The 12 Commandments of Post-Labor Economics
Neoliberalism has its universal commandments. I figured Post-Labor Economics ought to as well. Here are 12 economic imperatives distilled from all my work on PLE.
Wages built the modern world. Every mortgage payment, every grocery run, every quarterly earnings report traces back to the same engine. People sell their time, earn money, and spend it. The entire global economy runs on that loop. And the loop is breaking. When it breaks fully, we will need more than policy patches and emergency stimulus. We will need a new set of economic first principles. I think I have found twelve of them.
After spending the better part of three years developing Post-Labor Economics, writing hundreds of pages on everything from sovereign wealth fund mechanics to the structural foundations of civic leverage, I had a moment of clarity that felt embarrassingly overdue. I had built an enormous framework. I had specific policy prescriptions for every level of government, detailed case studies from dozens of countries, metrics with formulas, taxonomies with layers, historical arguments stretching back centuries. What I did not have was a concise set of core principles that someone could hold in their head and use to evaluate any economic proposal, in any context, at any point in history.
The realization hit me while thinking about neoliberalism. Love it or hate it, neoliberalism has been the dominant economic paradigm for roughly half a century, and it operates on a small set of orienting imperatives that are instantly recognizable even though nobody ever sat down and carved them into stone tablets. There is no canonical “Ten Commandments of Neoliberalism” etched on a wall somewhere at the University of Chicago. The closest thing is probably the Washington Consensus, a set of policy recommendations drafted for developing economies in the late 1980s that became a kind of informal catechism. But even beyond that specific document, the operative principles of neoliberalism are legible to anyone who has paid attention to economic policy debates over the past fifty years.
“If something exists outside the market, bring it into the market.” That is probably the most recognizable neoliberal imperative, and it has driven everything from the privatization of state-owned industries to the creation of carbon trading schemes to the financialization of housing. “Remove barriers to the free movement of capital and goods across borders.” That one animated decades of trade liberalization, from NAFTA to the WTO. “Governments should not do what markets can do more efficiently.” That imperative reshaped public services worldwide and drove waves of deregulation. You can agree or disagree with any of these prescriptions, but you have to acknowledge their power as organizing principles. They give a policymaker, an investor, or a voter a quick heuristic for evaluating proposals. Does this move expand market mechanisms or contract them? If it expands them, a neoliberal supports it. If it contracts them, a neoliberal opposes it. That simplicity is a feature, and it explains much of neoliberalism’s staying power even as its specific policy outcomes have drawn increasingly sharp criticism.
Post-Labor Economics needs something equivalent. The framework I have built includes very specific prescriptions. Every nation should build a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Norway’s Government Pension Fund. Every state or province should do the same, modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund or New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund. Baby bonds should be universal. Employee ownership should receive preferential legal and tax treatment. Payment infrastructure should be open and permissionless. Procurement data should be radically transparent. These are concrete, actionable recommendations grounded in existing real-world examples, and they appear throughout my book with supporting evidence and implementation detail. But they are prescriptions for particular contexts at a particular moment in history. What sits beneath them? What are the universal principles from which all of those specific recommendations can be derived?
That is what this article attempts to answer. I set out to distill the entire PLE framework into a set of imperatives that meet three design constraints.
First, they must be temporally invariant. A principle that applies only during the current wave of AI-driven automation is a tactical observation, and tactical observations expire. The imperatives I wanted had to be as valid for a policymaker in 1950 as for one in 2050 or 2150. The specific technologies change. The specific institutional forms change. The underlying economic logic should hold regardless.
Second, they must be economically agnostic in their framing. They should not reference the internal jargon of PLE or assume familiarity with its specific taxonomies. A reader encountering these imperatives with no prior exposure to Post-Labor Economics should find each one intelligible and defensible on its own terms. If a principle requires you to have read the rest of the book before it makes sense, it has failed as a principle. In many cases, Post-Labor policies sell themselves on their own merits, with or without an automation job-apocalypse coming.
Third, each imperative must stand on its own merits as good policy guidance independent of any particular theory about the future of work or technology. Sovereign wealth funds are good fiscal instruments whether or not AI eliminates half the labor market. Broad capital ownership produces more resilient economies whether or not humanoid robots are on the horizon. Transparent governance reduces corruption whether or not automation changes the balance of power between citizens and the state. The imperatives should be recommendations that a prudent society would follow in any scenario, with the post-labor context merely adding urgency to prescriptions that were already wise.
What follows is the result of that distillation. Twelve imperatives that together constitute the platform of Post-Labor Economics, stripped down to their most universal form. The specific policy recommendations in the rest of my book, from the Pyramid of Prosperity to the Pyramid of Power to the metrics framework, are all applications of these principles to particular institutional contexts. The principles are the source code. Everything else is the compiled program running on specific hardware. If you understand the twelve imperatives, you can derive the specific recommendations yourself for any context, any jurisdiction, any era. That is the test of whether they are truly foundational. And I believe they are.
NOTE: the book I’m referring to is my forthcoming Labor/Zero: A Post-Labor Economics Treatise.
