It happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room, half-listening to my boss run through quarterly numbers, when I realized the mood in the office was eerily subdued. The hissing fluorescent lights overhead felt overly bright as if exposing something we weren’t ready to see. Then the announcement came: our company was laying off a third of the team. An artificial intelligence system we’d been testing—once a side project, now suddenly the core of our operations—had proven so effective that many human roles were deemed redundant. My coworkers shifted uncomfortably in their seats as a few names were read out. A friend of mine across the table locked eyes with me in disbelief; he was one of those being let go.

At that moment, a notification buzzed on my phone. Our stock price was soaring. The same markets that often slumber through good news had jolted awake at the scent of job cuts. In the span of minutes, the company’s valuation leapt upward, as if some invisible judge had declared: fewer workers equals a more valuable enterprise. I felt a chill watching the stock ticker green up while, just feet away, my colleagues stared down at severance packets. It was a lightbulb moment for me—an epiphany in real time. In that stark juxtaposition, I glimpsed a disturbing but plausible future taking shape: one where capital reaps the rewards as labor withers away.

Leaving the office that day, I wandered through the downtown streets in a kind of daze. The city felt familiar yet subtly off-kilter. In the lobby, I passed an automated kiosk cleaning the floor, humming softly to itself. Outside, a delivery drone whirred overhead, unbothered by traffic lights or paychecks. Around the corner, a glossy new supermarket stood where an old department store had been. Curious, I stepped inside—only to find no cashiers at all. Shoppers glided in and out through turnstiles, scanned by cameras and AI that recognized their purchases. A lone employee hovered by the entrance, not to help customers, but to troubleshoot the machines. It struck me that on this ordinary day, I was seeing extraordinary signs of change: human workers gently edged out by algorithms and robots, the physical presence of labor fading from view.

That night I couldn’t sleep. My mind replayed the day’s scenes and spiraled further: I recalled reading about birth rates plunging in one country and record stock market highs in another; about a tech giant paywalling its AI tools after training them on open internet data; about governments injecting trillions into financial markets during a crisis, propping up asset prices while food bank lines stretched around the block. These disparate threads started to braid together in the dark. It was as if I had been guided into a dimly lit corridor full of shapes I could only now discern: artificial intelligence and automation, demographic shifts, the privatization of knowledge, runaway asset wealth, bifurcated money flows, and the slow sidelining of workers. In that restless moment it all coalesced for me into a single storyline—a new, intensifying chapter of our economy. Half in jest, half in dread, I found myself calling it “Wither Up Economics.” If the old promise of neoliberalism was that wealth would “trickle down” to everyone, this felt like its dark mirror image: wealth gathering and swelling upward, while everything below withers in its shadow.

Over the next few days, I began probing deeper into this epiphany. What I found was not a conspiracy or a sci-fi dystopia, but a set of interlocking forces quietly rearranging society in capital’s favor. No single person or cabal engineered it; rather, systemic incentives have been nudging us step by step into a future where capital triumphs decisively over labor. In the pages that follow, I invite you to walk with me through that dim corridor of emerging realities. We’ll begin with the neo-enclosure of our collective mind, move through the erosion of labor’s power in an aging, automated world, and then confront the financial currents that enrich assets while stranding wages. Each section is a piece of the puzzle. Together, they form a chilling picture of where we may be headed. This isn’t a comfortable journey, but by its end you might feel, as I did, that the ground beneath us is shifting—and that the future, however unsettling, is already in motion.

Fencing the Cognitive Commons

The first stop on this journey was prompted by that office layoff: a machine had essentially taken the place of dozens of skilled workers. To understand how that was possible, we have to step back and look at what fuelled that machine’s intelligence. The AI system that replaced my colleagues did not emerge from a vacuum; it was trained on vast troves of data, much of it sourced from the collective output of human minds. Every email ever written, every line of code open-sourced, every article and image on the internet – all of it formed a cognitive commons, an immense pool of shared knowledge and creativity. It is the digital equivalent of the village commons of old, where anyone’s sheep could graze freely. But now, that commons is being quietly fenced off and monetized in what can only be described as a neo-enclosure movement.

