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.

Three Other Floors

Chapter 1 of Unscarcity names three rival floors being poured today against the same engineering problem the book is trying to solve: what holds civilization up once wage labor stops being the way most people earn the right to eat? The chapter mentions each in a paragraph and points here for the long argument. This is that argument.

The three rivals are the Nordic welfare state, Universal Basic Income, and Singapore’s HDB-plus-CPF system. Each is a serious response. Each rests, when you check the load-bearing beams, on the same two primitives the book says are about to dissolve: money as the rationing tool, and wage labor as the source of value that the rationing tool divides up. Pull either primitive out, and the floor folds.

What the Nordic model actually does

Start with the strongest evidence in the room. Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio in 2024 hit 45.2%, the highest in the OECD for the second year running. Finland, Sweden and Norway sit between 41% and 43%, every one of them more than seven percentage points above the OECD average of 34.1%. Top marginal personal income tax rates run 55-56% in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. VAT is 25% across the Nordics and 25.5% in Finland.

What do voters get for those rates? Finland has been the top-ranked country in the World Happiness Report for eight consecutive years, with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden in the top five. Nordic life expectancy hit 83.2 years in 2024, above pre-pandemic levels and well above the EU’s 81.7. Child poverty in Denmark and Finland is under 10%, roughly a third of the United States rate. The Nordic countries dominate the OECD Better Life Index across health, safety, civic engagement and social connection. This is not theory but eighty years of receipts on the proposition that you can run market capitalism inside a serious collective safety net and produce both growth and happiness.

The question is what the receipts depend on.

Pull apart the OECD’s 2025 revenue statistics and the answer becomes hard to miss. In Denmark, personal income tax plus social-security contributions add up to 25.6% of GDP. Sweden: 25.5%. Add VAT, which is itself a consumption tax paid almost entirely out of wages, and the labor-financed share of total revenue runs to roughly three-quarters in Denmark and Sweden, and not far below that in Finland. Strip out wages and the consumption flowing from them, and the funding base of the Nordic state collapses to corporate and capital taxes: about a fifth of current revenue in Denmark, somewhat more in Sweden, and a special case in Norway.

The labor side of that equation is more specific than “people work and pay taxes.” The Nordic model is the most refined version on Earth of an everyone-works-and-we-share-fairly model. Female labor-force participation runs 75-80% across the four countries, against an OECD average of 64%. The IMF has estimated that bringing women into paid work accounts for up to 20% of average annual GDP-per-capita growth in the Nordics over the past forty to fifty years. The public sector itself is the largest single employer of those women: about 30% of total Nordic employment is in the public sector, against an OECD average closer to 21%, and seven of every ten Danish public-sector workers are women. The welfare state hires the workers that the welfare state then taxes to fund itself. It is an extraordinarily refined arrangement, and it requires near-universal wage employment to balance.

This is the load-bearing observation. The Nordic floor is not a post-labor model; it was never designed to be one. Its happiness and longevity numbers are contingent on the wage system it taxes. Remove the wage base and you remove both the funding and the social-meaning architecture in the same motion. The happiest country in the world is happy in part because nearly everyone has a job that pays well, comes with parental leave, and rolls a generous tax bill back through a dense public sector. None of those mechanisms have a fallback if the median household stops earning a wage.

There is one Nordic that has partially escaped this constraint, and it is worth pausing on because it is the closest existing precedent for what the Foundation actually requires. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global stood at roughly NOK 21.3 trillion at the end of 2025, on the order of US $2 trillion, about four times Norway’s GDP, or some $390,000 per Norwegian citizen. The fund owns close to 1.5% of every publicly traded company on earth. Under Norway’s three-percent fiscal rule, only the expected real return may be spent each year. That return alone finances roughly a quarter of the national budget. Norway has, alone among the Nordics, partially decoupled welfare financing from wage labor by capturing an exhaustible hydrocarbon endowment in a disciplined sovereign vehicle. The mechanism works. It also requires either an oil field or a political class willing to capture industrial surplus on a comparable scale, and most countries have neither.

The cracks elsewhere are showing in real time. Sweden’s center-right coalition spent 2024-25 publicly conceding that integration had become “a problem” for the welfare state; immigrants currently draw more in social-security expenditure than they contribute in pension-fund taxes, on the order of SEK 80 billion net. Finland’s right-wing Orpo government, in office since April 2023, is cutting housing and unemployment benefits by about 1.5% of GDP and is projected to push 51,000 adults and 17,000 children into poverty in 2024 alone. The Nordic model is not in collapse, but it is no longer expanding either, and the political class that built it is being replaced by a political class that is rolling it back. None of this is a verdict on the model’s elegance. It is a verdict on its base of support, which turns out to be conditional on a labor market that delivers wages distributed widely enough that the median voter still feels like a net contributor.