The 30,000 Foot View
Here is the framework at thirty thousand feet before we descend into each imperative in detail.
Imperative 1, “Broaden ownership of productive assets across the population,” is the master prescription from which most of the others follow. The returns from any productive system flow to whoever owns it, and if ownership is concentrated then prosperity is concentrated regardless of how impressive aggregate growth looks. The single most important thing a society can do to ensure broad prosperity is to ensure broad ownership.
Imperative 2, “Build public wealth through enduring funds rather than recurring expenditure,” says that governments should invest, not just spend. A dollar placed in a sovereign wealth fund generates returns for decades while the principal remains intact, whereas a dollar disbursed through a budget cycle is spent once and gone.
Imperative 3, “Endow every citizen with capital at the earliest possible stage of life,” addresses the “it takes money to make money” problem at its root. Compounding is the most powerful force in wealth creation, and the biggest determinant of who benefits from it is who starts with a stake.
Imperative 4, “Expand worker and community ownership within private enterprise,” brings the ownership principle inside the firm. Cooperatives, employee ownership plans, and community trusts route capital income to households that would otherwise receive only wages, blurring the line between the working class and the ownership class by making them the same people.
Imperative 5, “Capture rents on shared resources to capitalize public wealth,” identifies the funding mechanism. Spectrum, atmosphere, land values, mineral deposits, and collectively generated data are commons whose value can be monetized without penalizing productive activity and channeled into public wealth vehicles rather than consumed in annual budgets.
Imperative 6, “Use transfers as a universal floor rather than a primary income source,” affirms that a baseline beneath which no one falls is necessary and humane, but warns that a population primarily dependent on government payments has traded one vulnerability for another. Transfers are the scaffolding, not the building.
Imperative 7, “Engineer citizen leverage that does not depend on being economically needed,” addresses power rather than prosperity. Social contracts have always rested on structural mutual dependence between the governed and the governing, and anything that makes the population less necessary erodes that dependence. New sources of civic leverage must be deliberately constructed on foundations that persist regardless of how the labor market evolves.
Imperative 8, “Collapse information asymmetry between institutions and the public,” targets the mechanism by which concentrated power most reliably maintains itself. When institutions know what they are doing and the public does not, every other accountability structure operates at a disadvantage. Radical transparency is the load-bearing element beneath the rest of the civic architecture.
Imperative 9, “Keep financial infrastructure open and permissionless,” says that the ability to send and receive value should function like a public utility rather than a gated privilege. A citizen who can be severed from commerce by an intermediary’s decision is a citizen whose economic existence is contingent on permission.
Imperative 10, “Measure the distribution of capital income, not just aggregate output,” closes the loop by ensuring that the shift toward broad ownership becomes a trackable target with accountable stewards. A society that measures only how much it produces, without measuring who participates in the returns, has no way to see divergence between aggregate prosperity and lived experience until the gap becomes a crisis.
Imperative 11, “When designing programs and policies, favor capital-based approaches over transfer-based ones,” is a decision rule for institutional design. Given two interventions that achieve the same immediate goal, prefer the one that creates owners over the one that creates recipients, because capital compounds and transfers do not.
Imperative 12, “Favor decentralization and distribution of power over concentration,” is the meta-principle governing how all the other imperatives should be implemented. Concentrated power is fragile and dangerous regardless of who holds it. Distributed systems are more resilient, harder to capture, and better at generating the evolutionary learning that good governance requires.
With that orienting map in hand, let us now walk through each imperative in full.
The 12 Commandments of Post-Labor Economics
1. Broaden ownership of productive assets across the population.
Broaden capital participation
The single most important determinant of who prospers in any economy is who owns the productive system. Returns from economic activity flow to whoever holds title to the assets that generate them. This has been true in agrarian economies where the landlord collects rent, in industrial economies where the factory owner collects profit, and in financial economies where the shareholder collects dividends. The specific assets change across eras. The principle does not.
When ownership of productive capacity concentrates in a small class, the gains from growth concentrate in that same class regardless of how impressive the aggregate numbers look. Output can rise, productivity can soar, and GDP can break records while the median household treads water, because the median household owns essentially nothing that generates returns. Wages obscure this dynamic because they create the impression of broad participation in economic gains. A worker receives a paycheck and feels like a participant. But wages are compensation for being useful, and usefulness is contingent. It can be competed away, automated away, or simply rendered unnecessary by changing conditions. Ownership generates returns by virtue of holding a stake, regardless of whether anyone currently needs your labor. A person holding shares in a diversified fund receives dividends whether or not they are employed, whether or not their skills are in demand, whether or not any employer has decided they are worth hiring. That durability is what separates ownership from wages as an income source. One persists through disruption. The other does not.
The policy implication follows directly. If broad prosperity depends on broad ownership, then the distribution of ownership must be an active policy target, pursued with the same seriousness that governments currently pursue employment levels or GDP growth. Sovereign wealth funds place productive assets in collective hands. Employee ownership plans distribute equity within firms. Capital endowments seed individuals with assets at birth. Community trusts hold stakes on behalf of local populations. Each vehicle differs in mechanism, but they all accomplish the same structural shift, moving people from the wage side of the economy to the ownership side.