Enclosure has a cruel history. In medieval and early-modern times, peasants woke up to find the open fields and forests – their commons – suddenly claimed by landlords, bordered with stone walls and hedges. What had been shared wealth became private property, and those who once relied on it were left with nothing. Today, we’re seeing a strikingly similar process, only the turf is not soil but human knowledge and attention. Generative AI models are a prime example: they feed on our collectively produced content (books, blogs, art, conversation) and transform it into proprietary products owned by tech companies. A poem you tweeted a decade ago or a design you posted on DeviantArt might now be a tiny drop in the data ocean that an AI scraped and learned from. But the AI’s capabilities – to write, to paint, to code – are owned by the entity that trained it, not by the public who provided the raw material. The cognitive commons is being enclosed: open-source knowledge in, closed-source product out.

It’s not just AI art and chatbots. Think about our daily life online. Attention has become property. Scroll through social media and realize that every witty post, every video, every meme is part of a vast human conversation that, in aggregate, creates huge value. Yet that value is captured by a few platforms which sell our mindshare to advertisers. Our shared digital culture – conversations with friends, funny videos, grassroots creativity – is packaged into targeted ads and algorithm-driven feeds. One commentator called this “the ultimate enclosure – the enclosure of the cognitive commons, the ambient mental atmosphere of daily life”​

In other words, our very awareness has become a resource to be mined. What we think about, what occupies our mind, is increasingly determined by those who control the platforms and algorithms. If the feudal lord of old could fence the land, today’s lords fence the mind, bombarding us with curated information, stimuli engineered to capture and profit from our attention.

The neo-enclosure of the cognitive commons has profound effects. It tilts the playing field of innovation and opportunity toward those who own intellectual property and computational power. A handful of tech giants now control the APIs, the datasets, the cloud servers – the new means of production for knowledge work. Meanwhile, individuals and communities that once shared freely find themselves either locked out or locked in: locked out of accessing the most advanced tools unless they pay rent to the owners, or locked into ecosystems where their every action generates data for someone else’s gain. We celebrate how smartphones and search engines put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but less noted is how they also privatized the gatekeeping of that knowledge. The internet was once hailed as a great equalizer, a global commons of information. Increasingly, though, the “cognitive surplus” of millions is siphoned into corporate silos.

This enclosure isn’t announced with fanfare. There’s no decree saying “this knowledge now belongs to X corporation.” It happens subtly: an open platform slowly tightens its API access, a public research dataset gets bought out, a popular open-source tool is absorbed into a paid product. We wake up to find the digital pasture we wandered freely now has “No Trespassing” signs – or at least “For entry, pay a subscription”. And just as enclosure of land displaced peasants, enclosure of knowledge displaces workers. Graphic designers, journalists, coders, even lawyers and doctors – all these professions rely on knowledge and patterns that AI is learning to replicate. As the AIs get better, the humans in those loops feel the ground shrinking beneath their feet. The intangible commons of skill and know-how, built up by generations, is becoming the private domain of capital – capital in the form of algorithms and patents.

Standing in that office after the layoffs, I realized the AI that took over was not just a clever tool; it was the spearhead of a sweeping change. It represented a transfer of competence and autonomy from individuals to capital. The company wouldn’t need to pay a salary to the AI; it simply owned the AI (or rented it from another corporation), which would tirelessly perform tasks without breaks, complaints, or collective bargaining. In a sense, the knowledge and experience of my former colleagues had been appropriated – first as the training data that informed the AI, and second as the ongoing improvement the AI would get from doing their jobs. What was theirs became an asset on someone else’s balance sheet.

This is Wither Up Economics at the cognitive level: a privatization of the mind. We see it when a public university’s research is patented and sold, or when a community forum’s content is used to train a machine that ends up replacing the very contributors. It’s a world where ideas and creativity become capital’s fodder. And it sets the stage for the next development – because once capital has harnessed collective knowledge, the next logical step is to reduce its reliance on the knowledge holders themselves, i.e., the workers. In other words, enclose the commons, then sideline the commoners.

The Vanishing Labor Force: Automation and Demographic Erosion

A week after the layoffs, I visited my grandfather for coffee. He’s in his late 70s and often reflects on how different the world is now. We sat in his living room, sunlight falling on a shelf of old family photos. One picture showed him as a young man among hundreds of factory workers outside a plant that long ago shut down. “There were so many of us,” he said, shaking his head. And it’s true—there were. In his youth, people were everywhere in the economy: building, manufacturing, driving, selling, typing. Now, it seems, fewer hands are on deck. Factories are populated by robots. Offices, by software. Even the trucks are learning to drive themselves.

