What are the "Ten Commandments" of Post-Labor Economics?
Every economic framework needs it's axioms and imperatives. Let's start refining those of Post-Labor Economics
A brief intro…
While there’s no official “Constitution of Neoliberalism” you can generally refine it down to several axioms such as “anything outside the market should be brought into the market.” These principles serve as cardinal directions for anyone who wants to adhere to the Neoliberal framework. As the body of work around Post-Labor Economics grows, the mindshare has started broadening. The braintrust of PLE has produced the below gem. I created a community on X (Twitter) called “Post-Labor Economics” to serve as a reaction chamber and nexus for conversation. One of the first things that emerged was the synthesis of the “ten commandments” of PLE, depicted below.
https://x.com/i/communities/1927109708663374037
The group already has more than a thousand members and is the easiest place to join the conversation.
Without further ado, here’s the “ten commandments” of PLE, after which we’ll unpack them in greater detail.
PLE In a Nutshell
1. Automation is Inevitable and Transformative: AI and robotics are displacing human labor across all sectors, making wage-based employment increasingly obsolete while simultaneously threatening consumer demand and economic stability.
2. Economic Agency is the Core Concern: Individuals require labor rights, property ownership, and voting rights to retain agency. As labor rights erode, property rights become the cornerstone of financial autonomy.
3. The Demand Paradox: Businesses want to automate to cut costs but still need paying customers. Without jobs, people can’t spend—creating a structural contradiction that leads to economic collapse unless resolved.
4. Rethinking Metrics: The EAI: Traditional KPIs like GDP and unemployment are no longer sufficient. The Economic Agency Index (EAI) measures household income sources (property, wages, transfers) and highlights the need to prioritize ownership income.
5. UBI: Helpful but Not Enough: Universal Basic Income is necessary as a safety net but inadequate on its own due to inflation risk, governance issues, and centralization. It must be paired with decentralized, property-based income streams.
6. Ownership is the New Wages: Future economic resilience depends on expanding access to trusts, wealth funds, co-ops, patron equity programs, and digital tokens to replace lost labor income with ownership-based dividends.
7. Counties as Innovation Labs: With 3,100 U.S. counties, local governments are ideal sites for experimenting with and scaling post-labor economic models, offering granular data and tailored policy solutions.
8. Banks as Economic Interfaces: Banks will evolve into the primary economic hubs, managing dividend flows, investment portfolios, and identity verification, replacing the role of traditional employers in financial life.
9. Guardrails Against Technofeudalism: Preventing elite capture and concentrated corporate control is critical. Transparency, participatory governance, and broad-based ownership are essential safeguards.
10. Market-Driven, Not Ideological: Post-labor economics distinguishes itself from socialism and communism by preserving markets and private property. Its goal is not wealth redistribution through state control, but wealth inclusion through distributed ownership and market-based tools.
Now, with more detail
Automation Is Inevitable and Transformative
Generative-AI forecasts now suggest that roughly 300 million full-time positions worldwide could be “exposed” to large-language-model automation, with advanced economies seeing task-automation rates above 25 percent in the 2020s.
On factory floors the trend is already mature: every industrial robot added to a U.S. region since 2000 displaced about 1.6 manufacturing workers, and similar substitution is spreading through warehouses, logistics and retail self-checkout as machines prove “better, faster, cheaper, safer” for routine tasks.
Because even small unit-cost advantages redirect revenue from payroll to capital, central-bank simulations show that a modest acceleration of AI adoption drops labor’s share of income by two percentage points while raising the capital share accordingly—a macro-level confirmation that the technology shock is rewriting the earnings map rather than merely shifting job titles.
Economic Agency Is the Core Concern
Post-labor research argues that what ultimately matters is not hours worked but the bundle of rights that let people steer their own financial lives. The Economic Agency framework tracks those rights through the mix of wage income, property income and transfers each household receives, highlighting the shrinking space in which labor alone can guarantee agency.
In the United States the bottom fifty percent of households now own barely two percent of national wealth, meaning half the population gets almost no dividend, interest or rent income and must rely on either wages or government transfers for purchasing power.
Participatory ownership experiments—from worker-run cooperatives in Spain’s Mondragón network to employee-stock-ownership plans covering 10 million U.S. workers—show how widening property stakes can restore agency by letting the same people who lose bargaining power at work regain influence as owners.
The Demand Paradox
When firms automate to cut costs they also shrink the wage pool that finances demand; high-saving capital owners cannot fully replace the spending of displaced workers, and studies find that as income shifts up the distribution the marginal propensity to consume falls, risking chronic under-consumption.
Governments have quietly been papering over that gap: in the U.S. government transfers rose from 8 percent of personal income in 1970 to nearly 18 percent by 2022, an implicit admission that markets alone no longer deliver mass purchasing power.
Resolving the paradox durably means pairing a universal floor—often proposed as UBI—with mechanisms that spread asset ownership so that household spending draws on dividends as well as public stipends, preventing an endless ratchet of subsidies.
Rethinking Metrics: The EAI
Traditional gauges such as GDP growth or unemployment rates obscure whether people earn from work, capital or the state; the Economic Agency Index (EAI) was devised precisely to capture that shifting composition in an age when automation decouples output from jobs.
Methodologically, the EAI recombines national-accounts data into three continuous shares—labor, property and transfers—so analysts can track whether, for example, a rise in capital income is broadly shared or concentrated among a few asset-holders.
Because each component is policy-sensitive, the index becomes a navigational tool: Norway can set a target for property-income breadth while the U.S. might aim to reduce outsized transfer dependence in certain counties, monitoring progress in a single comparable metric.
UBI: Helpful but Not Enough
Evidence from Finland’s national pilot and dozens of municipal trials shows that unconditional stipends improve mental health and financial security without meaningfully cutting job-search effort, making a basic income an effective stabilizer when jobs vanish.
Yet detailed critiques warn that a stand-alone UBI could either prove fiscally unsustainable or simply entrench inequality if the assets that generate surplus remain in the hands of a minority; money to live is not the same as a stake in the future.
The emerging consensus, therefore, folds UBI into a broader dividend architecture—social wealth funds, carbon-fee rebates and baby-bond endowments—so that the cash floor is complemented by shared ownership of the capital that automation makes so productive.
Ownership Is the New Wages
Post-labor resilience hinges on converting more citizens from pure earners into owners. Proposals for decentralized dividends—from land-value capture to data royalties—envision thousands of dollars per person in passive income that rises with productivity instead of falling with payrolls.
A living precedent is Alaska’s Permanent Fund: by investing oil royalties since 1976 the state pays every resident an annual dividend that has hovered around $1,000–$2,000 and measurably reduced poverty and inequality without depressing employment.
Private-sector vehicles amplify the same logic: ESOP firms now hold $1.8 trillion for U.S. employees, with average account balances of $180,000—evidence that profit-sharing and co-ownership can translate corporate success directly into household wealth.
Counties as Innovation Labs
With 3,100 U.S. counties each controlling local taxing, land-use and development authorities, sub-state governments can prototype dividend and ownership models at manageable scale—much as Copenhagen turned waterfront land into a city wealth fund that finances transit instead of raising taxes.
North Dakota’s century-old state bank shows another county-level lesson: a publicly mandated financial hub can return hundreds of millions in profits to local budgets while strengthening community banks, illustrating how localized institutions can recycle surplus to residents.
Because the EAI can be computed at county resolution, officials can run real-time experiments—boosting co-op formation here, taxing land rents there—and see within a year whether labor, capital or transfer shares move toward desired thresholds.
Banks as Economic Interfaces
As employers shed payroll functions, banks are poised to become the primary conduits for dividend flows, identity verification and portfolio management; the Bank of North Dakota already channels public-enterprise profits into citizens’ accounts while partnering with private lenders.
Public or cantonal banks in Switzerland distribute hundreds of millions in dividends to local governments each year, demonstrating how a financial node can blend commercial performance with civic payout and, in effect, replace the paycheck as the organizing link between individuals and the economy.
At the micro level, borrower-owned institutions such as Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank pay dividends to millions of poor rural women, hinting at a future in which your primary bank doubles as your dividend custodian and digital-ID provider rather than merely a lender.
Guardrails Against Techno-Feudalism
History shows that simply handing out shares can fail when governance is weak: Iran’s Justice Shares and Mongolia’s mining dividends faltered once revenues dipped or owners lacked voting power, underscoring the need for transparency and participatory oversight in any broad-based ownership plan.
