Automation Annuity: Why Conventional Economics is Broken and What Comes Next

What happens when machines can produce more goods and services while employing fewer people to produce them?

Automation has delivered extraordinary increases in productivity, but it also creates a problem conventional economics has not solved: machines do not earn wages, buy houses, raise families, or provide the consumer demand needed to purchase what an increasingly automated economy can produce.

In Automation Annuity, Don Soards argues that the United States has undergone a fundamental economic transition from the Seller's Market that dominated much of the twentieth century to a new Buyer's Market. In the old economy, production capacity was often the limiting factor. In the new economy, automation increasingly makes consumer purchasing power the limiting factor.

Soards examines changes in inflation, government debt, wages, employment, consumer demand, and other economic indicators to make the case that many familiar economic assumptions were developed for conditions that no longer exist. Policies designed to restrain an economy suffering from inadequate production can produce very different results when the underlying problem is inadequate consumer demand.

The book then presents the Automation Annuity, a new approach to replacing purchasing power lost as automation replaces human labor. Rather than funding a conventional universal basic income through increased taxation or government borrowing, the proposal introduces Progress Dollars into the economy as productive capacity expands. Increases would be gradual and subject to economic safeguards intended to prevent demand from exceeding the economy's ability to produce.

Automation Annuity challenges readers to reconsider some of the most basic assumptions about inflation, money, employment, government debt, and economic growth. It also asks a larger question: if technology gives society the ability to produce abundance with less human labor, can our economic system evolve so that consumers retain the purchasing power necessary to share in that abundance?

This book is for readers interested in automation, artificial intelligence, economics, monetary policy, the future of work, universal basic income, and the economic consequences of technological change.

Don Soards is a retired civil engineer and former Emergency Management Chief with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. An author and longtime student of economics, he draws on decades of government service, research, teaching, and problem-solving to examine automation's economic consequences and develop practical solutions for the future.