But it’s not just technology thinning the ranks of the employed; demographics are doing it too. My grandfather’s eyes welled with tears as he mentioned a few of his old friends who had passed away recently. It dawned on me that an entire generation is exiting the stage, and the generation coming after is smaller than the one before. For years we’ve heard about aging societies: in Japan, in Europe, in America. This year, Japan’s census confirmed a stunning trend—deaths now outnumber births by such a margin that the population is set to shrink by nearly a third over the next 50 years. The evidence appears in mundane statistics: adult diaper sales have already doubled those of baby diapers in Japan​. It’s a poignant, almost surreal marker of society turning gray. And Japan is just an early example; many other countries are only a few steps behind on the same path of demographic contraction.

At first glance, you might think a shrinking working-age population would shift power back to workers. Fewer workers available should mean companies compete harder to hire them, driving wages up. Indeed, in certain sectors we do see labor shortages and rising pay—for example, construction or nursing in aging societies. But here’s the rub: just as labor starts to become scarce, capital is finding new ways to do without labor entirely. AI-enabled automation is stepping in to fill the gap that demographics creates. In Japan, where combinatorial forces of a labor shortage and abundant technology collide, you see automated restaurants, robot caregivers, AI-powered clerks. What began as a response to not having enough young workers has become an incentive to never need young workers again. It’s a quiet substitution: roles once occupied by people are erased not through malicious intent, but through a cold cost-benefit logic accelerated by circumstance.

I think of the self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store. A small sign cheerfully asks for patience with the “new automated checkout system” and promises “more efficient service.” For the shopper, it’s mildly convenient (or mildly annoying, depending on your mood). For the corporation, it’s another notch of labor removed from the ledger. One less cashier to schedule, to pay, to provide health insurance for. Multiply that by millions of touchscreens across retail chains worldwide, and you start to see the outline of a labor-light economy. And it’s not just low-wage jobs at risk. White-collar automation is coming on fast: AI that can draft legal contracts, diagnose illnesses, design buildings, even write code. A recent analysis by a major consulting firm suggested that by the mid-2030s, up to 30% of all jobs could be automated in some way​. Even if that figure ends up a bit high or slow to materialize, the direction is clear. We’re entering an era where the default response to a workforce crunch is not to improve job quality to attract more workers, but to eliminate the job entirely.

This has all sorts of cascading effects. Labor’s bargaining power erodes when the boss can say, “If you want $1 more an hour, I’ll just install a machine to do your job.” In warehouses and factories, the threat needn’t even be explicit; the mere presence of automation in the wings tamps down workers’ willingness to demand more. On top of that, unions have been declining for decades, stripping workers of collective voice just as they need it most. Many young workers have only seen gig work or short-term contracts, with no expectation of long-term stability. The message they’ve internalized is clear: you’re on your own.

Now add demographics back into the mix. An aging society votes and spends differently. Political pressure shifts toward protecting the retirees (who, importantly, often hold significant assets like homes, stocks, and pensions) rather than empowering the young workers. Policies skew to keeping interest rates low and asset prices high – partly because nobody wants their 401(k) or home value to drop as they approach retirement, and partly because governments need cheap debt (more on that soon). In effect, the old and capital-owning are subtly aligned interests: stable assets, low inflation, steady dividends. What about the young and wage-earning? They are fewer in number and often distracted by economic precarity – high rent, student debt, unstable jobs – to marshal political clout. The result is a further systemic sidelining of labor: not by any grand decree, but as an emergent property of an economy that finds it can run on ever fewer workers and doesn’t miss a beat when those workers have diminishing influence.

It’s a bizarre inversion of the 20th-century norm. For a long stretch of modern history, we fretted about having too many people and not enough jobs. Now, in some advanced economies, we face too few people for the jobs that need doing – yet instead of this leading to a golden age for workers, it’s leading to rapid investment in technologies that make workers optional. It feels like a slow-motion coup: not one orchestrated by generals or dictators, but by CEOs, algorithms, and societal aging. Labor isn’t being lined up against a wall; it’s simply being shrunk, automated, and rendered peripheral over decades. My grandfather’s photo of hundreds of factory hands is a relic not just of the past, but perhaps of a pattern of life that will not return. The future of work might be a future with less work – at least, less work done by humans and far less bargaining power for the humans who remain.

