The Age of Abundance

When automation eliminates entry-level jobs, the entire economic ladder breaks. This book introduces "The Ladder Problem" — why bottom rungs matter more than total unemployment — and explores how we can design distribution systems for an era of material abundance. The foundation for everything that follows.

For generations, the economic ladder worked because someone was always willing to hire you for something. Automation is eliminating that guarantee, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The first jobs to go are always the ones that required the least prior experience — the rungs on which everyone starts. When those rungs disappear, the ladder cannot be climbed.

This book maps the mechanics of that problem and argues that the answer is not to slow automation — that would be both futile and harmful — but to redesign how we distribute the extraordinary prosperity automation creates. The abundance is real. The challenge is distribution.