Verdict: the strongest existing answer to the question scarcity asks. Calibrated for a world in which everybody works.

What the UBI evidence actually says

The most ambitious modern reply is Universal Basic Income. Andrew Yang ran a national campaign on $1,000-a-month checks; Alaska has been paying a smaller version since 1982; the Marshall Islands launched the first national rollout in November 2025. The honest evidence is now substantial, and it is also more sobering than its advocates usually admit.

The richest dataset is Sam Altman’s OpenResearch Unconditional Cash Study, published in July 2024 after three years in Texas and Illinois. Three thousand people, ages 21 to 40, household income below 300% of the federal poverty line. One thousand got $1,000 a month for three years, a roughly 40% income boost. Two thousand controls got $50. This is the cleanest large-scale UBI trial run in a rich country to date.

Recipients worked 1.3 hours less per week, on average, roughly eight fewer workdays per year. Employment fell by 2 percentage points. Younger recipients in their twenties cut hours more sharply, and single parents cut by 2.8 hours. Bank savings rose 25%. Total spending rose by about $310 a month. Spending on gifts and help to others rose 26%. Black recipients were 9 percentage points more likely to start a business by the end of year three; women, 5 points more. Job-search activity went up: recipients searched longer and more selectively, and were more likely to look for work they found meaningful. None of this looks like laziness, and the rich-country version of the GiveDirectly-style “would they just spend it on liquor?” worry continues to fail to materialize.

The harder findings are where the prescription starts to wobble.

Recipients showed no significant improvement in physical health over three years, despite using more healthcare. The early gains in mental health and stress reduction — which made headlines after year one — faded by years two and three. Food security gains also faded. Children’s academic and behavioral outcomes did not improve in the study window. Political participation did not change. Job quality, measured directly, did not improve.

The fade pattern is the single most important datum in three decades of UBI research. It is the empirical signature of an instrument that addresses the acute distress of scarcity, the part where you cannot pay this month’s rent, and does very little for the deeper questions of purpose, identity, and place that reassert themselves once the acute distress is gone. Cash answers “I don’t have $400 for a car repair.” It does much less for “what is my role in the world after my job is automated and the company I worked for stops needing humans.”

The other live experiments rhyme with this. Finland’s 2017-2018 trial paid 2,000 unemployed people €560 a month for two years. The official conclusion: marginal employment effects, real but modest wellbeing gains, conversation killed by a center-right coalition that pivoted to a conditional “activation model” mid-flight. Stockton’s SEED program saw full-time employment rise from 28% to 40% for 125 recipients of $500 a month, the cleanest pro-employment finding in the UBI corpus. GiveDirectly’s Kenya trial of 20,000 villagers across three arms (twelve-year monthly, two-year short-term, and lump-sum) produced the most uncomfortable finding for cash-stream advocates: recipients of the monthly arm converted their payments into rotating-savings groups to synthesize a lump sum, because what they actually needed was capital. The monthly version was the least effective design.

Then there is the funding question, which has not gotten softer with time. The Tax Foundation analysis of Yang’s Freedom Dividend put its annual cost at roughly $2.8 trillion and the revenue raised by his proposed 10% VAT and adjacent taxes at about $1.3 trillion, less than half. A $1,000-per-month UBI for every American adult costs about $3.1 trillion a year, roughly the entire 2024 federal discretionary budget. The math does not work as proposed. To balance the line, you need either a much higher VAT (about 22%) or a much smaller dividend (about $750 a month).

Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend is the structural counter-example to all of this, and it points at something the UBI movement has consistently underweighted. The 2024 PFD was $1,702; the 2025 PFD was $1,000. The fund itself is an $83 billion sovereign vehicle. Every politician who has tried to cut the dividend has paid for it, because Alaskans treat it as a property right, a share of the state’s resources, and not as a welfare transfer. The lesson is institutional rather than fiscal: cash is politically durable when it is framed as ownership of a productive asset, and politically fragile when it is framed as a check from the state. The Foundation analog is not “everyone owns oil.” It is “everyone has a claim on the productive surplus of the automated economy.”