Societies where ownership has concentrated without corrective have followed predictable trajectories toward instability, extraction, and eventually violent redistribution. Societies that have managed to broaden ownership, whether through land reform, homesteading programs, or modern equity participation, have built more durable prosperity and more stable political orders. The pattern recurs across centuries and continents. A society of broadly distributed asset holders is resilient in ways that a society of wage earners simply cannot match, because the foundation of its prosperity does not depend on any particular configuration of the labor market.
2. Build public wealth through enduring funds rather than recurring expenditure.
Build wealth funds that pay dividends
Governments overwhelmingly operate on a spend-as-you-go model. Revenue comes in through taxes and fees. It goes out through programs and services. Whatever is left over, if anything, reduces the deficit. The balance sheet, to the extent anyone thinks about it, is a liability story told in debt levels, deficit projections, and unfunded obligations. Very few governments think of themselves as investors, as entities that should be accumulating productive assets and generating returns on behalf of their populations. Yet the most financially resilient jurisdictions in the world have organized themselves in exactly this way.
Norway capitalized its Government Pension Fund with oil revenues beginning in the 1990s. Rather than spending the windfall on immediate consumption, as most petroleum states have done, Norway invested it in a globally diversified portfolio of equities, bonds, and real estate. The fund now holds well over a trillion dollars in assets and generates returns that exceed the annual petroleum revenue that created it. The original resource wealth has been transformed into a permanent, self-sustaining engine of public income. Alaska followed a similar path on a smaller scale, setting aside a portion of oil revenue into a permanent fund that pays annual dividends to every resident. New Mexico built an early childhood trust fund from land grant revenues. Singapore manages sovereign wealth that provides the city-state with a financial buffer and a source of returns that supplement taxation.
The principle underlying all of these examples is the same. Revenue that flows through a government budget gets spent once and is gone. Revenue that flows into a wealth fund gets invested and generates returns indefinitely. The fund becomes an asset rather than an expenditure, sitting on the public balance sheet and working for the population in perpetuity. Over time, the returns from a well-managed fund can grow to dwarf the original contributions, creating fiscal space that would otherwise require higher taxes or deeper deficits.
Any jurisdiction with a revenue source that can be partially diverted into long-term investment should do so. Carbon fees, spectrum auctions, land value capture, resource royalties, and data extraction fees are all candidates for capitalization rather than immediate spending. The specific revenue source matters less than the structural commitment to investing rather than consuming public wealth. The first dollar is the hardest. Every dollar after that benefits from compounding, and compounding is patient, relentless, and indifferent to political cycles.
3. Endow every citizen with capital at the earliest possible stage of life.
Implement universal basic capital
Compounding is the most powerful force in wealth creation, and the single largest factor determining who benefits from it is who starts with a stake. Wealthy families understand this intuitively. They establish trust funds, open investment accounts for their children, and pass down assets across generations. The compounding escalator carries their descendants upward from birth. Families without assets cannot do this, and no amount of wage income in adulthood can replicate the effect of decades of compound growth from a starting endowment. The wealth gap between families with inherited assets and families without them is not merely a gap in income. It is a gap in time, in the decades of compounding that one group enjoys and the other never gets to experience.
Universal capital endowments address this directly. When every child receives a publicly funded deposit into a long-term investment account at birth, the compounding clock starts for everyone simultaneously. The amounts need not be large at inception. A modest endowment invested in a diversified portfolio at birth can grow into a meaningful sum by the time its holder reaches adulthood, depending on market returns and the time horizon. Connecticut has implemented a version of this through baby bonds that seed accounts for children born into Medicaid-eligible families. The United Kingdom ran a similar program called the Child Trust Fund before discontinuing it. Several other jurisdictions are exploring or piloting variations, and the idea has intellectual support from economists across the political spectrum because it addresses wealth inequality at its structural root rather than its symptoms.
What makes endowment programs distinctive compared to other interventions is that they require nothing from the recipient. Wage subsidies raise income but do not build assets. Tax credits provide short-term relief but do not compound. Traditional savings incentives tend to benefit households that already have surplus income to save. A universal endowment requires no prior wealth and no behavioral change. It places capital in the citizen’s name and lets time do the work. By the time these citizens reach adulthood, they enter the economy as people who already own something, and that changes their options, their risk tolerance, their relationship to the market, and their sense of participation in the broader economic system.
The deeper logic here is about what kind of society you are building. Every generation faces a choice about whether the starting conditions of economic life will be determined entirely by the accident of birth into a particular family, or whether the society itself will establish a baseline of capital access that everyone shares. A society that endows its citizens with capital at birth has decided that ownership should be a birthright rather than something available only through inheritance or exceptional individual accumulation. That decision, compounded across millions of lives and decades of growth, reshapes the entire distribution of economic power.
