Rethinking the Economy: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal

Welcome to the 19th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.

Table of Contents

• Jess’ Monthly Reflection

• A Brief History of the Economy

• The Economic Defaults We No Longer Notice

• Designing an Economy for Humans

• The Design of Deliberate Economies

Jess’ Monthly Reflection

I've been avoiding this topic.

Whenever I thought about 'The Economy', my brain shut down. If someone asked about it, I'd dismiss the topic as too complex for me to tackle. But as we continue to move towards Paradigm Makers’ vision for 2075 - a world where our invisible systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where we need it - I realised I couldn't keep avoiding it.

I knew the time was right for two important reasons. The first is that 2026 is year three for Paradigm Makers. If you're familiar with the stats, you'll know 60% of small businesses fail in their first three years of operation. That means if I don't find a sustainable business model aligned with the 2075 vision this year, I need to reevaluate dedicating my career to this wicked problem. [Side note: if you know of any business models that might work, please send them my way!]

The second reason is more interesting and relates to the concept of the Brain Economy. As I described last month, the brain economy recognises that the most valuable resource in modern work is human cognitive capacity. The more I learn, the more clearly I see a bridge materialising to help us move from a world designed for industrial output toward one designed for humans.

This topic matters because, from the day I started researching the history of work, I've known that redesigning the economy is the most challenging yet vital shift we must make. If your brain also shuts down at the mere mention of interest rates or GDP, I hope this edition provides a different perspective.

As always, we'll explore the economy through three perspectives: the historical context, the logic we inherited and how we can create new paradigms for tomorrow.

Enjoy May’s Flower Moon,

Jess Price

Founder & Chief Vision Officer

EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

^{Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; citations included. This is not meant to be a complete summary. Case studies were chosen for their enduring legacy.}

A Brief History of the Economy

The economy is the system that decides what has value, how that value is measured and who benefits from it. For most of history, the economy measured visible resources like land, physical labour and goods. Yet over time, those measures became the rules for how societies governed progress and growth. This history traces how we moved from counting land to measuring markets, eventually treating GDP growth as the dominant signal of economic success.

Pre-Industrial (before 1760): The Domesday Book

The Domesday Book is a comprehensive survey of England's land and resources, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086. It was a tool of control designed to assess taxation, record ownership, and assert royal power through a centralised record. This legacy continues whenever we measure tangible assets as a proxy for wealth.

First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) laid the foundation for modern capitalism. He introduced the 'invisible hand', an idea that individual self-interest could drive social benefit. Smith argued for a market economy where supply and demand dictate exchange with minimal government intervention, emphasising the role of capital in driving constant growth.

Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914): New York Stock Exchange

While the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was founded in 1792, it defined the mid-19th century. By facilitating the massive capital required for railroads and factories, the NYSE drove urbanisation and wage labour. This Gilded Age saw millions move from farms to cities, resulting in extreme wealth inequality and the birth of the industrial worker.

The GDP
Between the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions, the Great Depression spurred the creation of formal national accounting. In 1934, Simon Kuznets released a report that gave the United States its first credible framework to make the scale of economic collapse visible. While his work was hailed as a success, introducing the concepts of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP), Kuznets cautioned: "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income [as defined by GDP]." In 1944, the Bretton Woods system tethered global currencies to the U.S. dollar (and the dollar to gold), establishing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. By 1953, the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) set uniform definitions for GDP. Together, these acts established GDP as the global metric of power, making every government on Earth accountable to a single growth signal.

Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006): The Nixon Shock

In 1971, President Nixon abandoned the gold standard in response to the 'Triffin dilemma', a structural conflict between global demand and domestic stability. The Nixon Shock shifted the global economy from a system anchored in gold to one anchored in confidence. In this fiat money world, economic governance became tightly linked to debt, interest rates, and financial market signals. By 1993, the SNA had evolved to reflect an increasingly financialised economy, connecting GDP to complex balance sheets of assets and liabilities. 

Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now): Surveillance Capitalism

Coined by Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism describes a business model where personal data is collected to predict and influence behaviour. It treats human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices. While it fuels GDP growth through tech giants, it has created the very social and ethical dilemmas Kuznets warned of in 1934. In this era, the 'invisible hand' has become an invisible algorithm, extracting value from our private lives to keep GDP climbing, even as our collective wellbeing suffers.

