Experimental Thought Inc.
Boy carrying a mallet past a cracked revolving door as formally dressed onlookers react

Speculating on the present value of labour; paying labour not to work illustration

Speculating on the present value of labour; paying labour not to work

Capital is routinely withheld from the market for no reason other than the speculative expectation that a better price can be secured, and the owner’s right to withhold it—to wait, refuse prevailing terms, leave it idle, or abandon the market altogether—is ordinarily taken for granted.

As a matter of theoretical rigour, if capital can be withheld in its own self-interest, to the extent that financial means permit, why not embrace that same speculative instinct when it is extended to labour as a productive entity?

Labour need not itself possess the capital required to speculate. Financial capital could fund labour’s refusal of prevailing terms and take a contractual share of the economic gain thereby secured.

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Canadian woman with headphones facing a Trump-capped package labelled Meat.

Labour liquidity: a teaser

Might Canadians, acting through a crowdfunded corporation of their own making, poach every single Trump Organization employee worldwide in a matter of days… because it’s fun, and costs them next to nothing?

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Monetary Aggregation illustration

Monetary Aggregation

A constituent monetary unit within a larger unified holding can be deployed against a broader range of an economy’s product than the same nominal unit within a smaller holding.

Someone with a larger holding might therefore ask: “Why should a unit of my money transact at par with an identical unit of yours when, by virtue of my wealth, the next unit of money I receive can be redeemed against more of the economy’s output than can that same unit received by you?” Why should we suppose that nominal equivalence of identical money should equal real equivalence when in different hands?

Perhaps no answer seemed more satisfying—for some reason—than the assumption itself.

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A National Job Bank Worth Using illustration

A National Job Bank Worth Using

Every publicly advertised job should also be required to appear on a single, free, national employment platform, creating one complete and reliable place for workers and employers to find one another. Standardized listings and candidate profiles would sharply reduce wasted search time, while giving employers immediate access to the broadest available pool of qualified workers. Because the entire advertised labour market would pass through one common public system, government could also enforce basic standards—real vacancies, current postings, comparable information, and limits on pointless application requirements. Private job boards could continue to compete freely, but they would have to demonstrate genuine value added rather than profit from fragmentation of the labour market.

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Reconstructing Space and Time illustration

Reconstructing Space and Time

A model for reconstructing spatial and temporal structure from an unexpectedly limited kind of information. What begins as a fairly simple question about unknown facts develops into strange questions of inference, geometry, and representation, with answers that point to far-reaching technological usefulness.

Forthcoming in late September or early October-ish.

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