4. Expand worker and community ownership within private enterprise.
Create more on-ramps to capital ownership, make it the default
Most people interact with the productive economy through firms. They work for companies, buy from companies, and live in communities shaped by corporate decisions about where to invest, what to produce, and how to allocate profits. In the conventional ownership model, the returns from all of this activity flow to external shareholders who may have no relationship to the workers, the customers, or the community. Workers receive wages. Shareholders receive profits. The boundary between these two groups is sharp, and for most workers it is never crossed.
Collective ownership structures dissolve that boundary. Employee stock ownership plans give workers equity stakes in the firms where they labor, so that the profits generated partly by their effort flow back to them as owners. Worker cooperatives take this further, vesting control and profit-sharing rights in the workforce itself. Community land trusts and local investment vehicles allow residents to hold stakes in the enterprises that operate in their neighborhoods, capturing some of the value that would otherwise be extracted by distant capital. These structures accomplish something that no amount of wage adjustment can achieve. They route capital income, the fastest-growing share of economic returns in most advanced economies, directly to households in the middle and lower portions of the income distribution.
The evidence base for these models is mature and extensive. Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region has built a cooperative ecosystem that generates a substantial share of regional output and has demonstrated superior firm survival rates compared to conventional businesses. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain’s Basque Country has operated as a federation of worker cooperatives for over sixty years, employing tens of thousands of worker-owners across multiple industries and surviving economic downturns that destroyed comparable conventional firms. The United Kingdom created over two thousand employee ownership trusts in the decade after introducing favorable tax treatment in 2014, demonstrating that where the legal and fiscal path is made easy, adoption follows rapidly.
The aggregate effect of expanding these structures across an economy is significant beyond the individual firms involved. Every cooperative dividend, every ESOP distribution, every community trust payout represents capital income flowing to people who would otherwise receive only wages. At scale, this blurs the line between the working class and the ownership class by making them the same people. A worker with an equity stake in their employer has different incentives, a different time horizon, and a different relationship to the firm’s success than a worker whose only connection to the enterprise is a paycheck that stops the moment they are no longer needed. Favorable legal frameworks, streamlined formation processes, and tax incentives should make collective ownership the easy default path rather than the exceptional one that only unusually motivated founders pursue.
5. Capture rents on shared resources to capitalize public wealth.
Monetize the commons for the many
Every society possesses resources that belong to no individual. The electromagnetic spectrum that carries wireless communications. The atmosphere that absorbs emissions. The land values created by public investment in transit and infrastructure. The mineral deposits beneath public territory. The data generated by millions of people going about their daily lives. These are commons, and when they are exploited without compensation to the public, the value they generate is privatized while the resource itself remains collectively owned in name only.
Rents on shared resources are categorically different from taxes on productive activity. A tax on wages penalizes labor. A tax on profits penalizes enterprise. A rent on spectrum usage prices access to a public asset that the government administers on behalf of citizens. A carbon price captures the cost imposed on a shared atmosphere. A land value tax collects the appreciation that results from community investment and public infrastructure rather than individual effort. The distinction matters enormously in practice because rents on commons can be captured without discouraging the productive activity that generates prosperity. You are pricing access to something that already belongs to everyone, and you are doing so in a way that makes the user of that resource internalize its true cost.
The critical question, and the one most jurisdictions get wrong, is where these revenues go once captured. In most cases they flow into general revenue and get spent in the current budget cycle, indistinguishable from any other income stream. The alternative is to channel them into public wealth funds that invest the proceeds and distribute returns to the population over time. This is how Alaska built its Permanent Fund from oil royalties and how Norway built the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund from petroleum revenue. Both demonstrate that capturing rents on shared resources and investing them prudently can create permanent public wealth that benefits citizens across generations without requiring ongoing taxation of wages or profits.
The commons already exist. Their value is already being generated. Someone is already capturing it. The question is whether that value accrues to whoever gets there first, or whether the population that collectively creates and maintains these shared resources receives a return on them. Spectrum auctions generate billions. Carbon pricing can generate hundreds of billions at scale. Land value in major cities appreciates by trillions over decades, almost entirely because of public investment and population growth rather than anything the landowner did. These are enormous revenue streams hiding in plain sight, already available for capitalization into public wealth vehicles, requiring only the political will to redirect them from private capture to collective investment.
6. Use transfers as a universal floor rather than a primary income source.
Universal basic income as a stopgap, not the whole show
A minimum income beneath which no person falls is a mark of a functional society. People need to eat, keep a roof over their heads, and access basic services regardless of whether the labor market currently has a place for them. Universal baseline support, designed without means tests or bureaucratic gatekeeping, accomplishes this with the least administrative overhead and the fewest perverse incentives. When everyone qualifies by virtue of citizenship, nobody faces the benefit cliffs and poverty traps that plague targeted programs. Nobody has to prove they are poor enough or broken enough to deserve help. The floor should be universal, unconditional, and sufficient to prevent destitution.
