CONCEPT
The Flood of Adequacy
The economic condition in which AI drives the supply of competent cognitive output toward infinity, pushing the marginal value of any individual piece toward zero, and causing economic value to migrate entirely to whatever remains scarce.
When any good becomes sufficiently abundant, the marginal utility of each additional unit approaches zero—the mathematics William Stanley Jevons formalized in 1871 and that applies with particular precision to the AI age. Before AI, competent cognitive output was scarce: a clean line of code, a clear analytical paragraph, a serviceable design took human time and skill to produce, and their scarcity gave them economic value. AI collapsed the marginal cost of producing such output toward zero, and the rational response of every actor—individuals, organizations, markets—is to produce more of it. The flood of adequacy names the resulting condition: a world saturated with cognitive output that is technically competent, grammatically correct, and practically unremarkable, in which the thousandth AI-generated blog post provides negligible value to anyone who has read the previous nine hundred and ninety-nine. The flood is not a failure of AI quality; it is a consequence of AI quantity. Declining
marginal utility does not stop when quality