The November 2025 Marshall Islands rollout ($200 a quarter, every citizen, including children) is technically the first national UBI, but at $800 a year per person it is a population-retention program against migration to the United States, not a livelihood replacement. Calling it a UBI is accurate. Calling it a model for replacing wages would be rhetorical inflation.

Verdict: UBI is the right diagnosis of the wrong magnitude. The work-survival link is breaking. Cash is necessary but insufficient: necessary because survival cannot be conditional on a labor market that is disappearing, insufficient because money is the rationing tool for a price system that is about to lose most of the things it can ration. Compare the UHI critique for the variant Musk and others are now selling at a higher dollar figure; the structural objection is the same.

What Singapore actually built

If the Nordic floor is “the state taxes wages to share fairly,” and the UBI floor is “the state hands out cash to soften the landing,” Singapore’s floor is something more idiosyncratic and more revealing. The state builds the apartment, opens the savings account, runs the hospital insurance, and ties the entire stack — house, savings, retirement, medical premium — to the wage you continue to earn.

About 77% of Singapore’s resident population lives in flats built by the Housing & Development Board, down from a peak closer to 87% in the 1990s. Most own their flat under a 99-year lease, financed by their Central Provident Fund balance, on land owned by the state. This is the most successful exercise in mass-scale public housing any market democracy has ever run, and it is not a museum piece: HDB resale prices hit a record high in September 2025, with 172 million-dollar transactions in a single month. In April 2026, National Development Minister Chee Hong Tat confirmed that about 6% of all 2025 HDB resales, 1,594 units, crossed the million-dollar mark. The system is operating, and it has produced one of the highest home-ownership rates in the world.

It has also produced a slow-burning crisis around the 99-year lease. Then-DPM Lawrence Wong acknowledged in March 2024 that the vast majority of HDB leases will run their full course and the flat will revert to the state with no compensation to the leaseholder. Only about 4% of stock has been redeveloped via the SERS scheme since 1995. The Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme that was announced as a mitigation in 2018 has still not been implemented and is not expected before 2030. Singaporeans are buying assets that, on the system’s own design, will be worth zero in their grandchildren’s hands, and the country is in the early phase of working out what that means politically.

The savings half of the architecture is the Central Provident Fund. Combined contributions for workers under 55 are 37% of salary (20% employee, 17% employer), and these flow into a set of individually owned accounts that fund housing, retirement, medical insurance, and a narrow band of approved investments. Total balances reached S$609.5 billion at end-2024, with members earning S$22.4 billion in interest. For the cohort turning 55 in 2026, the Basic Retirement Sum is S$110,200, the Full Retirement Sum is S$220,400, and the Enhanced Retirement Sum is S$440,800. In January 2025, the government closed the Special Account for 1.4 million members aged 55 and over, moving balances out of a 4%-yielding account into either a Retirement Account or the lower-yielding Ordinary Account. The change was modest in headline terms and structurally significant in practice: a stealth interest-rate cut on older members’ liquid savings.

The defining feature of CPF, against both the Nordic floor and any cash-transfer scheme, is that it is fully funded by wages and has no non-contributor entry point. You can only touch your Ordinary Account before age 55 for an HDB flat, an approved investment, education, or insurance. The lowest layer of state support for working Singaporeans, the Workfare Income Supplement, is conditional on receiving CPF contributions, that is, on having a job. The 2025 income cap is S$3,000 a month gross, with maximum annual payouts ranging from S$2,450 to S$4,900, 60% routed into CPF and 40% paid in cash. Workfare both rewards work and forces savings; it is structurally not a UBI and was carefully designed not to be one. MediShield Life and CareShield Life cover every citizen and permanent resident, but they are premium-funded, with premiums drawn from Medisave, itself a CPF account, itself funded by wages. The pattern is consistent up and down the stack: universal in enrolment, contributory in finance.

The paternalism layer is also load-bearing. The Ethnic Integration Policy, in place since 1989, sets ethnic quotas at the block and neighbourhood level (roughly 84% Chinese, 22% Malay, 12% Indian and Other at the neighbourhood ceiling), and minority sellers can find themselves unable to sell when a block has hit its minority cap. Singles can only buy a BTO flat after age 35, and only a 2-room Flexi until very recently. Unwed parents could not buy a 3-room BTO in any estate until a 2020 reform, and still receive a smaller grant than a divorced or widowed parent. The eligibility architecture is descended from Lee Kuan Yew’s explicit 1969 line that the state should not “owe” food, medicine, housing, education and jobs to the “irresponsible” who simply produce children. Half a century later, the architecture still reflects that judgment. The state will house and bank for you, with extraordinary technocratic competence, provided you produce wages and, ideally, a marriage certificate.