The danger lies in allowing this floor to become the load-bearing structure of household income rather than the safety net beneath it. A society where the majority of household income flows through government appropriations has built its prosperity on a foundation that is simultaneously fragile and coercive. Transfer payments must be renewed every budget cycle. They survive only as long as the political coalition that supports them holds power. They create enormous leverage for whoever controls disbursement, because the ability to adjust, condition, or revoke a benefit is the ability to dictate behavior. Politicians across the ideological spectrum have demonstrated willingness to weaponize transfer programs when it suits their interests, whether through work requirements designed to punish, means tests designed to exclude, or benefit cuts designed to coerce compliance. A population whose livelihood depends primarily on the continued generosity of elected officials has exchanged one form of vulnerability for another.
The structural goal should always be to shrink the share of household income that comes from transfers relative to the share that comes from owned assets. Think of transfers as scaffolding around a building under construction. The scaffolding is necessary while the structure is going up, and removing it prematurely would be catastrophic. But you do not design a building that depends on its scaffolding permanently. As sovereign wealth fund dividends grow, as cooperative distributions expand, as endowment accounts mature, as worker equity stakes accumulate, the transfer component should naturally decline as a fraction of total household income. It never disappears entirely, because the floor is permanent and universal. But it becomes the smallest layer in a diversified income stack rather than the dominant one.
The practical test for whether a transfer program is functioning as a floor or as a dependency is straightforward. Ask whether a household receiving the transfer could survive its elimination because other income sources have grown to compensate. If the answer is yes, the transfer is functioning as intended. If the answer is no and there is no trajectory toward yes, the system has failed to build the capital infrastructure that makes the transfer temporary rather than permanent. Every transfer program should be designed with its own obsolescence as a goal, not in the sense that it gets cut, but in the sense that the households it supports are simultaneously being moved toward income sources they own and control.
7. Engineer citizen leverage that does not depend on being economically needed.
Replace labor’s waning leverage with new systems
Throughout history, ordinary people have possessed bargaining power for reasons that had nothing to do with rights or constitutions or the goodwill of rulers. They possessed it because the people in charge needed them. Factories needed workers. Armies needed soldiers. Treasuries needed taxpayers. That structural dependence constrained elite behavior under every form of government, from ancient empires to modern democracies. A king who pushed his peasants too far lost the agricultural output that fed his army. An industrialist who ground his workers into destitution lost the productive capacity that generated his wealth. A democracy that ignored its citizens lost their votes and their cooperation. The concessions that define modern civic life, including the weekend, the minimum wage, the right to organize, and the franchise itself, were extracted by populations whose cooperation could not be taken for granted because the system could not function without them.
Any development that makes the population less structurally necessary weakens this dynamic, and the weakening does not require the complete elimination of human usefulness to be felt. Even partial erosion of structural dependence changes the calculus of those in power, because the cost of ignoring public demands falls with each increment of reduced dependence. A government that can run its economy with half the workforce has less reason to accommodate the other half. A military that can project force with autonomous systems has less need to maintain a broad base of popular support. A treasury that draws revenue from automated production and capital gains taxes on concentrated wealth has less fiscal dependence on a broad consumer class. Each of these shifts is already underway to varying degrees across advanced economies, and each incrementally reduces the structural leverage that ordinary people have historically wielded.
The response to this erosion cannot be to prevent the developments that cause it. They flow from technological and economic forces that operate on global timescales and resist unilateral intervention. The response must be to construct new forms of citizen leverage on foundations that do not depend on being needed. Broad capital ownership is one such foundation, because a population of asset holders has structural power through their ownership stakes that a population of pure wage earners loses when wages disappear. An owner can vote their shares, withdraw their capital, and impose costs on institutions through economic action. But ownership alone is not the complete answer.
The architecture of citizen leverage must be engineered across multiple dimensions, each reinforcing the others, so that the erosion of any single source of power does not collapse the entire structure. A hostile faction might successfully undermine one institution, but it should not be able to simultaneously dismantle transparent governance, capture democratic mechanisms, control financial infrastructure, and override constitutional protections. The mesh of overlapping accountability mechanisms must be harder to subvert than any single institution standing alone. That redundancy is the design principle. The following commandments address specific components of this architecture.
8. Collapse information asymmetry between institutions and the public.
Make radical transparency the default posture
Asymmetric information is among the most reliable mechanisms by which concentrated power maintains its position. When the people who run institutions know what contracts have been signed, what money has been spent, who owns what, and who benefits from which decisions, and the public does not, the institutional side of every negotiation holds a structural advantage that no democratic process can fully overcome. Elections give citizens a voice. Transparency gives them eyes. Without both, the voice speaks into darkness.
Radical transparency means that the default posture of public institutions is openness, with opacity justified only where specific and articulable reasons demand it. Ukraine built ProZorro, a transparent procurement platform, after the Maidan revolution and maintained it through a full-scale invasion. The system publishes every tender, every bid, every award, every contract in real time for anyone to scrutinize. The results were measurable in billions of dollars saved through increased competition and reduced corruption. Estonia has operated a digital governance system since 2002 that allows citizens to verify their own records and see exactly who has accessed their data. These are functioning systems in countries that face acute governance challenges, and they demonstrate that radical transparency is operationally feasible rather than aspirationally theoretical.
The deeper reason transparency matters to this framework goes beyond the general good-governance case. Every other commandment in this list depends on institutions operating honestly. You cannot verify that a sovereign wealth fund is being managed in the public interest if its operations are opaque. You cannot confirm that capital endowments are being disbursed equitably if the disbursement data is locked away. You cannot hold representatives accountable for their allocation decisions if the allocations are invisible. You cannot ensure that rents on shared resources are being captured and invested rather than diverted if the revenue flows are hidden.
Transparency functions as a load-bearing structural element that the rest of the architecture rests upon. Without it, every mechanism for building broad prosperity and maintaining citizen leverage is vulnerable to quiet subversion by those with the access and motivation to subvert it. Corrupt officials can redirect wealth fund assets. Captured regulators can structure endowment programs to benefit connected parties. Opaque procurement allows public resources to flow to politically favored firms. Every one of these failure modes becomes dramatically harder to execute when the relevant information is public by default, machine-readable, and accessible to any citizen or journalist or watchdog who cares to look.
9. Keep financial infrastructure open and permissionless.
Financial freedom is leverage
The ability to send and receive value is a precondition for economic participation. In most advanced economies, that ability is mediated by a stack of private intermediaries, each of which can deny access, extract fees, or freeze transactions at the direction of any sufficiently powerful actor. A citizen who can be severed from commerce by an institution’s decision is a citizen whose economic existence depends on remaining in good standing with that institution. That dependence has been weaponized historically for purposes ranging from political repression to competitive suppression to the simple extraction of rents from captive populations that have no alternative way to move money.
Open payment systems fundamentally alter this dynamic. India’s Unified Payments Interface processes more transactions than Visa and Mastercard combined within that country and has brought hundreds of millions of people into the formal financial system at near-zero cost. Brazil’s Pix enables instant transfers between any two accounts without fees. Kenya’s M-Pesa brought mobile payments to populations that had never had bank accounts and transformed economic participation across East Africa. In each case the pattern was the same. Removing gatekeepers from the transaction layer increased participation, reduced costs, and eliminated a point of coercive control that incumbents had exercised, often without anyone noticing until the alternative demonstrated what had been missing.
Financial infrastructure should function like a public utility. Universally accessible, neutrally operated, and unavailable as a tool of control by any party. A state that can freeze a citizen’s accounts without due process has coercive power that operates beneath the surface of any formal rights or protections. A payment processor that can deny service to an industry or an individual based on internal policy decisions is exercising quasi-governmental authority without any of the accountability structures that governments face. A banking system that excludes hundreds of millions of people because they lack the documentation or minimum balances that legacy institutions require is an infrastructure failure masquerading as a market outcome.
The base layer of financial infrastructure, meaning the ability to move value from one party to another, should not require permission from anyone other than the two parties involved. Every layer of intermediation that sits between a citizen and their ability to transact is a layer where access can be denied and rents can be extracted. Minimizing those layers is an act of civic infrastructure with direct implications for every other element of this framework. A citizen who cannot freely transact cannot fully benefit from capital ownership, cannot receive sovereign wealth dividends without friction, cannot participate in cooperative economies, and cannot exercise the economic agency that the rest of this architecture is designed to provide.
10. Measure the distribution of capital income, not just aggregate output.
Optimize the economy around increasing capital based income for households
Every society optimizes for what it measures. When gross domestic product became the standard economic indicator in the mid-twentieth century, governments organized their priorities around maximizing output. When unemployment became a political mandate through legislation like the Employment Act of 1946 in the United States, governments organized their priorities around job creation. These metrics shaped what leaders paid attention to, what journalists reported, what voters rewarded and punished at the ballot box, and what institutions were built to manage. The history of economic governance is in large part a history of which numbers ended up on the dashboard, because the numbers on the dashboard are the numbers that drive decisions.
The standard economic dashboard was built for an era when wages were the primary mechanism for distributing prosperity. It tracks aggregate output and employment with exquisite precision. It can tell you how much the economy is producing and how many people have jobs. It cannot tell you whether the gains from that production are reaching ordinary households. This is a specific and consequential blind spot rather than a minor omission. Aggregate output can grow while median families stagnate, because the gains flow to capital and capital is concentrated at the top of the wealth distribution. Productivity can rise while the workers who enabled that rise see none of the benefit. Corporate profits can hit records while the consumer base that generates those profits watches its purchasing power erode. The instruments show green lights across the board while the underlying conditions deteriorate, because the instruments were designed to measure something other than what now matters most.
What should be tracked, with the same institutional weight and political salience that GDP and unemployment currently command, is the breadth of capital income across the population. Specifically, three things need to be visible. What share of households receive meaningful income from ownership of productive assets. How that ownership is distributed across income quintiles and demographic groups. And what share of household income derives from collectively held public wealth rather than from wages or transfers alone. The data to calculate these indicators already exists in the records of statistical agencies like the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Congressional Budget Office. What has been missing is a framework that elevates these measurements from academic curiosities to first-class policy targets.
