A Human Centered Economy
(Continued from Intelligent Money: Inflation, Marks & Spencer, and Time)
If we are to make this transition from scarcity to abundance, we must wean ourselves off old data sets that no longer reflect the world we actually live in. That’s why Chairman Warsh is assembling task forces to review the data the Fed considers. He wants to move us away from the stale, corporate-aggregated lag indicators to unvarnished, real-time data. The belief is that this can stop those trying to manipulate market expectations and instead reorient focus to objective economic truth. It is the beginning of an institutional evolution. He is forcing the high priests to look out the window at individuals' actual behavior, rather than staring at a broken spreadsheet inside the citadel. We’ve been shining the spotlight on the data for so many decades that we forget to shine that light on the humans who create it.
One of the most important indicators comes from W-2s. That tells us about employment, right? Or does it? In a world where I can have an army of 600 AI agents and a couple of robots, I can create immense wealth. But, there’s no W-2.
Post W-2
In addition, there is a fear that a w-2less world is dangerous. “Idle hands make trouble”, right? If people can make a ton of money in just a few hours a week, trouble will happen. This narrative is one of the most persistent, backward, and psychologically upside-down myths in human history. For centuries, defenders of the status quo have weaponized this fear, arguing that if the working class isn’t kept completely exhausted by grueling labor, they will turn into a dangerous, chaotic mob.
But when you look at how human civilization actually advanced, the exact opposite is true. Human progress has never been driven by exhaustion; it has always been driven by liberation. Every single massive leap in human creativity, technology, and wealth occurred precisely because we found a way to free ourselves from manual labor.
For thousands of years, 90% of the human population had to toil in fields just to grow enough food to survive the winter. They didn’t have “idle hands”. They worked from sunrise to sunset. Yet, this era wasn’t a golden age of peace and innovation; it was a stagnant period of brutal survival. It was only when advanced plows, crop rotation, and eventually mechanized tractors freed humans from the dirt that we had the time to build universities, map the stars, discover penicillin, and invent the steam engine.
In the early 20th century, everyday household survival required hours of backbreaking manual labor. Fetching water, stoking coal fires, and washing clothes by hand on a scrubbing board consumed the entire day. The invention of the electric washing machine, the refrigerator, and indoor plumbing didn’t turn people into destructive degenerates. Instead, it freed up billions of hours of human cognitive bandwidth, sparking a massive explosion in literature, art, entrepreneurship, and social reform.
When a person is completely consumed by a 60-hour work week just to afford a roof over their head and food on the table, they are trapped in survival mode. Survival mode floods the brain with cortisol, narrows focus to immediate threats, and completely paralyzes the capacity for long-term, creative thinking. You cannot solve