This paper argues that a significant portion of what economics presents as natural is constructed, that artificial intelligence alters the feasibility of alternatives that earlier critics proposed and could not implement, and that six propositions define the design requirements of a genuinely reconstructed economics. Draws on Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning governance evidence, the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, Acemoglu and Restrepo’s so-so automation findings, and operational instances including the Anker Living Wage methodology and the ILO Better Work programme. A prelude to the longer work Economics in the Age of AI.

This paper identifies the Fiscal Amplification of Imported Inflation, the mechanism by which fixed indirect taxes automatically collect more from households already absorbing an external price shock, and the Household Protection Gap, the interval during which households bear the full weight of that shock without income relief. It proposes the VAT Buffer as the corrective instrument and introduces the Consumer-Activated VAT Claim System, an original architecture that eliminates pass-through failure and asymmetric price reversal by design rather than by monitoring. Mauritius is the anchor case. The framework applies across SIDS and all import-dependent economies exposed to external shock transmission.

Two documents published in 2026 arrive at an identical diagnosis from opposite ends of the institutional spectrum. The World Bank's Economics of a Livable Planet documents how the existing financial architecture fails to reward countries for protecting global public goods. The State of the Mind's Global Accord on Land and Labour Sustainability documents how the same architecture fails to require countries to measure the dignified employment their land generates per hectare. One carries 189 member states and a USD 117.5 billion lending portfolio. The other carries a Tin Tuna Index. Together they describe a system destroying the planet and the people who work it simultaneously. Neither is being heard.

This policy document translates the Human Intelligence Unit's land-and-labour framework into a direct institutional programme. It sets out the moral and economic case for treating land as a labour obligation, not merely an asset; calls for living-wage accountability, labour-yield measurement, subsidy conditionality, and land-use reform; and addresses states, development institutions, corporations, and regulators in plain terms. If the working papers built the framework, this document states the demand.

This essay examines the paradox by which abundance, when not governed by institutional discipline, can weaken productive life rather than strengthen it. Surplus can delay reform, distort incentives, protect failing structures and encourage elites to consume stability instead of building it. The piece treats abundance not as an automatic blessing, but as a condition that must be governed if it is not to become a trap.

This essay argues that beneath property, credentials, reputation and institutional standing, there remains one original resource that cannot be confiscated in the ordinary way: the inner faculty by which a person attends, judges and chooses. The piece treats this resource not sentimentally but philosophically, as the remaining ground of dignity when systems become extractive, manipulative or spiritually noisy.

This paper introduces the Ethical Yield Standard, a composite index measuring the ethical performance of any land use across Labour Yield, Ecological Yield, and Value Yield, adjusted by shock resilience and governance integrity modifiers. It presents the full Corporate EYS Disclosure specimen, a five-law legislative architecture, and ten formal manifesto demands addressed to the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, ILO, governments, and corporations. Labour sustainability is not a welfare byproduct. It is a first-order ethical obligation equivalent to climate sustainability.

Classical rentier theory was built around oil states and assumed price sovereignty without naming it. This paper names the missing variable, formally ranks external rent types by crisis durability, introduces the concept of Double Subordination, and identifies the land-capital-skill lock-in trap that prevents small island economies from executing the structural transitions that resource-rich states can fund. Seven case studies across Iran, Kuwait, Dubai, Lebanon, Mauritius, Fiji, and Sri Lanka.

This paper introduces elastic political hysteresis as a new theoretical concept and formally reconstitutes rentier theory by identifying price sovereignty as the missing variable that determines whether external rent dependence produces fiscal cushion or permanent fiscal trap. Twelve original theoretical concepts. The composite framework is tested across fifteen SIDS economies in five global regions.

This paper introduces elastic political hysteresis, an original concept independently derived from field observation of the Mauritian labour market paradox. It is the first application of hysteresis theory to a small island developing state in the Indian Ocean region.