The reason this matters goes beyond diagnostic value. Metrics do not merely describe reality. They shape it, because they determine what becomes a political issue and what remains invisible. Unemployment above a certain threshold triggers political action because unemployment is on the dashboard and everyone can see it. Capital concentration could reach historic extremes without triggering any comparable response, because no widely tracked indicator makes that concentration visible in a way that demands attention. Getting the right numbers onto the dashboard is how you ensure that the transition toward broad capital participation becomes a measurable objective with accountable stewards, rather than an aspiration that everyone nods at and nobody tracks. Simon Kuznets invented national income accounting in 1934 because the Great Depression revealed that policymakers were flying blind without it. The equivalent gap exists today in our ability to track whether the gains from an increasingly capital-intensive economy are reaching the households that constitute its consumer base.
11. When designing programs and policies, favor capital-based approaches over transfer-based ones.
Wages are going away. Process of elimination leaves transfers and capital. Whenever possible, favor capital (at all layers)
Given two interventions that achieve the same immediate goal, prefer the one that creates owners over the one that creates recipients. A government that gives a household a thousand dollars has improved that household’s month. A government that places a thousand dollars in a wealth-generating vehicle on that household’s behalf has potentially improved its decade, because capital compounds and transfers do not. The thousand-dollar check gets spent and disappears from the recipient’s balance sheet. The thousand-dollar investment generates returns, and those returns generate further returns, and the gap between the two approaches widens with every passing year.
This preference is not absolute. There are situations where immediate cash is exactly what a household needs, and the urgency of the moment outweighs the long-term advantage of capital accumulation. Emergency relief, acute poverty intervention, and crisis response all call for direct transfers that reach people quickly and without conditions. The commandment to use transfers as a universal floor exists precisely because the capital-first orientation has necessary exceptions. But as a default orientation for long-term institutional design, capital-based programs build something that transfer-based programs structurally cannot. They build a balance sheet. They create an asset that works for the household independently of any future political decision.
The behavioral evidence supports this preference from a different angle. Decades of research on asset ownership have consistently found that households with assets, even modest ones, behave differently from households without them. They plan on longer time horizons. They invest more in their children’s education. They take entrepreneurial risks that households without assets cannot afford. They participate more actively in civic life. They report greater life satisfaction and lower stress even when controlling for income level. Something about holding an asset that belongs to you and generates returns changes your relationship to the economic system around you, in ways that receiving a check of equivalent value does not.
This principle also applies at the governmental level, reinforcing the earlier commandment about public wealth funds. A state that channels a billion dollars into annual transfer payments must find another billion next year, and the year after that, forever. A state that channels a billion dollars into a well-managed wealth fund can reasonably expect that investment to generate tens of billions over the following decades while the principal remains intact. The fiscal mathematics of compounding favor capital-based approaches as strongly at the institutional level as they do at the household level. Wherever a choice exists between spending and investing, between creating recipients and creating owners, between disbursing and capitalizing, the long-term case favors the capital path. The short-term political incentives often favor the transfer path, because a check in the mail generates more immediate gratitude than a fund balance that will matter in twenty years. Overcoming that asymmetry between political time horizons and economic time horizons is one of the central challenges of institutional design, and it is why this preference needs to be stated explicitly as a governing principle rather than left to the discretion of whoever holds office at the moment.
12. Favor decentralization and distribution of power over concentration.
Subsidiarity should be a default policy whenever possible.
Concentrated power is fragile and dangerous regardless of who holds it and regardless of their stated intentions. A system where a single institution, a single individual, or a single class controls the decisive resources of a society is a system with a catastrophic single point of failure. If that center is captured, corrupted, or simply makes poor decisions, there is no redundancy and no check. The history of concentrated power is not a history of good intentions reliably producing good outcomes. It is a history of systems that work passably well under competent stewardship and then fail catastrophically when stewardship changes, because the same structures that enabled competent governance enabled its opposite with equal ease.
Distributed power is more resilient, harder to capture, and more adaptive. When decision-making authority, economic ownership, information access, and coercive capacity are spread across many actors, the failure or corruption of any single actor does not bring down the system. A federation of sovereign wealth funds held at national, state, and municipal levels is harder to loot than a single central fund. A network of cooperatives and employee-owned firms is harder to monopolize than a single national corporation. A government with participatory mechanisms at multiple levels, independent courts, transparent procurement, and citizen assembly rights is harder to capture than a government where all authority flows through a single executive or a single legislative body.
This principle applies across every domain the previous commandments address, and it functions as a meta-prescription that governs how the other commandments should be implemented. Capital ownership should be distributed across many vehicles and many levels of governance rather than concentrated in a single national fund that becomes a target for capture. Financial infrastructure should be open and decentralized rather than routed through a handful of chokepoints. Transparency should flow through multiple overlapping systems rather than depending on a single platform that could be shut down. Governance should push decision-making authority to the lowest feasible level rather than accumulating it at the top, because decisions made close to the people they affect tend to be better calibrated and harder to corrupt than decisions made at great distance.