Walking through the city these days, I sometimes play a game: I look at each worker I see and ask, “Will they still have that job in 10 or 20 years?” The barista – maybe, if we still like a human touch, or maybe not if a robot arm makes latte art better. The cab driver – likely to be supplanted by a driverless car. The nurse – probably safe for longer, though AI will assist her, and tablets might replace some of what a nurse’s aide used to do. The construction worker – his exoskeleton suit helps him lift heavy beams now, but perhaps one day the suit won’t need a human inside. It’s a morbid exercise, I admit. But it underscores how pervasive the incentive is to trim human labor out of the equation. Each of those scenarios represents capital (in the form of machines or software) stepping in for labor. Each is capital saying to labor, “I’ve got it from here, thanks.”

This steady march isn’t just about replacing workers—it’s about changing the fundamental balance of power between capital and labor. In classical economic struggles, labor and capital needed each other: one brought muscle and skill, the other brought tools and money. You couldn’t run a railroad without both investors and thousands of workers swinging hammers. But now, capital is building a world where it doesn’t need as many hammer-swingers. It can do with a handful of engineers and a fleet of automated drills. And when capital no longer needs labor, labor loses whatever leverage it had left. That’s the endgame of this trend if left unchecked: a society where capital effectively rules, not by force or legal decree, but by simply not relying on humans to generate wealth.

The Asset-Wage Disconnect: Two Economies, One Winner

One evening, not long after the layoffs, I met up with an old friend who works in finance. We sat at a rooftop bar, clinking glasses as the city lights blinked on. I confessed to him my growing unease about where things are heading. He listened, then asked, “Have you looked at the markets lately? The economy’s doing great, by some measures.” He pulled out his phone and showed me a chart of the stock market’s performance over the past decade. It was a steep, nearly unbroken climb to the sky. I countered by recalling what wages had done in that same period—little more than flatline. We found ourselves staring at two very different stories: one of capital booming, the other of labor treading water.

This is the asset-wage disconnect laid bare. The total value of stocks, real estate, and other assets has been exploding upward, especially in the last decade or two, while average incomes barely inch forward. In fact, over a span of 40 years, U.S. corporate stock values increased on the order of 60-fold (inflation-adjusted), whereas real wages for the typical worker have remained essentially stagnant. It’s hard to even wrap your head around that divergence—imagine a graph where one line shoots up like a rocket and the other hugs the x-axis like a dead snake. We’re living in that picture. And it creates the sensation of two economies coexisting: one swimming in money, the other perpetually scraping by.

How did we get a split like this? Part of the answer lies in how money flows through the system, something I think of as a bifurcated money supply. Consider the actions of central banks and governments in recent crises. When a recession looms or a pandemic hits, the traditional playbook has been to flood the financial system with money – slashing interest rates, buying up bonds and other assets (known as quantitative easing), and generally doing everything to ensure banks have liquidity and investors stay confident. This is often done in the name of helping the “economy,” but much of that help travels on a one-way express lane to capital markets. Bond-buying by the central bank raises bond prices and lowers yields, which pushes big investors towards stocks and real estate, driving those prices higher. Companies find it easier to borrow money at cheap rates, which they often use to acquire other companies or buy back their own shares, further boosting stock prices. Asset inflation, in other words, becomes standard operating procedure.

Meanwhile, what about the other side of the economy – the world of paychecks and households? Some money does reach here (stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, etc., when political will allows), but it’s comparatively modest and usually temporary. Policymakers are quick to worry about wage inflation if workers seem to be getting too much leverage (heaven forbid wages rise faster than a couple percent—then it’s time to “cool off” the economy). So even in boom times, there’s a tendency to tap the brakes if too many people start getting raises. The result is an odd equilibrium: high-octane fuel for the financial engines, strict speed limits on the real economy. You get bubbles in stocks or housing, but minimal wage growth and only mild consumer price inflation. It’s as if the river of money split into two streams – one rushing into the ponds of the wealthy, the other a thin trickle sustaining everyone else.

Sitting on that rooftop, I remarked to my friend, “It’s like the markets and the people live on different planets.” He nodded, swirling his drink, “Well, in my line of work, we call the market the real economy.” That struck me. Wall Street had come to see itself as the main show, with jobs and wages as a secondary subplot. And perhaps in truth, their fortunes had become decoupled from the fate of workers. A corporation can see its profits surge even while cutting staff or holding wages flat, because maybe it found a way to sell more products overseas, or it invested in automation, or it simply benefited from a speculative frenzy in its stock. In the old industrial model, to get richer you often had to hire more workers and pay them to make more widgets. In the new model, you might get richer by not hiring—by optimizing, downsizing, merging, algorithm-izing.

