Karl Polanyi

Foreword

By Edo Segal

Nobody in the AI discourse is talking about the magistrates of Berkshire.

In 1795, a group of well-meaning local officials in a parish called Speenhamland looked at workers whose wages had collapsed below subsistence and did the compassionate thing. They created a public fund to make up the difference. Bread prices rise, the supplement rises. Wages fall, the public covers the gap. The intention was protection. The result, over the following decades, was the institutionalization of poverty itself. Employers discovered they could slash wages further — the fund would absorb the cost. The workers became permanent dependents. Compassion, absent structural reform, became a machine for producing the exact misery it was designed to prevent.

I read that story during the same month I was hearing serious people propose