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The First Step: A System That Needs No Heroes
Almost every book that proposes an economic system asks for trust. This one asks for the it was built to be attacked, and to be left standing when the attack is over.
It starts from an uncomfortable the two compasses that have guided our arguments for two centuries—the market without limits and the state that plans everything—no longer orient the world we actually have, a world where work is increasingly algorithmic, capital has no nationality, and machines are about to make employment optional. Before proposing anything, the book dissects six systems that have governed the modern world—free-market capitalism, social democracy, globalized neoliberalism, market socialism, communism, and the cooperative model—salvaging from each what worked and naming, without flinching, what did not.
Out of that comes a proposal with a single design rule, the one in the it must need no heroes. It does not count on exemplary citizens, or politicians of integrity, or generous employers. It takes for granted that we will be selfish, shortsighted, and sometimes petty, and the system still has to hold. And it does not stop at the it says where the money comes from, in what order things get done and in which decade, what happens when employment becomes optional, what to do about borders and about the companies that no longer recognize any, and when to hit the brakes.
Then it puts itself on trial. One chapter tells six ordinary biographies twice—once if the sequence is respected, once if it only half works—to see who gains and who loses under what is being proposed. Another is written entirely by an adversary, with no rebuttals threaded through it and no one cutting in mid-sentence to qualify anything. And, before the end, it lays out a list of checkable what should be observed, on what timetable, and what result would prove it wrong.
It is a map, not a destination. And like every useful map, it was made so the next traveler can correct it.
It starts from an uncomfortable the two compasses that have guided our arguments for two centuries—the market without limits and the state that plans everything—no longer orient the world we actually have, a world where work is increasingly algorithmic, capital has no nationality, and machines are about to make employment optional. Before proposing anything, the book dissects six systems that have governed the modern world—free-market capitalism, social democracy, globalized neoliberalism, market socialism, communism, and the cooperative model—salvaging from each what worked and naming, without flinching, what did not.
Out of that comes a proposal with a single design rule, the one in the it must need no heroes. It does not count on exemplary citizens, or politicians of integrity, or generous employers. It takes for granted that we will be selfish, shortsighted, and sometimes petty, and the system still has to hold. And it does not stop at the it says where the money comes from, in what order things get done and in which decade, what happens when employment becomes optional, what to do about borders and about the companies that no longer recognize any, and when to hit the brakes.
Then it puts itself on trial. One chapter tells six ordinary biographies twice—once if the sequence is respected, once if it only half works—to see who gains and who loses under what is being proposed. Another is written entirely by an adversary, with no rebuttals threaded through it and no one cutting in mid-sentence to qualify anything. And, before the end, it lays out a list of checkable what should be observed, on what timetable, and what result would prove it wrong.
It is a map, not a destination. And like every useful map, it was made so the next traveler can correct it.
423 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 20, 2026
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