This asset-wage disconnect also explains a lot about inequality and the lived experience of different social classes today. If you were fortunate enough to own a home, some stocks, maybe a 401(k) retirement account, you’ve probably seen your net worth climb nicely over the past decade. Many such folks feel perplexed by talk of economic malaise—“Look at the Dow, look at housing prices, things are good!” But if you’re someone who depends entirely on wages, with little or no assets, you likely feel like you’re running in place or falling behind. Your rent went up, health care and education costs skyrocketed (not coincidentally, those are sectors heavily driven by either assets or monopolistic dynamics), and your paycheck simply hasn’t kept up. To you, claims of a “strong economy” ring hollow, even mocking.

Generationally, this split is producing a chasm. Baby Boomers and many Gen X-ers managed to buy houses when they were cheaper and have ridden that wave; younger Millennials and Gen Z, in contrast, often see homeownership as an unattainable dream, and without it they have no stake in the asset bonanza. They’re effectively locked out of the capital party, stuck in the world of labor. This asset inequality begets more inequality: an older landlord collects rent from a younger tenant, transferring wealth monthly from the wage-earner to the asset-owner. Or consider two college buddies: one became a skilled employee, the other became an entrepreneur who eventually sold his startup or got stock options at a tech firm. Fast forward 20 years, and the latter might be 100 times wealthier than the former, not because he worked 100 times as hard, but because he had equity – a piece of the upside – whereas his friend had a salary. We are increasingly a society split between the investers and the invested-in.

There’s also a psychological component to this. When asset values keep rising, those who hold them feel secure, even blithe. A rising stock portfolio or home equity can cushion a lot of bumps. It can pay for your kids’ college or your medical emergency or your retirement with room for cruises and vacation homes. So if you’re in that boat, the system is largely working for you. You’re less likely to notice the systemic rot underneath or to rock the boat if you do. But if you’re on the other side – no assets, just labor – you live with a constant precariousness. One unexpected expense or layoff can spell disaster. And you notice, keenly, that no one is flooding your bank account with cheap money. In fact, when times get tough, you might struggle to even get a small loan, whereas big companies can borrow millions at near-zero rates. The injustice isn’t always loud; often it’s a quiet background hum, like a machine room vibrating under the floorboards of society, steadily transferring wealth to one side.

To put it succinctly, capital has learned to thrive without labor thriving. The stock market doesn’t need full employment or rising median wages to hit record highs; it just needs profits and plenty of liquidity sloshing around. We’ve redesigned our economy—through policy choices, technological changes, and globalization—so that the fortunes of capital and labor need not rise together. In fact, they can diverge dramatically, as they have. As one analysis noted, neoliberal policies essentially shifted inflation and growth into asset prices and away from paychecks​. The promise was that the wealth at the top would eventually trickle down, but in practice it has pooled and pooled at the top, forming an almost separate ecosystem of wealth. Call it the Moneyverse, parallel to the universe the rest of us inhabit.

This parallel world has its own self-reinforcing logic. When crises hit, the guardians of the economy (central banks, treasuries) rush to rescue the financial system first and foremost—because they believe (or at least say) that helping capital will save us all. Sometimes it does prevent broader disaster, but it also reinforces the privileged status of capital. Think of the 2008 financial crisis: banks got bailed out to stop a meltdown of assets, and maybe that prevented deeper recession, but millions still lost homes and jobs, and hardly any banker faced consequences. Or the pandemic: swift action by the Fed meant the stock market recovered in mere weeks after the crash, and then went on to soar to all-time highs even as millions were still out of work and lining up for food relief. It was astonishing—pain on Main Street, party on Wall Street. The disconnect couldn’t have been more stark.

We’re left with a situation where capital accumulation has become uncoupled from broad human progress. It’s like a high-speed train that has detached from the passenger cars and left them behind on the tracks. The engine is speeding ahead – that’s the world of assets and capital gains. The passengers – everyday working people – are stranded, or moving at a crawl. Occasionally the train sends a shuttle back to offer a ride to a lucky few (say, a startup founder or a homeowner in a gentrifying neighborhood), but many remain stuck. If you listen carefully, you can hear some economists and politicians celebrating the engine’s speed while others are desperately trying to figure out how to reconnect the cars. But in the logic of Wither Up Economics, you don’t reconnect them. The whole point is that the engine doesn’t need the cars to keep going.