What Singapore is doing about the automation problem makes the structural gap visible. The country’s SkillsFuture program put 260,000 individuals through credit-funded training in 2024, up from 192,000 in 2023, with a real and measurable 69% reporting improved work performance. The Progressive Wage Model raises sector-by-sector wage floors. Smart Nation 2.0 commits more than S$1 billion over five years to AI compute, talent and industry. Budget 2026 merged Workforce Singapore and SkillsFuture into a single statutory board, under a new National AI Council chaired by PM Lawrence Wong. The IMF’s August 2024 Selected Issues Paper on AI’s impact on Singapore’s labor market found that high-skilled and clerical roles are the most AI-exposed (the older “automation hits the bottom of the ladder” story has flipped) and recommended further SkillsFuture scale-up. What the paper does not address, and what no MAS or MOF paper has yet addressed in public, is the implication for CPF flows under sustained labor-share decline. If wages compress because AI does the clerical and analytical work, contributions compress. If contributions compress, the housing-medical-retirement stack contracts in real terms. There is no public model of that scenario.

Verdict: the most paternalistic and technocratically impressive floor on offer, Singapore’s system resembles the Foundation in its willingness to engineer infrastructure at population scale and diverges from it in its insistence on wage-coupling at every layer. If the labor market contracts, the entire stack contracts with it. There is no non-wage door in.

What the three floors share

Lay the three side by side and the shared load-bearing assumption becomes hard to deny.

Each rests on money as the rationing medium for the floor — even Singapore’s HDB, which you buy — and on wage labor as the upstream source of the money the medium rations. The Nordic state taxes wages and distributes the proceeds as services and transfers. The UBI state taxes wages (or a wage-correlated consumption base) and distributes the proceeds as cash. The Singaporean state requires wages to enter every door of the social system and matches them with public infrastructure on the other side.

This is not a coincidence. All three are calibrated for the world that produced them, in which most adults of working age held wage jobs and the political class could redistribute around that fact in different ways. The Nordic, UBI, and Singapore floors differ in elegance, in generosity, in the share that goes as cash versus services versus assets, but they are variations on a single instrument. None of them was designed for the world the book argues we are entering, in which wage labor is no longer the source of value and money is no longer the rationing tool for the things money used to ration.

What dissolves

The book’s case for this is in Chapter 1 and in the supporting work on the labor cliff, the humanoid-robot trajectory, the AI coding revolution, and the fusion-energy timeline. The short version: when machine labor crosses the line where it becomes both cheaper and more capable than human labor across most economic tasks, the wage system stops being the way most people earn the right to eat. Klarna’s deployment of an AI customer-service assistant covered the workload of 700 full-time agents in its first month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s monthly tracker recorded “AI” as the number-one cited reason for U.S. layoffs in March 2026, for the first time in the firm’s history. These are early signals, not endpoints. The arithmetic under them is not going to soften.

Each of the three floors handles a slice of that arithmetic and breaks on the rest.

The Nordic floor breaks on the funding base. A welfare state that draws three-quarters of its revenue from wages cannot keep its promises when wages compress to a small slice of national income. Norway’s sovereign-fund model is the partial exception, and it is the one that points where the Foundation actually has to go.

The UBI floor breaks on the meaning layer and on the political coalition. OpenResearch’s fade-out tells you what cash alone does once acute scarcity is addressed: it produces a year of measurable relief and then loops back to the deeper questions cash cannot touch. Yang’s funding math tells you what scale a real UBI requires: numbers that the existing political coalition for UBI is nowhere close to mustering. Marshall Islands–scale Enra works; nation-scale livelihood replacement does not, on the receipts so far.

The Singapore floor breaks at the door. If the wage that powers your CPF deductions vanishes, the entire technocratic stack (apartment payments, retirement sum, medical premium, Workfare top-up) has nowhere to root. The country’s policy class is acutely aware of the AI question and has no model in public of what happens to the system if the wage base shrinks. That silence is its own piece of evidence.

What makes the Foundation different

The Foundation is not a fourth variant of the same instrument. It is a different instrument.

