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Essay

Start Before We Need It

June 20, 20268 min read

In 1930, with the world falling into depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to write about his grandchildren. It was a strange moment to be optimistic. He was optimistic anyway. Within a hundred years, he argued, the economic problem — scarcity itself, the struggle to have enough — would be largely solved. And then the real difficulty would begin. The hard part was never the having. The hard part was what comes after.

His phrase for it has aged well. The challenge would be “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” Read that again. He is not worried about poverty. He is worried about meaning — about a species that has spent its whole history fighting for survival suddenly handed survival, and not knowing what to do with itself.

Keynes was half right, in the half that matters

He got the growth roughly right. The rich world is several times wealthier per person than it was when he wrote. On that, the prophecy held.

He got the other half wrong, and the way he got it wrong is the whole point of this essay. He guessed that as we grew richer we would simply work less. “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while,” he wrote. That did not happen. We grew several times richer and kept working — long hours, hard, often well past any point where another unit of money buys another unit of life.

Why? Keynes assumed people work for things. Mostly they don’t, not only. They work for standing, for purpose, for the feeling of being needed, for a place in the eyes of other people. He underestimated how much of work was never about the wage. That gap — between the leisure he predicted and the striving we chose — is exactly the territory this movement is about. When the economic reason to work weakens, the human reasons stay. They just go looking for something to organize themselves around.

The forecast that makes this urgent again

For most of the century since Keynes, his deadline felt safely distant. It does not anymore.

The people building today’s frontier AI expect it to push much further toward the abundance he imagined, and the serious ones are already proposing income floors to distribute what it produces. Sam Altman’s “Moore’s Law for Everything” is the clearest statement of it. We treat that as their forecast, not our certainty — an interested party predicting the world their own work would create. Hold it loosely.

But notice what is at stake if they are even half right. When money stops being the thing that decides whether you eat, its grip on the scoreboard — on what measures a life — loosens. Not vanishes — wealth stays, and can stay a ranking above any floor, which is why the seat is contested rather than simply vacated. The grip loosens, and the contest for what measures a life opens up. And the contest is not hypothetical. In our digital lives, where standing already gets scored apart from income, attention is already auditioning for the job — followers, views, engagement, the running tally of who gets seen. If the economic problem really is fading, the question Keynes left open arrives at last, and it does not wait for an answer. Something fills the seat by default. Defaults are rarely chosen well.

The floor is not a footnote. It is what keeps the yardstick humane

Here is the part that is easy to skip and most important not to.

An income floor is not just a way to keep people fed in an automated economy. It is the precondition for any measure of standing being decent at all. A measure of impact that sits above a guaranteed floor is a game of meaning. You can ignore it, opt out, walk away — and still live. A measure that decides whether you eat is a leash.

This is the line we will not cross. Everything Impactism proposes assumes the floor underneath it. Nothing it proposes may ever reach beneath the floor to coerce. The whole reason an impact yardstick can be a gift rather than a threat is that no one’s survival ever rides on their score. Take the floor away and the same design becomes a weapon — which is precisely the social-credit fear, and a fair one. The floor is the difference between honor and a leash.

So what do we actually know about floors? Less than we would like, and enough to act. The early evidence on unconditional income is consistent: it does not collapse the will to work, and it improves well-being. Finland gave two thousand unemployed people €560 a month and found clear well-being gains with small employment effects. GiveDirectly’s randomized trial in Kenya, across roughly twenty-three thousand adults, found no work disincentive and rising enterprise. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend shows no aggregate employment effect (Kangas et al. 2020; Banerjee et al. 2023; Jones & Marinescu 2022). The defensible claim is exactly that and nothing stronger: unconditional cash does not collapse work and improves well-being. None of these tested a full livable floor in a rich country. Who pays for one is genuinely unsolved, and we keep it on our open-questions list rather than waving it away. We are not claiming the floor is easy. We are claiming it is load-bearing.

The deeper danger isn’t poverty. It’s meaninglessness

Suppose the floor arrives and the economic problem really does fade for most people. The threat does not disappear. It changes shape — from poverty to purposelessness — and on this, the evidence runs deeper than the forecast.

Émile Durkheim noticed it in 1897, reading suicide statistics that refused to behave. Suicide rose in economic booms as well as busts. Prosperity was no protection. He called the condition anomie: desire outrunning the norms that give it meaning, a life unmoored from anything that tells it what it is for. The hazard he named is not want. It is a kind of freedom with nothing to hold. A world that solves scarcity without solving meaning has not arrived anywhere good. It has arrived at Durkheim’s warning at scale.

And the assumption underneath Keynes’s optimism — that once fed and housed we would happily rest — does not survive contact with what we know about motivation. As far back as 1943, Abraham Maslow argued that human motivation extends beyond material need; that meeting the basics does not switch wanting off, it changes what we want (Maslow 1943). We use that claim and only that claim. The famous pyramid was never Maslow’s; later scholars added it. And the strict ladder — needs satisfied in fixed order — lacks empirical support. But the core observation holds and is enough: handed the basics, people do not stop striving. They strive for something else. The question is what.

Two phases. A curve, not a switch

This is why Impactism runs in two phases, and why you do not have to believe the second to join the first.

Phase one — today, while money still binds. Make contribution visible and honored. Culture first; no mechanism required. The aim is modest and immediate: that the difference a person makes in other lives is seen — recognized, named, carried by the people they affected — rather than written down small or not at all the way the money ledger writes it. This is joinable now, and it stands on its own merits whatever the future does. The dead are already eulogized by the right measure. The living deserve it too.

Phase two — later, if abundance arrives. If the floor lands and survival stops being the question a life has to answer, what the culture honors moves to the center, and the rails built in phase one become the yardstick people actually live by. The danger flips from poverty to meaninglessness, and an impact standard becomes purpose infrastructure for a post-work life — the answer to the question Keynes left his grandchildren and we left ourselves.

A curve, not a switch. What a culture honors shifts gradually — impact counting for more over time, money for less as the measure of a person; the weight moves along a slope, not at a moment. We are not asking anyone to end money or markets — money still prices the scarce things that sit above the floor, and wealth differences remain. We are asking only to build the rails before we need them, because a yardstick assembled in a hurry, after the old one fails, is assembled badly. Attention took the seat online by showing up first while no one guarded the door. We would rather not learn that lesson twice.

Notice the shape of the bet. You can think the second phase is unlikely — that AI abundance is overstated, that the floor never comes — and phase one still earns its keep, because honoring contribution makes culture better right now, in the world that exists. The first phase costs you nothing if the future never arrives, and it is most of what matters if it does. That asymmetry is the whole argument for starting early.

Keynes wrote to his grandchildren because he would not see the world he was describing. We are roughly those grandchildren now, standing where he pointed, watching the forecast he made come partly true and the question he raised go unanswered. He told us the hard part comes after the having. The honest thing is to start building the answer before the having is done — to start before we need it — and to begin where it is already true and already useful: by making impact, not money, the measure of a life.

The full argument is on Foundations; where the two phases lead is the Vision; and if it holds, you can add your name.

Sources

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