The Debt-Collateral Spiral: The High-Wire Act of Modern Finance

One question might be nagging at this point: if wages are stagnant and work less secure, how is society holding together at all? How are people affording things like homes or education or even basic consumption? Part of the uncomfortable answer: debt. Over the past few decades, we’ve increasingly turned to debt to paper over the cracks between stagnant incomes and rising costs. And debt, in large volumes, has its own powerful effect on the relationship between capital and labor.

Picture a young couple that wants to buy a house. Thirty years ago, maybe the price of a house was such that one middle-class income (or one and a half incomes) could pay the mortgage. Today, in many cities, the price of entry is so high that even two incomes strain to meet it. How do people still buy houses? They take on larger and longer loans, often with both adults working full-time to pay it off. So the couple gets the house, but along with it they sign away a big chunk of their future earnings to the lender. In essence, their future labor is mortgaged to capital (the bank). Multiply this story by millions and extend it beyond housing—student loans for education that wages don’t cover, credit card debt for living expenses that paychecks can’t stretch to, auto loans for cars to get to those far-flung jobs, and so on. The result is an indebted society, where many people’s present and future labor is already claimed by creditors.

Now, debt in moderation isn’t necessarily bad. It can be a useful tool. But what happens when it becomes systemic and ever-increasing is what we might call a debt-collateral spiral. Here’s how it works: In order for lenders to be comfortable extending all this credit, they need assurance they’ll be paid back. That usually means collateral – an asset they can seize if you default. For mortgages, it’s the house; for student loans, it might technically be your future earnings potential; for corporate loans, it’s the company’s assets or revenues. As credit has expanded, asset values have had to keep rising to backstop that credit. If house prices stagnate or fall, suddenly banks worry the loans on their books are not secure. If corporate stock values fall, suddenly those companies look shakier and their debt might be downgraded. So there’s an implicit pact: keep asset prices growing, and we can keep debt growing, and that in turn keeps consumption and investments going even if wages are flat. It’s a bit like stretching a rubber band – as long as it doesn’t snap, you can stretch surprisingly far.

But of course, sometimes reality doesn’t cooperate. We saw that in 2008 when the U.S. housing market—a bulwark of collateral—collapsed under its own speculative excess. Suddenly that spiral went in reverse: falling home prices meant trillions in mortgage debt were not fully backed; banks panicked, credit froze, and the whole house of cards nearly came down. The response was telling: governments and central banks rushed not so much to bail out individual homeowners (millions of whom lost homes), but to bail out the financial system. They effectively said, we will not let asset prices crash further, we will not let the lenders go down. It was messy and imperfect, but they succeeded to an extent in re-inflating the collateral (through low interest rates and buying up bad assets) so the debt could be sustained.

From that crisis emerged an unspoken doctrine: never let the debt-collateral spiral unwind chaotically. Since 2008, whenever there’s a hint of crisis, authorities step in forcefully to stabilize assets and credit. Think of it as a tightrope walker who must keep moving forward—if they try to go backward or stop, they fall. Similarly, our debt-fueled system must keep pressing on, more debt, higher assets, rinse and repeat, or face collapse. This imperative further binds the fate of the economy to the interests of capital. Because who benefits most from propping up asset prices? Those who own the assets (capital owners). Who benefits from keeping credit flowing? Those who need credit, yes (which is many of us), but also those who provide credit and earn interest (banks, investors). Over time, a heavily indebted society effectively hands the steering wheel to the creditors.

There is also a more subtle effect: debt tames labor. A worker laden with debt is far less likely to go on strike or quit a job to start a risky new venture. They need the paycheck to service the loans. Debt can be a form of social control — a golden shackle. You see this in the gig economy: a driver financing an expensive car to drive for a rideshare company is unlikely to protest that company’s pay cuts or unfair practices, because missing even a week of work could mean missing a payment. Or at the macro level: entire countries with high sovereign debt are pressured to adopt “investor-friendly” (read: capital-friendly) policies to avoid spooking the bond markets. There’s even a term, “debt discipline,” which describes how the need to repay debt forces individuals and nations to live in a way that pleases their creditors.

In the context of Wither Up Economics, the debt-collateral spiral is like the hidden engine room powering the whole ship. It doesn’t just power it — it also constrains the ship’s direction. We can’t simply decide to reduce inequality or boost wages significantly if doing so threatens the ability of borrowers to repay, or if it upends asset valuations. For instance, imagine a bold policy that significantly raised middle-class incomes — sounds great, right? But if it came at the expense of corporate profits or required high taxes on the wealthy, markets might tumble, interest rates might spike, and suddenly our debt edifice would wobble. Policymakers know this, consciously or not. So any change has to thread a very narrow needle: don’t upset the bondholders, don’t prick the asset bubbles. In practice, that means don’t rock capital’s boat.

