Essays

Enough headspace — 余裕 — is what lets a person stop chasing money and live by something better. The case for slack, and the floor a society owes to make it possible.

Long before money, human societies ran on gift exchange — and gift logic still governs the parts of life we value most. The gift is the deepest precedent for an economy of recognition rather than price. It is also a warning.

Impactism is not science fiction. Two enormous, productive systems already run on peer-conferred recognition rather than pay — open-source software and academic science. They are our existence proof. They are also our most honest catalog of how an impact economy fails.

In 1930 Keynes predicted we would solve the economic problem and face a harder one: how to live well when nothing is required of us. He was roughly right about the wealth and famously wrong about the hours. The reason he was wrong is the reason we exist.

Suppose AI and abundance abolish material want. The economy doesn't end — it migrates to whatever stays scarce, and status is scarce by definition. There will be a yardstick. The only question is what it measures. We say: make it contribution.

The most famous fictional reputation currency was meant to replace money with merit. Its own author later called it dystopian — and every real-world descendant failed the same way. Read the autopsy, and the failures become our design rules.

The deepest design objection to honoring impact is that any metric, once it becomes a target, gets gamed. The literature is brutal and it is right. Read it to the end and the lesson is not 'don't measure' — it is what the unit has to be made of instead.

The most common fear about a society that honors impact is that it becomes a dystopian ranking — a real Nosedive, a state score that follows you everywhere. We take that fear at full strength, then show why our unit cannot become one.

In 1930 Keynes told his grandchildren scarcity would end and the real problem would arrive after. The income floor that may follow is also what keeps an impact yardstick humane.

Impactism did not appear from nowhere. It is the next step in a lineage of people who argued that what we count is what we become — and intellectual honesty means naming both the shoulders and every place we differ.

The hardest objection to Impactism is one we raise against ourselves: rewarding goodness can ruin it. The research bites. Read it to the end, and the corruption has a precise location — the price, not the honor.

Money is losing its grip as the online scoreboard, and we can already watch what replaces it. The seat is contested now. We get to choose what fills it.

The money-and-happiness research, read honestly. No universal $75k plateau. Well-being rises with the logarithm of income — and the things that predict a life worth living sit mostly outside the ledger.

Money is a kind of societal memory — a portable record of what you did for someone. It records what was sold, and forgets what was given. The case for a second measure, alongside it.

Abundance never ends the human contest for standing. It only relocates it. The question a society gets to answer is not whether it keeps score, but what it measures.