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Post-Labor Wiki

Bibliography

Generated from research/sources.json. Links are checked against Crossref and over HTTP; the latest report lists any that need a manual check. in Labor Zero marks works that David Shapiro’s Labor Zero (2026) also cites, from its published bibliography.

David Shapiro: Post-Labor Economics

  1. David Shapiro (2025). Understanding Post-Labor Economics in Six Easy Steps.in Labor Zero
  2. David Shapiro (2025). I'm starting a movement. (Labor/Zero).
  3. David Shapiro (2026). Technofeudalism is the Default Trajectory.
  4. David Shapiro (2026). Why Ending Labor is Catastrophic for Democracy.
  5. David Shapiro (2026). Labor Zero: AI, Automation, and the Last Employed Generation (online companion: appendix, bibliography, plates).
  6. David Shapiro (2026). PostLaborEconomics: public research repository (CC0).

    CC0 except docs/laborzero and video thumbnails. Its /Research PDFs are AI deep-research outputs: use them to find primary sources, never cite them for facts.

  7. David Shapiro (2026). UniversalHighIncome: whitepaper and simulator.

Classic texts

  1. Aristotle (c. 350 BCE). Politics (trans. Benjamin Jowett).

    Book I, ch. 4: if shuttles wove by themselves, masters would need no slaves. The oldest automation thought experiment.

  2. Thomas More (1516). Utopia.

    Six-hour workday; the first post-scarcity blueprint in the Western canon.

  3. Thomas Paine (1797). Agrarian Justice.in Labor Zero

    A one-off capital grant at 21 plus a pension, funded by a ground-rent on land: the ancestor of universal basic capital.

  4. Karl Marx (1844). Estranged Labour (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).in Labor Zero
  5. Karl Marx (1858). Grundrisse, Notebook VII (the 'Fragment on Machines').
  6. Paul Lafargue (1883). The Right to Be Lazy.
  7. Oscar Wilde (1891). The Soul of Man under Socialism.

    'Machinery must work for us': drudgery to machines, leisure and art to people.

  8. Max Weber (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.in Labor Zero

    Where the sacralisation of work ('laborism' in Shapiro's terms) is usually traced.

  9. John Maynard Keynes (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.in Labor Zero

    Coins 'technological unemployment'; predicts a 15-hour week by ~2030.

  10. Bertrand Russell (1932). In Praise of Idleness. Harper's Magazine.
  11. Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution (1964). The Triple Revolution.

    Memo to President Johnson: 'cybernation' will break the link between work and income.

Peer-reviewed papers

  1. E. P. Thompson (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present 38.DOI 10.1093/past/38.1.56
  2. Wassily Leontief (1983). Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income. Population and Development Review 9(3).DOI 10.2307/1973315

    The horse analogy: labour could go the way of draft horses after the tractor.

  3. David H. Autor, Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane (2003). The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(4).DOI 10.1162/003355303322552801in Labor Zero

    Routine-biased technical change; basis of the task framework.

  4. Evelyn L. Forget (2011). The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment. Canadian Public Policy 37(3).DOI 10.3138/cpp.37.3.283in Labor Zero

    Mincome, Dauphin, Manitoba, 1974–79: hospitalisations fell ~8.5%.

  5. Loukas Karabarbounis, Brent Neiman (2014). The Global Decline of the Labor Share. Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(1).DOI 10.1093/qje/qjt032in Labor Zero
  6. David H. Autor (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(3).DOI 10.1257/jep.29.3.3in Labor Zero

    The strongest mainstream case that automation complements labour; steelman it.

  7. Joel Mokyr, Chris Vickers, Nicolas L. Ziebarth (2015). The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is This Time Different?. Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(3).DOI 10.1257/jep.29.3.31
  8. Carl Benedikt Frey, Michael A. Osborne (2017). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114.DOI 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019in Labor Zero

    The '47% of US jobs at high risk' estimate (circulated as a working paper in 2013). It measures technical exposure, not a forecast of job losses.

  9. Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo (2019). Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor. Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(2).DOI 10.1257/jep.33.2.3in Labor Zero
  10. Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo (2020). Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets. Journal of Political Economy 128(6).DOI 10.1086/705716in Labor Zero

    US local labour markets, 1990–2007: areas more exposed to industrial robots saw large, robust falls in employment and wages (working-paper estimate per robot per 1,000 workers: −0.18 to −0.34 pp employment, −0.25 to −0.5% wages).

  11. Damon Jones, Ioana Marinescu (2022). The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 14(2).DOI 10.1257/pol.20190299in Labor Zero

    No drop in employment; part-time work rose ~1.8 pp.