So we chug along, increasing debt here, massaging asset prices there. Real estate becomes more a financial asset than a place to live, something to be traded and leveraged. Companies that might in earlier eras have reinvested profits into expansion or wages now often choose to take on debt to buy back shares (pumping up the stock price which benefits shareholders and executives). We’re effectively pulling future value into the present to keep the game going. But that future value isn’t coming from thin air—it’s coming from us, from our future labor and productivity, and from our children’s as well. We are eating tomorrow’s lunch today, under the assumption that tomorrow we’ll somehow cook a bigger lunch to compensate.

I remember standing in my apartment after discussing these realizations with a few friends, and one of them said, “You make it sound like we’re all just living in a big Ponzi scheme run by the Fed and Wall Street.” I laughed, because it’s not an outright scam—there is real productive activity and innovation in our economy. But there is an element of pyramid dynamics: as long as more debt can be added and assets keep rising, the system stays solid; if either of those falter, things get precarious. And in a pyramid, those who get in early (or are at the top) make out like bandits, while those at the bottom or late can get crushed. In our context, that roughly translates to older, wealthier capital owners at the top, and younger, poorer laborers at the bottom, laden with student loans and mortgages that financed the gains of those above.

Debt, then, is the quiet accomplice of capital in subduing labor. It extends capital’s reach into the future, claims a portion of it, and ensures that the present momentum (profits, asset growth) can continue. But it also means that if you’re not on the benefiting side of this equation, you’re likely digging yourself deeper just to stay in place. You take a loan to get a degree to hopefully get a job that might let you pay off that loan before you retire. You swipe a credit card to pay a medical bill and then work overtime to pay off the credit card. The wheel keeps spinning, and you have to run inside it faster if your wages stagnate, which, for many, they have.

This debt spiral might seem abstract, but it has human consequences. It’s in the statistics of declining entrepreneurship among young people (hard to start a business when you’re swimming in debt and investors are cautious unless you already have money). It’s in the deferred family formation – couples having fewer children or none at all because they feel financially strapped (ironically reinforcing the demographic contraction). It’s in the anxiety that hums in the background of modern life: a sense that one slip – an illness, a layoff – could send everything tumbling because there isn’t much of a cushion. Meanwhile, for those at the top, debt is a tool for wealth creation: they leverage cheap loans to buy more assets, which go up in value, making them richer, allowing them to borrow even more. The rich borrow to get richer; the rest borrow to survive. That is Wither Up Economics in a single line, perhaps.

Capital’s Quiet Coup and the Future in Motion

Put all these pieces together – enclosed minds, vanishing labor, surging assets, split money circuits, debt-fueled stability – and you have a portrait of a society subtly reengineered in capital’s favor. It’s not the old robber barons in a smoke-filled room plotting how to break the backs of workers. It’s more insidious than that: it’s code and algorithms allocating resources; it’s impersonal markets responding rationally to skewed incentives; it’s policymakers who genuinely fear upsetting the status quo because the system has grown so fragile in certain ways. It’s a series of second-order effects that all line up pointing to the same outcome: labor loses ground, capital gains ground. Year by year. Crisis by crisis. Innovation by innovation.

In many ways, it is an intensification of neoliberalism – that ideology which took hold in the late 20th century preaching free markets, privatization, and the rolling back of state support and labor power. Neoliberalism’s champions promised dynamism and growth, and indeed the world did grow richer, but the benefits were never evenly shared. Still, there was a time when even the neoliberals would nod to the idea of “trickle-down” – that eventually, something for the rich would mean something for everyone. Wither Up Economics has no such pretense. It’s a harsher doctrine born from reality, not theory: it simply observes that wealth has trickled up and shows no sign of coming down. In fact, the upward flow is intensifying, even self-accelerating.