Modern cooperative and community-trust movements therefore embed democratic rules—one-member-one-vote, capped executive pay, open books—to keep assets from being recaptured by elites and to nurture the civic skills that make distributed wealth politically durable.
Policy design must also limit excessive leverage and algorithmic opacity in platform monopolies; proposals include mandating public seats on social-wealth-fund boards and real-time disclosure of algorithmic dividend calculations so citizens can audit the machines that pay them.
Market-Driven, Not Ideological
Post-labor economics deliberately keeps markets and private property at the center; instead of replacing capitalism it extends it, securitizing everything from oil revenues to user data so that citizens hold tradable claims on the productive base rather than waiting for state rationing.
Because the mechanism is voluntary exchange—stocks, trusts, cooperatives—it can align with entrepreneurial risk-taking and price signals, distinguishing PLE from both socialism’s state allocation and neoliberalism’s neglect of distribution by giving every participant a genuine capital stake.
In that sense the PLE “ten commandments” aim to finish what earlier market reforms started: by pairing radical inclusion of asset ownership with the efficiency of competition, they seek an economy where technological abundance enriches the many without extinguishing the dynamism that produced it.
Where do we go from here? Building a movement…
The history of Neoliberalism gives us a solid roadmap for deploying new economic theory. The seeds of Neoliberalism were very deliberately planted through universities and other institutions starting as far back as the 1940’s, so by the time the world was ready to transition, in 1980, it had already become the orthodox economic theory. Students coming up through Harvard and now serving in the IMF and advisors to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were all “true believers.”
Unfortunately, we do not have 40 years to develop Post-Labor Economics. We have about 3 years before things get painful, and 10 years before they are catastrophic.
Fortunately, we have the internet today, and I already have a global reach with my platform. Many students and professors consume my content, as well as policy folks, government officials, and ordinary people.
My entire decision to pivot my platform and focus exclusively on Post-Labor Economics was quite deliberate and, as it turns out, also quite timely.
MSNBC has just done a piece on the coming “white collar bloodbath” which means the fear and narrative is going mainstream. The facts and numbers don’t lie.
What does this mean strategically? Well, like ChatGPT, I was in the “right place at the right time” and my channel blew up because I’d been tinkering with GPT-3 and had a backlog of generative AI videos. Now, with any luck, the same thing will happen. I’m already networking with universities, NGOs, and other interested parties to bring PLE to the masses.
Also, fortunately, PLE often speaks for itself, once you internalize the core ideas. All the best frameworks offer just a handful of things:
Description of what’s going on.
Prescription of what to do about it.
Guiding principles and axioms.
That’s it. With Post-Labor Economics, we’ve captured and distilled those three questions. Now with the big picture squared away, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty details.
To compound matters, we are blessed with ultra powerful AI, and there’s enough material and conversation about Post-Labor Economics that internet-enabled AI tools are able to quickly uptake and aid with the information gathering and research. I use ChatGPT and other tools extensively to monitor people’s reactions to PLE so I can shape my message to proactively address concerns and misunderstandings. I also can follow the pulse of what’s resonating and what isn’t.
To that end, I’ve partnered with Julia McCoy, a fellow content creator and powerhouse entrepreneur to bring this message to the masses. We’re working on two books, one fictional and the other a nonfiction. The work of fiction is an imaginary story of a community going through the Post-Labor Economics transition journey, facing unemployment from automation and scrambling to make ends meet. The nonfiction treatise is a whopping 200,000 word tome documenting the history, data, theory, and evidence for Post-Labor Economics.
You can check out Julia’s latest video below:
I’ve also launched a lecture series on my YouTube channel, which is presently planned to have 5 parts.
Rapid dissemination, rapid uptake, and rapid feedback loops are the way we’re using exponential technology to push the PLE idea out. By tightly coupling with marketplace feedback, we’re refining the messaging, filling in the gaps, and finding the “product-market fit” of this framework as fast as possible.
Once our books are out, they will serve as a powerful coordination mechanism—anyone who wants to get fully caught up on PLE will have a one-stop source.
Thanks for reading to the end.
WAGMI.
Very insightful piece - I look forward to reading your books.
Great article and so insightful.