Reality over ideology
If evidence contradicts a preferred theory, the theory changes.
Economic systems beyond employment
What happens when work is no longer necessary?
After Labour is an independent research project exploring how societies create prosperity when human labour is no longer the primary source of economic value or household income.
Model 001
The Labour Machine
A simplified model for exploring what happens when productivity rises while fewer people are required to work. Change the assumptions. Watch the economy move.
Live scenario
What does this economy produce?
Total output
$52.6T
Employment-supported income
$19.6T
Aggregate labour-linked income
Machine / capital income
$33.0T
Income accruing to capital before redistribution
Universal dividend
$9,966
Estimated annual dividend per adult
Median real purchasing power
$41K
Distribution gap
105
Higher means output and household prosperity diverge
System signal
Production is rising faster than household prosperity.
How this model works
The six controls feed each other in order. Automation and productivity gain set the size of the economy — total output. Automation and labour participation together determine how that output splits between wages and capital — as automation rises, labour's share falls.
Capital income is simply whatever labour's share doesn't claim. The universal dividend carves a slice out of capital income only, never wages, and divides it evenly across the adult population.
Household purchasing power blends labour-linked income with any dividend received, then discounts the result for capital concentration and essential-cost inflation. The distribution gap is simply output growth minus purchasing-power growth — a single number for how much of the economy's growth never reached the median household.
Try holding automation and productivity fixed while moving only concentration and dividend share. The size of the economy won't change — but who it reaches will.
Working principles
No ideology. No prophecy. Test the system.
Build mechanisms
Research should produce systems that can be modelled, compared and challenged.
Expose assumptions
Every model should make its assumptions visible so readers can change them themselves.
Research agenda
The questions beneath the future of work.
Would Anyone Still Work?
Modelling the labour-market effects of a high guaranteed income in the United States.
Who Owns the Machines?
Comparing private ownership, social wealth funds, universal capital and public infrastructure models.
The Human Dividend
What happens when citizens hold a direct economic claim on machine-generated output?
About
After Labour studies economic systems beyond employment.
We investigate a simple question: what happens if technological productivity increasingly separates the production of wealth from the need for human labour? Our work explores the consequences for ownership, income, scarcity, public finance, labour markets and social institutions.
We do not assume that mass technological unemployment is inevitable. We do not advocate a predetermined economic ideology. We build models, expose assumptions and test possible systems.
Who's behind this
After Labour is written and maintained by Jay Speakman, an independent researcher working at the intersection of long-range systems thinking, financial and product design, and economic modelling. His background spans historical analysis, UX architecture, and seven years of content and design work across SaaS and fintech.
The models on this site are built openly. Every assumption is a control, not a footnote — if you disagree with an input, change it and see what happens. Modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development, help a single researcher maintain and update these models without a team. The framing, the judgment and the conclusions are not automated. They're accountable to one person, by name.
More on the work behind this and related projects: jayspeakman.com