It does not tax wages to fund services; it builds the services directly, at the marginal cost that AI plus robotics plus cheap fusion energy makes possible, and treats them as infrastructure rather than transfers. It does not cut every citizen a check; it removes the prices from the layer where money has nothing left to ration, and keeps the price system sharp at the frontier above, where genuine scarcity still lives. It does not require contribution as the entry condition to the safety net; it makes the safety net unconditional and asks for contribution through the entirely separate channel of Civic Service and the Impact economy of the Frontier.

That last move is the one that the rival floors cannot make and the Foundation has to. Nordic universalism handles the meaning problem implicitly by giving everyone a job and a public role. UBI hands the meaning problem back to the recipient with a check. Singapore embeds meaning in the work that earns the CPF contribution. None of these survives a world in which most people are not employed in the wage-labor sense. The Foundation answers the meaning question by separating the two questions the rival floors fuse: what guarantees survival? and what makes a life feel earned? The first is solved by infrastructure that runs whether or not you participate. The second is solved by a Civic Service architecture, an Impact-based reputation system, and a non-coerced ladder into the Frontier that exists because survival is no longer the prize at the top of it.

There is a partial historical precedent for the financing model, and the Foundation generalizes from it. The Inca coordinated twelve million people across some of the most challenging terrain on Earth without markets or currency, using engineered warehouses, royal highways, and an obligatory labor tax (mit’a) that funded a guaranteed floor of food, clothing and old-age security. The Inca floor worked for centuries; its flaw was coercion. The Foundation keeps the architecture (infrastructure-as-service, marginal-cost provision, decoupling of survival from the price system) and removes the coercion, because the robots and the AI and the energy do the work the Inca extracted from human labor. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is a smaller, modern version of the same logic: capture a slice of the productive surplus in a disciplined institution, and let its return finance a slice of the social floor. The Foundation generalizes this to every citizen of an automated economy, with the productive surplus being not oil but the AI-and-robotics output stack itself.

There is also a partial historical precedent for what happens if you try to do this with closed productive roles and abundance but no meaning architecture, which is the subject of the companion piece on the decadence pattern. The book’s response to that risk is the second layer of the 90/10 framework: the Frontier and the Impact economy. The three rival floors do not have an answer to the decadence problem because they do not need one — they hold the wage system together as the meaning architecture by default. The Foundation does need one, because it is honest about what is dissolving.

What this is not

This article is not a verdict against Nordic social democracy, against UBI, or against Singapore’s technocratic state. Each is a serious answer. Each handles a piece of the problem better than the United States currently does. A Nordic-style welfare state in the U.S. would be an enormous step forward; so would a meaningful UBI; so would HDB-quality public housing. Nothing in the book or in this article argues otherwise.

The argument is narrower and more specific. The rival floors are calibrated for a world in which wage labor is the source of value and money is the rationing tool for the basics. That world has, by the book’s reading of the receipts, perhaps a decade left in its current form for most of the developed world’s workforce. The instruments that worked inside it will not, by their construction, work outside it. A different instrument is required, and the book calls that instrument the Foundation.

If the labor cliff is real and the rival floors are insufficient on the grounds above, the question is not whether to build the Foundation. The question is whether the political and engineering choices made between now and the labor cliff produce something closer to the Foundation, closer to Star Wars elite capture, or closer to Mad Max collapse — the three scenarios the book lays out in Chapter 8. That is the conversation the rest of the corpus is for.

Further reading

• The book’s own treatment: Unscarcity, Chapter 1: The Foundation, “Three Other Floors” section.
• The labor-cliff math: Labor Cliff 2025-2030, The Humanoid Robot Revolution, AI Coding Revolution, Fusion Timeline 2024-2030.
• The Foundation architecture: The Foundation, Foundational Principles, Civic Service, Free Zones, Free Zone Economics.
• Companion UBI / UHI critiques: UBI: 122 Experiments Later, UHI vs UBI, Universal High Income, UHI Funding Mechanism.
• Funding side, post-wage: Land Tax Funds Abundance (the Henry George approach), Transition Trust (the $60T conversion mechanism the book proposes).
• Historical precedents and counter-cases: Inca Engineering Without Money, The !Kung Affluent Society, Maya Dual Economy, Meiji Restoration Exit Protocol.
• The meaning layer the rival floors leave to the wage system: Purpose Beyond Survival, Why Paradise Has Failed Before, Impact.
• For Singapore specifically: Singapore Smart City (the AI-governance dimension the HDB+CPF model is now being asked to handle).