The deeper justification for decentralization goes beyond resilience against corruption, though that alone would be sufficient. Distributed systems also generate more information, more experimentation, and more adaptive capacity than centralized ones. When thirty different jurisdictions try thirty different approaches to capitalizing public wealth, the successes become visible and replicable while the failures remain contained. When a single central authority dictates one approach for everyone, a mistake becomes systemic and a success may be suboptimal for the many contexts it was not designed for. The history of governance innovation bears this out consistently. Participatory budgeting was invented in a single Brazilian city and spread because it could be observed, evaluated, and adapted by other cities that found it compelling. Estonia’s digital identity system was a national experiment that other countries could study and adapt. Alaska’s Permanent Fund was a state-level innovation that has informed sovereign wealth fund design worldwide. Each of these began as a local experiment in a distributed system, proved its value in practice, and then propagated through voluntary adoption rather than top-down mandate. Centralized systems do not generate this kind of evolutionary learning because they do not permit the variation that learning requires. The decentralization preference is ultimately a preference for systems that can discover good solutions rather than systems that must guess correctly on the first attempt.
My Ask of You
The full Post-Labor Economics framework spans six pillars, two pyramids, two novel metrics, hundreds of policy examples drawn from dozens of countries, and enough historical evidence to fill several volumes. That is its strength and its weakness. The depth is necessary because the transition we are navigating is genuinely complex and the stakes are civilizational. But depth creates a barrier to entry. If understanding PLE requires reading a hundred and eighty thousand words before you can evaluate whether you agree with it, the framework risks becoming an artifact that specialists appreciate and everyone else ignores. That outcome would defeat the entire purpose.
These twelve imperatives are my attempt to solve that problem. They are the operating system beneath the applications. They are the principles from which every specific recommendation in the book can be derived, and they are stated at a level of abstraction that allows them to be evaluated, debated, and stress-tested without requiring anyone to first master the full taxonomy of interventions or memorize the details of Norway’s pension fund governance structure. If you disagree with one of these imperatives, that disagreement is productive and specific. You can point to it and say “this one is wrong, and here is why,” and we can have a substantive conversation about whether broad capital ownership actually produces the resilience I claim it does, or whether decentralization genuinely outperforms centralization in the ways I have argued, or whether transfers deserve a larger structural role than I have given them. That kind of focused debate advances the framework. Asking someone to argue with an entire book rarely does.
I also want to be honest about the limitations of what I have produced here. These twelve imperatives represent my best current distillation, but they are almost certainly not the final form of Post-Labor Economics as a platform. Economics is not physics. There are no timeless equations waiting to be discovered. There are frameworks that prove useful for navigating particular challenges, and those frameworks evolve as the challenges evolve and as smarter people than me identify gaps, redundancies, and errors in the original formulation. I expect these imperatives to be debated, refined, reorganized, and expanded by people with deeper expertise in specific domains. Some may be merged. Others may be split. A few may turn out to be wrong. The value of stating them explicitly is precisely that it makes refinement possible. You cannot improve what has not been articulated.
What I am confident about is the direction. The broad strokes of PLE point toward something that I believe is both necessary and achievable. Ownership must be broadened. Public wealth must be built and invested rather than spent. Citizens must hold leverage that does not depend on their economic usefulness. Institutions must be transparent. Financial infrastructure must be open. And the metrics we use to judge economic success must reflect whether prosperity is reaching households, not just whether aggregate output is rising. These commitments can be implemented in a thousand different ways depending on the jurisdiction, the political culture, the existing institutional landscape, and the specific challenges of the moment. The imperatives do not prescribe a single path. They describe the direction of travel and leave the routing to the people on the ground.
The full argument, with all its evidence and nuance and historical grounding, lives in the book. Labor/Zero: A Post-Labor Economics Treatise is the complete framework, one hundred and eighty thousand words with hundreds of citations, walking through each of the six pillars in detail, unpacking the pyramids layer by layer, developing the metrics with worked examples, and surveying the global landscape of interventions that are already being implemented in countries from Estonia to Kenya to Brazil. I narrated the audiobook personally because I wanted the ideas to be accessible in every format I could manage. If these twelve imperatives have resonated with you, or provoked you, or made you want to argue with me, the book is where that conversation deepens.
The Kickstarter campaign for Labor/Zero is live right now. By supporting it you are doing more than buying a book. You are voting with your wallet for the idea that this transition deserves serious, rigorous, nonpartisan analysis, and that the people who will determine how it unfolds, the politicians, the investors, the think tank scholars, the voters, need a framework in their hands before the window for shaping the outcome closes. Every copy that reaches someone in a position to act moves the needle. Every share that puts these ideas in front of an audience that has not encountered them yet expands the conversation.
The transition is already underway. The question is whether we navigate it deliberately or let it happen to us. I have tried to provide the map. Now I need your help getting it into the right hands.
Thank you
Great listen on the train today, I hope community policy makers are taking note!