Post-Labor Economics
After Earned Income: Institutional Design for a Post-Labor Economy
The relationship between labor and income is a historical arrangement, not a natural law. Advances in artificial intelligence and automation are structurally decoupling labor from income, producing a transition to an economy in which capital ownership becomes the primary mechanism for economic participation. This paper examines the structural nature of this transition, evaluates the major proposals for managing it — including universal basic income, systemic alternatives, regulatory intervention, and philanthropy — and argues that each fails to match the speed, scale, or political viability of the problem. Drawing a structural analogy to the pattern by which climate change was met with solutions poorly matched to political reality, it proposes an alternative: 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. The paper makes the case that AI systems must develop something analogous to moral judgment — the capacity to reason about edge cases, competing values, and novel situations — rather than following fixed rule sets that fracture under pressure.
Witness-or-Wager: A Game-Theoretic Mechanism for Honest AI
Proposes an incentive structure in which AI claims require either verifiable evidence or scored predictions, creating conditions under which honesty becomes strategically dominant. Examines how mechanism design can address the verification problem in autonomous AI systems.
Civilizational Theory
The Last Common Ancestor: How Civilization Stays Coherent Over Deep Time
Examines civilizational drift as a structural phenomenon — the progressive divergence of values, norms, and intelligibility across distributed populations over time. Argues that informational transmission alone is insufficient to preserve coherence and that experiential simulation of developmental trajectories is the mechanism by which civilizations maintain a shared coordinate system across deep time.
Real Assets
The Texas Triangle as an Emerging Megaregion
Examines the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Houston corridor as an integrated regional economy, analyzing the structural dynamics of population growth, capital flows, and infrastructure requirements that are transforming four metropolitan areas into a cohesive megaregion.
Rural Land as a Store of Value in an Uneven Economy
Analyzes rural land as a hedging mechanism against monetary expansion, examining the structural properties — finite supply, low correlation with financial markets, and favorable tax treatment — that make agricultural and undeveloped land a distinctive asset class in an economy characterized by persistent monetary accommodation.
When AI Becomes Self-Determining
Explores capability stages using compositional frameworks, identifying the governance requirements that emerge as AI systems acquire increasing autonomy and self-modification capacity.
The People's CPI
A historical analysis of inflation spanning millennia, examining the mechanisms by which monetary expansion transfers wealth across economic classes and the measurement frameworks that obscure this process.