The Public Capital Foundation began as a set of questions that became difficult to avoid in 2022. The rapid emergence of capable AI systems made certain conclusions about economic structure, institutional design, and long-term governance feel less like speculative futures and more like near-term engineering problems.
What happens to labor income when automation scales? How do distributed institutions stay coherent across time and divergence? What does it mean to align artificial intelligence with human values when those values are themselves contested and evolving? These questions don't belong to any single discipline. They require thinking that moves across economic theory, philosophy, cultural history, and empirical analysis.
The Foundation's work is grounded in the conviction that the institutions and systems we build — or fail to build — in the coming years will shape the distribution of power, stability, and intelligibility across civilizational timescales.
Post-Labor Economics
After Earned Income: Institutional Design for a Post-Labor Economy
Examines the structural decoupling of labor from income driven by AI and automation, evaluates standard proposals — UBI, systemic alternatives, regulation, philanthropy — and argues for the deliberate expansion of capital ownership through perpetual public endowments designed to compound wealth and generate returns for broad civic benefit.
Artificial Intelligence
Preventing Paperclips: The Case Against Formalism
Argues that alignment-by-directive inevitably produces Goodhart distortions at scale unless coupled with a framework for contextual moral reasoning. Makes the case for cultivating judgment in AI systems rather than imposing brittle rule sets.
Civilizational Theory
The Last Common Ancestor: How Civilization Stays Coherent Over Deep Time
Explores civilizational drift as a structural law and argues that shared experiential baselines — not informational transmission alone — are the mechanism by which distributed civilizations maintain coherence across deep time.
AI Alignment and Institutional Design
How should institutions govern increasingly capable AI systems? What frameworks preserve human agency without imposing brittle constraints that fail at scale?
Post-Labor Economics and Economic Policy
As automation structurally decouples labor from income, what institutional forms can broaden capital ownership and sustain economic participation for populations no longer served by wage labor?
Civilizational Theory and Long-Horizon Governance
How do distributed societies maintain coherence across time and divergence? What mechanisms preserve intelligibility when shared experience cannot be assumed?
Land Markets and Real Assets
How do physical and informational limits shape scarcity and scale in land markets? What role do real assets play in a post-labor economic structure?