Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Failed Transition Models: The Graveyard of Good Intentions

Humanity has been trying to fix civilization since civilization began. We’ve tried praying our way to utopia, voting our way there, and occasionally beheading our way there. The track record is… instructive.

The Labor Cliff—that incoming tidal wave where AI, robots, and fusion energy make human labor economically obsolete—demands we navigate from “here” to “there” without killing each other in transit. History offers two well-worn paths for such transitions: gradual reform (“let’s vote for incremental change over several decades”) and revolutionary rupture (“let’s flip the table and build something new from the rubble”). Both approaches have been field-tested extensively. Both have body counts.

Understanding why these paths fail isn’t academic trivia. It’s the engineering specification for any transition strategy that might actually work.

Path 1: The Slow Road (Gradual Reform)

The gradualist pitch sounds reasonable. It always sounds reasonable—that’s why it keeps getting tried. “Tax the robots. Implement UBI pilots. Let institutions adapt organically. Previous technological transitions—agriculture to manufacturing, manufacturing to services—took generations but created more jobs than they destroyed. Why should this time be different?”

Here’s why: technology moves at exponential speed; bureaucracy moves at glacial pace.

The Track Record of “Let’s Go Slow”

Consider the Finland UBI experiment (2017-2018): 2,000 participants received €560 monthly for two years. Results showed improved wellbeing and life satisfaction—7.3 vs 6.8 out of 10 for control groups. Participants reported better health, less stress, and even started businesses. The experiment worked.

Then Finland… stopped. Political winds shifted. The government decided not to continue the experiment “while results were being analyzed.” The analysis came. The results were positive. The program remained dead.

This isn’t unique to Finland. Spain’s Catalonia planned a UBI pilot for 2021-2025 with 5,000 participants. Stockton, California found that full-time employment actually increased because UBI gave people time to apply for better jobs instead of juggling multiple part-time gigs. The data keeps saying the same thing. The policies keep dying anyway.

The problem isn’t that gradual reform doesn’t work in theory. It’s that it doesn’t survive politics.

The WIOA Graveyard

America’s flagship displaced worker program is the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), enacted in 2014. According to the Brookings Institution, many of these programs “focus on interviewing and resume writing skills, rather than helping workers acquire the actual skills needed to perform the tasks for their next job.”

Think about that. We’re facing the automation of cognition itself—77% of AI jobs require master’s degrees—and our solution is teaching people to format their LinkedIn profiles better.

The Trade Adjustment Assistance program (TAA), which specifically helped workers displaced by trade, expired in 2022. Just as AI displacement began accelerating, we defunded the program designed to address it. A new proposal suggests funding at $700 million annually—roughly the price of two stealth bombers—“with flexibility to expand or contract based on the pace of AI-related job loss.” We’re pricing civilizational insurance like a monthly gym membership.

The Arithmetic of Delay

The World Economic Forum estimates 120 million workers need retraining within three years. Twenty-four million Americans lack high-speed internet access—meaning they can’t even reach the online training programs that teach the wrong skills. Meanwhile, 14% of workers have already experienced job displacement due to automation, and 40% of white-collar job seekers in 2024 failed to secure interviews.

Imagine Maria Delgado’s timeline under gradualist policy:

2027: Maria loses her cleaning job. Congress debates a “robot tax” that dies in committee—lobbying from tech giants who employ exactly zero robot lobbyists but plenty of human ones.

2029: Maria retrains as a home health aide. Congress passes a watered-down UBI pilot covering 5,000 people in three states.

2032: AI-assisted robots handle eldercare. The pilot expires because someone needed that $50 million for a bridge repair in a swing district.

2035: Maria has exhausted her savings and moved in with her sister. Congress debates reinstating the pilot. A senator calls it “socialism.”

2038: A modest UBI passes—$400/month, means-tested, requiring Maria to prove her poverty every month while covering a third of her rent.

By the time gradual reform catches up to the problem, the problem has already eaten the solution.

Path 2: The Fast Road (Revolutionary Rupture)

If slow reform is a patient dying from treatment delays, revolution is the patient dying from surgery performed with a chainsaw.

The revolutionary pitch has its own seductive logic: “The system is corrupt. The elites won’t give up power voluntarily. History shows change only comes through force. The old structures must be destroyed before new ones can be built.”

There’s truth in this diagnosis. But the prescription has a side effect: it tends to kill the patient.

The French Revolution: A Case Study in Overcorrection

In 1789, the French had legitimate grievances. The aristocracy was parasitic, the tax system was insane, and Marie Antoinette probably didn’t say “let them eat cake” but the sentiment wasn’t far off. The revolution began with genuine democratic aspirations—liberty, equality, fraternity. Noble goals.

By 1793, those goals had produced the Reign of Terror. The Committee of Public Safety—twelve men exercising “almost dictatorial control”—executed an estimated 16,600 people on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Another 40,000 may have been summarily executed or died awaiting trial. Three hundred thousand were arrested.

The revolutionaries ate their own. Moderates (the Girondins) were guillotined by radicals (the Montagnards). Then the radicals were guillotined by other radicals. Robespierre, architect of the Terror, eventually got the treatment he’d prescribed for others. The revolution’s currency collapsed, food rationing gripped Paris, and price controls proved “unworkable.”

The aftermath? Not a “virtuous and happy republic” but the Directory—an unstable government that lurched from crisis to crisis until Napoleon’s coup in 1799. Liberty, equality, and fraternity gave way to empire.

The fire that was supposed to purify instead consumed indiscriminately. The system was destroyed before anything could replace it.

The Soviet Collapse: Shock Without Therapy

Russia in 1991 offers the mirror lesson. The Soviet system was clearly failing—shortages of consumer goods, 20% GDP decline between 1989-1991, a command economy gasping its last breaths. Something had to change.

What changed was everything, all at once, with no functioning replacement.

“Shock therapy”—the rapid privatization of state assets and elimination of the planned economy—was supposed to create capitalism quickly. Instead, it created oligarchs quickly. State assets were sold at undervalued prices to “a handful of opportunistic individuals.” Russian GDP contracted 40% between 1991 and 1998. Living standards collapsed. Life expectancy dropped. Crime proliferated.

As Yeltsin himself admitted: “We have gotten stuck half-way… We have created a hybrid of the two systems.”

The problem wasn’t that Russia tried to change. The problem was destroying the old structures before new ones could function. Perestroika, Gorbachev’s reform program, “pulled the rug out from under the already tottering structure of central planning while doing little or nothing to lay the foundation for a real market economy.”

This is the revolutionary pattern: the destruction is easy; the construction is hard. And in the gap between destruction and construction, strongmen flourish.

The Common Thread

Jack Goldstone’s work on revolutions and Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979) document this pattern across centuries. Revolutionary ruptures consistently produce:

1. Power vacuums that invite authoritarian consolidation
2. Economic chaos that discredits the revolutionary ideals
3. Political violence that spirals beyond the revolutionaries’ control
4. Eventual stabilization under systems often worse than what they replaced

The French got Napoleon. The Russians got Stalin. The pattern is so consistent it might as well be a law of political physics: destroy the old order faster than you can build the new, and the gap gets filled by whoever’s best at violence.

This doesn’t mean the revolutionaries were wrong about the injustice. It means they were wrong about the solution. The fire burns everyone alike.

Why Both Paths Fail the Same Test

Gradual reform and revolutionary rupture appear opposite but share a fatal flaw: neither accounts for the speed mismatch between their mechanisms and the problem they’re trying to solve.

Gradual reform moves at the speed of legislation—years to debate, more years to implement, vulnerability to every election cycle. The Labor Cliff moves at the speed of software updates—exponential improvement compounding quarterly.

Revolutionary rupture moves at the speed of destruction—fast—but construction moves at the speed of institution-building—slow. You can guillotine the aristocracy in months. Building a functioning alternative takes generations.

The automation crisis is unprecedented because it requires both speed (the cliff is coming fast) and stability (chaotic transitions breed worse outcomes). Neither gradualism nor revolution provides both.

The Third Path: Engineered Incentive Alignment

This is why the Unscarcity framework proposes a different approach: not defeating the powerful, but bonding them to the transition.

The EXIT Protocol applies the logic of Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868). When Japan needed to abolish the samurai class to modernize, they faced a choice: fight the samurai (expensive, bloody, uncertain) or buy them out. They chose buyout. Samurai received government bonds, converting their dying feudal privileges into stakes in the new industrial economy.

The psychological shift was profound. The samurai stopped being defenders of the old order and became stakeholders in the new one. When you own stock in the future, you stop trying to prevent it.

The EXIT Protocol translates this for the 21st century:

• Year 1: Billionaires transfer 10% of assets into Transition Trusts. In exchange: priority access to life-extension research. Address those 3 AM mortality fears.
• Years 2-5: Progressive asset transfer continues. But something unexpected happens: invitations to help build the new system. Expertise in logistics, manufacturing, coordination—suddenly valuable again, but for different goals.
• Year 10: Full transition. The former billionaire has something their fortune never bought: reconnection with alienated family, purpose beyond accumulation, legacy measured in civilizations built rather than dollars hoarded.

This isn’t justice. The samurai didn’t “deserve” their bonds any more than billionaires “deserve” life extension. It’s the price of peace. It’s cheaper than the alternative.

Parallel Tracks for Parallel Timelines

The EXIT Protocol handles elites over 20 years. But Maria can’t wait 20 years. The Civic Service handles everyone else in 10.

While billionaires negotiate their soft landing, ordinary people start building Free Zones—visible proof that abundance works. Maria doesn’t need to wait for Richard to take his deal. She starts contributing to Foundation infrastructure now, building the alternative that makes the old system obsolete.

The two tracks run in parallel. Elite transition is a slow arc. Mass transition is an emergency response. Both must succeed—but neither depends entirely on the other.

Why This Might Work (And Might Not)

The honest answer: the EXIT Protocol could fail. Maybe billionaires prove more stubborn than samurai. Maybe they flee to space before Free Zones achieve critical mass. Maybe a major war resets everything.

But the alternatives are worse. Gradual reform arrives after the fire. Revolutionary rupture is the fire.

The EXIT Protocol isn’t guaranteed to work. It’s the approach most likely to work given the constraints we face. We don’t have the luxury of certainty. We have the obligation to try.

The Constraint of Time

The gap between “crisis” and “solution” is where revolutions breed.

In the book timeline, Maria’s daughter Sophia grows up watching the transition happen—difficult but navigable. In the worst-case timeline, Sophia spends her entire life in the gap, and her daughter Luna inherits either a transformed world or a collapsed one.

The physics of abundance—fusion energy, AI, robotics—is the same in both scenarios. The suffering is not.

We can choose the path we take. We cannot choose to stay where we are—the Labor Cliff is not negotiating. The only question is whether we design our transition or let it design us.

History’s graveyard is full of good intentions implemented too slowly or too chaotically. The point of studying failed models isn’t pessimism. It’s engineering specification.

We know what doesn’t work. Now we build what might.

Related Articles

• The EXIT Protocol - How to buy out the powerful without fighting them
• The Labor Cliff - Current data on job displacement
• Civic Service - The parallel track for mass transition

References

• Goldstone, Jack. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (2014)
• Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions (1979)
• Finland UBI Experiment: Wellbeing Economy Alliance
• Brookings Institution: AI Labor Displacement and the Limits of Worker Retraining
• French Revolution: Britannica - Reign of Terror
• Soviet Collapse: Carnegie Endowment
• Unscarcity, Chapter 8: The Transition