  12. Dennis Egger, Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, Michael Walker (2022). General Equilibrium Effects of Cash Transfers: Experimental Evidence From Kenya. Econometrica 90(6).DOI 10.3982/ECTA17945

    Local multiplier ~2.5; minimal inflation.

  13. Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin, Daniel Rock (2024). GPTs are GPTs: Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs. Science 384(6702).DOI 10.1126/science.adj0998

    ~80% of US workers have ≥10% of tasks exposed to LLMs; ~19% have ≥50%.

  14. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, Lindsey Raymond (2025). Generative AI at Work. Quarterly Journal of Economics 140(2).DOI 10.1093/qje/qjae044

    5,172 customer-support agents: +15% issues resolved per hour on average; gains concentrated among less experienced workers.

Working papers

  1. Anton Korinek, Donghyun Suh (2024). Scenarios for the Transition to AGI. NBER Working Paper 32255.in Labor Zero

    Whether wages collapse depends on whether the space of tasks is bounded.

  2. Daron Acemoglu (2024). The Simple Macroeconomics of AI. NBER Working Paper 32487.in Labor Zero

    Task-based estimate: no more than a 0.66% TFP gain over 10 years. The strongest citation for the skeptical case.

  3. Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Sarah Miller (2024). The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States. NBER Working Paper 32719.

    OpenResearch study, $1,000/month for 3 years: non-transfer income fell ~$1,900/yr, participation fell 4.2 pp, hours fell 1–2 h/week; leisure rose most.

Books

  1. Karl Polanyi (1944). The Great Transformation.

    Labour as a 'fictitious commodity'; markets disembedded from society.

  2. Norbert Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings.
  3. Hannah Arendt (1958). The Human Condition.in Labor Zero

    Labour vs work vs action; warns of 'a society of laborers without labor'.

  4. Louis O. Kelso, Mortimer J. Adler (1958). The Capitalist Manifesto.

    Intellectual origin of the ESOP and 'binary economics': broaden capital ownership, not wages.

  5. Milton Friedman (1962). Capitalism and Freedom.

    Proposes the negative income tax (ch. 12).

  6. E. P. Thompson (1963). The Making of the English Working Class.

    The standard account of the Luddites as skilled workers defending their bargain, not technophobes.

  7. Martin Luther King Jr. (1967). Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?.

    Argues for a guaranteed income as the simplest answer to poverty.

  8. Jeremy Rifkin (1995). The End of Work.
  9. Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz (2008). The Race between Education and Technology.
  10. Guy Standing (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.in Labor Zero
  11. Kathi Weeks (2011). The Problem with Work.DOI 10.1215/9780822394723
  12. Thomas Piketty (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century.in Labor Zero

    r > g: returns to capital outpace growth, so wealth concentrates absent policy.

  13. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age.
  14. Martin Ford (2015). Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.
  15. Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.
  16. Rutger Bregman (2017). Utopia for Realists.
  17. Philippe Van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght (2017). Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy.
  18. David Graeber (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.in Labor Zero
  19. Aaron Bastani (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  20. John Danaher (2019). Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work.
  21. Aaron Benanav (2020). Automation and the Future of Work.

    Skeptic: weak labour demand comes from slow growth, not fast automation.

  22. Daniel Susskind (2020). A World Without Work.
  23. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson (2023). Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity.
  24. Yanis Varoufakis (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.in Labor Zero

Trials and programmes

  1. Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Kela (2020). Results of the Basic Income Experiment: Small Employment Effects, Better Perceived Economic Security and Mental Wellbeing.in Labor Zero
  2. Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (2021). SEED: $500/month guaranteed income, Stockton, California (2019–2021).in Labor Zero
  3. GiveDirectly (2023). Early Findings from the World's Largest UBI Study (Kenya).in Labor Zero

Reports

  1. Josh Bivens, Lawrence Mishel (2015). Understanding the Historic Divergence between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay. Economic Policy Institute.in Labor Zero
  2. UCL Institute for Global Prosperity (2017). Social Prosperity for the Future: A Proposal for Universal Basic Services.in Labor Zero
  3. Norges Bank Investment Management (2025). Government Pension Fund Global: Annual Report 2024.in Labor Zero
  4. Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (2026). The Fund.in Labor Zero

Data series

  1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, FRED (2026). Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share for All Workers (PRS85006173).
  2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, FRED (2026). Labor Force Participation Rate, 25–54 Yrs. (LNS11300060).in Labor Zero
  3. Our World in Data (2026). Share of the labor force employed in agriculture.

    CC BY 4.0, embeddable.

Commentary

  1. Sam Altman (2021). Moore's Law for Everything.in Labor Zero

    Proposes an American Equity Fund paying citizens from taxes on companies and land.

Fiction

  1. Edward Bellamy (1888). Looking Backward: 2000–1887.
  2. Kurt Vonnegut (1952). Player Piano.