Economics as if People Mattered

The subtitle was not an afterthought. It was the argument compressed into six words functioning as an indictment of an entire civilization's assumptions. The dominant economic tradition had constructed elaborate mathematical models of production, consumption, and distribution in which the human being appeared as a variable—an input to be optimized, a unit of consumption to be stimulated. The models were technically impressive. They were also spiritually ruinous, because they measured everything about economic activity except the thing that mattered most: what the activity did to the people who performed it. Applied to the AI transition, the phrase demands that every deployment decision be evaluated not only by what it produces but by what it does to the people who use it. This is not a softer lens. It is a harder one, because it forces counting costs the productivity metric was designed to ignore.