David Shapiro · Tech & AI
TIER 4 Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:05:47 +0000
Watch now (22 mins) | Macroeconomics of the Future ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- --- | | Watch now --- # What happens when AGI nukes the jobs? ### Macroeconomics of the Future | | David Shapiro --- | Dec 16 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- # How Money Reaches Your Pocket in a World Without Jobs Have you ever stopped to ask how money actually gets into your pocket? Not the work you do to earn it, but the actual plumbing of the economy that pushes purchasing power from the top of the financial system down to your bank account. Right now, that plumbing is designed around a single, potentially fragile pipe called the job market. And that pipe may be about to spring some serious leaks. In our current system, the circulation of money is what economists might call labor-mediated. It starts at the top with the Federal Reserve and the banking system, which create liquidity and lend it to businesses. Those businesses take that capital and, crucially, hire people. This is the critical transmission step that makes everything else possible. The primary mechanism for distributing money to regular households is wages. You sell your time, the business pays you, and that is how purchasing power reaches the bottom of the pyramid. The entire system relies on a core assumption: that businesses need human labor to grow. When companies borrow money to expand, they hire more people, and money circulates through the economy. Households spend their wages, businesses earn revenue, and the cycle continues. It is an elegant design that has powered industrial economies for over a century. | | ---|---|--- But we are entering an era where that foundational assumption is beginning to fail. As automation and artificial intelligence allow companies to produce more with fewer people, the link between business growth and hiring weakens. A company can now take a loan to deploy a fleet of robots or implement a sophisticated AI system and produce massive value without hiring a single new employee. The productivity gains are real, but the wages never materialize. This creates a structural problem that goes beyond unemployment statistics. When the wage pipe narrows, money gets stuck at the corporate level or circulates only among asset owners. The purchasing power that once flowed to millions of households instead pools in corporate treasuries and financial markets. The money exists, but the transmission mechanism that delivers it to ordinary people is broken. This is the core economic challenge of what some are calling the post-labor economy. It is not that there will be no jobs at all, but that jobs will cease to be the reliable, universal distribution mechanism for economic participation. If we do not redesign the plumbing, we risk an economy where productivity soars while most people are locked out of the gains. The framework of Post-Labor Economics proposes a fundamentally different way to wire the machine. Instead of relying on wages to move money to people, we shift to a capital-mediated cycle. In this new regime, the circulation of money can bypass the labor market entirely when necessary. The value generated by automated production does not just sit in corporate treasuries. Instead, it flows into shared ownership vehicles like sovereign wealth funds, social wealth funds, and community asset trusts. The key insight here is that ownership becomes the new channel for distribution. Rather than earning income by selling labor time, households receive income because they hold a stake in the productive machinery of society. When the robots get more productive, ordinary people get paid more, not less. This is not redistribution in the traditional sense. It is a redesign of who owns what and how returns flow. This shift also requires new infrastructure. Open payment rails and digital public infrastructure become essential for sending money directly to citizen wallets. Think of systems like India's UPI or Brazil's Pix, which can move small payments to millions of people instantly and cheaply. Without this kind of infrastructure, distributing dividends to an entire population would be slow, expensive, and dependent on private gatekeepers who extract fees at every step. The tax base must also evolve. You cannot fund a society by taxing payrolls if there are no payrolls. Post-Labor Economics proposes shifting the tax base from labor income toward land, resources, data, and automation itself. Levies on the value added by machines, land value taxes that capture economic rent, and resource royalties become the new foundation of public revenue. This money is then recycled back into the shared ownership vehicles that pay out to citizens. One of the most important effects of this redesign is maintaining what economists call the velocity of money. In the current system, if money concentrates among the wealthy, velocity drops because rich people cannot possibly spend all their income. They save it, and it sits idle in financial assets. By systematically moving money from high-saving entities like corporations and billionaires to high-consuming entities like ordinary households, the new system keeps money circulating through the real economy. Think of it as building a permanent detour around a blocked road. Today, if the job market is blocked by automation, the flow of money stops reaching households, and the economy stalls. Demand collapses, businesses lose customers, and a vicious cycle begins. In a Post-Labor Economics world, we build a direct line from national productivity to your digital wallet, ensuring the economy keeps moving even when traditional employment contracts. The Federal Reserve and central banks still manage the supply of money at the top. The basic mechanics of monetary policy do not disappear. But the path that money takes to get to you changes fundamentally. It stops being primarily a reward for labor you perform and starts being a dividend on the society you help constitute. It is a shift from earning your keep to owning your share. This is not utopian speculation. It is a structural necessity for an economy that wants to keep functioning as technology reshapes the relationship between capital and labor. The question is not whether we will need new distribution mechanisms, but whether we will build them in time. The plumbing of the twentieth-century economy served us well, but the water pressure is changing. We need new pipes. You're currently a free subscriber to David Shapiro's Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2025 David Shapiro 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe