. Every year millions of graduates push onto a labour market that cannot absorb them. Among young Chinese a word of its own has spread for this: tang ping, “lying flat”, that is, refusing the race because it no longer promises anything.

China’s population never had the lever of the ballot. The Communist Party justifies its rule not through elections but through performance: for forty years it has delivered growth, work and rising prosperity, and in return people have done without a say. That is precisely why unemployment is politically more dangerous there than in the West. A government that cannot be voted out must deliver. When the machines take over the work, the basis of this silent bargain falls away.

At first sight Hutter’s model fits nowhere better than in China. The state itself owns large parts of the economy, it can tax without companies escaping abroad, and some years ago it declared “common prosperity” a goal. In the new Five-Year Plan, however, observers see the promotion of companies more in the foreground than redistribution. And even if China one day pays a basic income, it will remain a favour and not a right. It would be bread, handed out for fear of unrest, as in imperial Rome. The recipients have no lever other than unrest.

The young engineer Liu Shengyu, whom we wrote about in “The Knitter at the Window”, has asked this question for his own country. He sees two futures: one in which the machines benefit everyone, and one in which a few own them and class boundaries harden. In China no voter decides this. The Party decides, and it decides according to what secures its rule.

III. The Gulf: the Laboratory

There is a place where the Jobless Utopia has been on view for decades, only with oil instead of machines. In Kuwait a good 80 percent of employed citizens work for the state. In the private sector, by contrast, foreigners make up 96 percent of the workforce. The productive work is done by migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Egypt and the Philippines. Citizens receive their share of the oil wealth through secure posts in ministries and through free education, health care and housing. It is similar, to varying degrees, in Qatar, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Political science has a term for such states, the rentier state. A state that lives on resource revenues does not have to tax its citizens, and whoever does not tax does not have to ask either. The slogan of the American colonists, no taxation without representation, is turned around: no representation, because no taxation. Citizens trade a say for prosperity, and many are content with the trade.

The Gulf shows what the political form of a society looks like whose citizens are not needed to produce its wealth. It is peaceful and prosperous, and it is not free. The payout depends on the goodwill of the ruling families and on the price of oil. And it shows something else: alongside the citizens lives a majority without civil rights who do the actual work and have no share in the yield beyond their wages. In an automated world the machines take their place. Whoever then has no passport that secures him a share has nothing left at all.

This model too has cracks. The Gulf states can no longer place all young citizens in the civil service. Saudi Arabia has for years been trying to move its citizens into the private sector, with quotas and programmes. In Kuwait unemployment among citizens now exceeds six percent, among foreigners it is close to zero. When the rentier state can no longer distribute enough, it has no answer, because it never provided for any other form of participation.

IV. India: the Missing Rung

For poorer countries the question looks entirely different. They have neither the machines nor the oil. Their way up has so far led through cheap labour. Korea, Taiwan and most recently China became rich because they brought millions of peasants into factories, where they earned more and produced more. The economist Dani Rodrik compares this industrialisation to an escalator that was wide enough to carry very many people. He has also observed that this escalator no longer runs for today’s latecomers. Countries such as India are beginning to dismantle their industry before they have even become rich. He calls this premature deindustrialisation.

India has therefore tried another route, through services. The Indian IT sector employs around five and a half million people who programme, test and process data for companies all over the world. It is precisely this work that is now being automated first, because its results are easy to check. The largest Indian firms are already cutting jobs while their revenues keep growing. The former head of Infosys warns that without rapid retraining there will be a large number of people who can no longer be placed in work.

For a country like India a basic income on Hutter’s recipe is hardly conceivable. The halls in which the work will be done in future do not stand in India, and they do not belong to Indians. The profits accrue in California, in Shenzhen or in investors’ accounts. The question from “Who Owns the Deserted Hall?” acquires a second half here: not only who owns the hall, but also in which country it stands.

V. What the Comparison Shows

Placed side by side, the four cases give a clear picture. In the West the many are losing their levers but keep the ballot. In China they never had the ballot, and the Party replaces it with performance for as long as it can deliver. In the Gulf citizens have traded their lever for prosperity, and the trade holds as long as the oil flows. In India and the poorer countries even the thing that could be distributed is missing, because the yields accrue elsewhere.

Common to all four cases is that distribution is ultimately a question of ownership and political form, not of technology. The machines are the same everywhere. What they mean for people is decided by whom they belong to and whether those to whom they do not belong still have a say.

This gives the West a special responsibility, and that should be said without arrogance. It is the only one of the four cases in which the many still hold a lever, the ballot. If they do not use it to raise the question of ownership while they still can, there will be no one left in the world to raise it. That is why so much depends on what we called the baby in “One Could, One Should”: the possibility of getting rid of those in power without bloodshed.

VI. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: China could solve the problem better than the West, precisely because the state there steers the economy and need not take elections into account. A state that plans for the long term can shape basic income, retraining and industrial policy from a single mould. That is possible, and we should not rule it out. But it answers only the question of whether there will be distribution, not whether the recipients have a claim.

The second objection: citizens in the Gulf are content. Many observers report high approval of the ruling houses. If prosperity without a say makes people happy, why ask for more? Because contentment is not the same as security. The contentment lasts as long as the oil flows and the rulers remain generous. There is no claim one could invoke if either of the two ends.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that states in which citizens are not needed to produce the wealth secure them a share permanently and reliably, even when the coffers run low.

VII. The Four Halls

The machines in Shenzhen, in a desert city on the Gulf, in a data centre for Indian programmers and in a Bavarian factory are the same. The people in front of them are not. The first could never ask, the second have stopped asking, the third have nothing they could ask for. Only the fourth can still ask.

If only the citizens of the Western democracies still hold a lever: will they use it before they lose it, or will they lay it down of their own accord?