An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of the People

Daniel and Emily both work, and by the standards of their North American city they are not poorly paid. They take home $10,300 a month. Once the mortgage, childcare, food, commuting, insurance and medical costs are paid, $1,400 is left, along with about ten usable hours a week. The city grows richer every year; their margin does not.

In 1776 Adam Smith asked where the wealth of nations comes from. Two hundred and fifty years later, as artificial intelligence begins to take over cognitive work, this book asks the same question of ordinary people. A gain in productivity can become cheaper goods, higher pay, larger profits or shorter hours. Technology creates the gain; it does not decide where the gain goes.

The book separates wealth, what a society produces, from prosperity, the money, time and security left in an ordinary life once the essentials are paid. It measures prosperity with a generalized Engel coefficient and the hours of work the essentials cost, and shows that prosperity forms only in exchange among a society's own people: one person's discretionary spending is another's income. Trade, printed money and conquered resources cannot stand in for that circuit.

It then places politics and economics in one frame. Whether a person can do something depends both on whether it is permitted and on whether it is affordable. From there the book treats the range of fair prices, the pure producer, education, the decay of economies and of power, public finance, a market built on morality, and why the age of AI, like the age of the factory acts, needs a boundary drawn around working time.

It is written for general readers. No prior training in economics is needed.