The personal epiphany I experienced on that fateful afternoon was that we might already be witnessing capital’s quiet coup d’état. Not a violent overthrow, but a gradual handover of societal steering. Capital in the form of technology decides what work is needed and who does it. Capital in the form of finance decides which initiatives live or die, which communities thrive or wither. And capital in the form of amassed wealth bends our institutions to its liking—because when the economy becomes dependent on capital’s continued success (to avoid those crises and collapses), then whatever is good for capital appears to be good for society by default. We saw it when “full employment” was quietly redefined as something less than everyone having a job, because if employment gets too high, wages might rise and investors might not like that. We see it when intellectual property law gets ever extended to protect corporate rights at the expense of the public domain, all in the name of innovation and investment incentives. These are the footprints of capital’s triumph.

And yet, this future is not a sci-fi dystopia with robot overlords or jack-booted tycoons. It’s strangely banal and plausible. It’s the world where you wake up in 2035 and most people are either working gig jobs for pennies or living on some kind of basic income stipend, while a small elite technocratic class and their AI-driven enterprises generate most of the GDP. Public libraries might be gone (who needs them when information is delivered by a few mega-corps for a fee?), public parks perhaps neglected (the wealthy have their own green spaces, the rest are pacified with digital entertainment). Democratic politics could still exist, but increasingly theater-like, because the real constraints on any bold policy are set by “what the markets will tolerate.” It’s a chillier world, not in climate but in spirit – one where economic power has consolidated to such a degree that the traditional levers of democracy and community feel almost impotent. This is the dim corridor I felt I was being guided down: not a single cataclysm, but a gradual darkening of possibilities for the many, as the glow of wealth intensifies for the few.

I wish I could say there’s an easy solution on the horizon in this essay. But I promised at the outset this wouldn’t be a policy prescription piece, and indeed the situation defies any quick fix. The uncomfortable truth is that those benefiting most from Wither Up Economics are the ones with the greatest power to change its course. Who else could? The workers? They’ve been losing collective power and even absolute numbers. The indebted masses? They can hardly risk a revolt when missing a bill could ruin them. Perhaps visionary political leaders could break the spell, but they too are often constrained by the very forces we’ve described – they know an assault on capital (be it higher taxes on wealth, aggressive antitrust, robust labor laws) will be met with capital flight, market crashes, or simply lack of support from an electorate that has been taught to fear anything that “hurts the economy.” And so, realistically, it is the capital class – the tech barons, the financiers, the asset-rich – who might decide to course-correct if they ever realize that a society which withers below them will eventually threaten even their vantage point. History has shown that extremes of inequality and disempowerment can lead to social unrest or collapse that spares no one. The beneficiaries of today’s system might act, if not out of altruism, then out of enlightened self-interest, to prevent such an outcome.

As I finish writing this, I think back to that moment in the office, watching the stock price leap as humans were shown the door. It felt like a tiny time machine, giving me a glimpse of a possible tomorrow. In that tomorrow, productivity and profit no longer require people the way they used to; knowledge is abundant but owned by a few; money flows plenty, but in rarefied circuits; debt keeps the game running, until it can’t. It’s a future that’s already arriving in pieces, like twilight creeping in. Standing here in the dusk, one can just make out the silhouettes of these looming structures. They provoke a sense of awe at the power of human innovation and capital accumulation, but also a sense of foreboding—because an economy that grows upward while letting its foundation rot is ultimately a castle built on sand.

Will we, collectively, realize what’s happening and demand a different path? Or will we acclimate to the water slowly warming around us? I sometimes hear a hopeful refrain: “The future is not fixed; we can choose differently.” And I do believe that. Yet I also feel, with each passing year, that the future I’ve described is settling into place, one default decision, one quarterly earnings report, one AI upgrade, one interest rate cut at a time. Perhaps recognizing it is a first step—dragging these subtle shifts into the light of day, and calling them out for what they are. That’s why I wrote this, to share that uneasy illumination I stumbled upon.

We might discover that the corridor we’re being guided down has doors after all—doors that could be opened to alternate corridors, if we look for them. But for now, the trajectory holds: capital ascends, labor recedes. The name I gave it, Wither Up Economics, sounds bleak, and it is. Yet it’s not prophecy; it’s merely the trend of the moment projected forward. Trends can change, especially if enough people see where they lead and decide, simply, not to go there.

For the time being, though, the momentum is strong. The future is quietly being written in lines of code, in legal contracts, in balance sheets. It feels like destiny, even if it isn’t. And so we end with a paradox and a warning: the future might already be in motion – and those who are winning the most from it might be the only ones with the leverage to rewrite it. Whether they will do so is a question that hangs in the air, unanswered, as we step deeper into the corridor, eyes open and uneasy at what lies ahead.