What this reveals 

Our economic system was designed to maximise profit through markets, but it now must sustain global wellbeing and environmental health. This transition from physical assets to gold-backed currency, and finally data-driven financialisation, has prioritised short-term growth over long-term human and environmental sustainability. The result is a system where GDP growth masks structural inequality, creating a systemic friction between our economic indicators and social values.

THE LOGIC WE HAVE INHERITED

The Economic Defaults We No Longer Notice

Someone once said, we measure what we value. Based on the economic logic we've inherited, we have transitioned from a society that valued tangible land and labour to one that tracks floating currency and cognitive attention. Understanding this timeline helps us understand the friction we feel between our human wellbeing and a systemic demand for constant growth. Yet, even as the 2025 SNA begins to acknowledge a changing labour market, the underlying logic remains untouched.

GDP has become a metric of power that ignores human and environmental costs

In 1934, Kuznets designed the measurements that became GDP to help the U.S. navigate the Great Depression. Its purpose was specific: to provide a quantitative picture of the economy for government intervention. Kuznets himself urged that money is merely one aspect of economic activity and should not be used as the sole metric of success. Yet we ignored him. Today, the hidden costs to society are treated as 'externalities' rather than systemic failures:

• Invisible Labour: 16.4 billion hours of unpaid domestic and care work are performed every day. If valued at a minimum wage, this would account for 9% of global GDP (ILO, 2018)

• Natural Bankruptcy: The loss of ecosystem services (wild pollination, fisheries, forests, etc.) could shrink the global economy by USD $2.7 trillion annually by 2030 (World Bank, 2021)

• The Cost of Breath: Since 2021, 4.3 million lives have been lost to air pollution, primarily driven by the fossil-fuel combustion that powers GDP growth (WHO, 2026)

Modern surveillance capitalism treats humans as products

The Nixon Shock decoupled value from physical constraints. This meant value could be found in invisible resources, which Surveillance Capitalism fulfilled by turning human attention into a product. Now, invisible data extraction is a key metric fueling GDP growth as our data is sold to advertisers to sell us more stuff. People have become a resource to be mined rather than a human to be protected:

• The Attention Tax: On average, an adult now spends 6 hours and 38 minutes per day online, roughly 40% of waking life (GWI, 2025)

• The Mental Deficit: 48% of teens report social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022 (Pew Research, 2025)

• The Data Mine: In 2025, Meta generated over US 196 billion from advertising (Statista, 2026)

We must redesign our indicators to prevent systemic friction between economic signals and social value

The Domesday Book and the SNA were tools of control to dictate what society prioritised. Our current friction arises because we are trying to solve 21st-century ecological and social crises using a 20th-century scorecard that incentivises their destruction. The system is working exactly as designed; therefore, the only way to shift the output is to create new metrics that treat human and environmental health as the primary signals of success:

• The Inequality Gap: Between 2019 and 2025, global worker pay fell 12% while CEO pay surged 54% (Oxfam, 2026)

• The Poverty Floor: Despite soaring GDP growth, 8.5% of the world's population still lives on less than USD 2.14/day (World Bank, 2024)

• The Dying Species: Since 1970, the average size of wildlife populations has plummeted by 73% (WWF, 2025)

Redesign at the Level of Meaning

In 1968, Robert F Kennedy famously said that GNP "... measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile..." In 2026, this sentiment feels even more urgent. We have inherited a definition of value that is strictly transactional. But we are no longer in an era of scarcity of goods. Our scarcity relates to attention, trust and ecological stability.

We inherited an assumption that if an activity doesn't have a price tag (like parenting, volunteering or clean air), it has no economic value. This reinforces the hidden logic that silence and disengagement from digital platforms are economic losses, rather than human necessities. If we want a more human future, the question must shift:

How do we design a system of value where human and ecological flourishing are the primary signals of success?

CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW

^{Principle Generation Approach: AI-assisted possible futures, based on a NotebookLM containing sources related to the Brain Economy and Paradigm Makers 5 Essential Elements.}

Designing an Economy for Humans

While it can feel like we disregarded Kuznets' warning about GDP, there have been several attempts to design a 'wellbeing economy'. From Aristotle's Eudaimonia (flourishing) to Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNH) in the 1970s, humans have long searched for a way to measure what actually makes life worthwhile.

Promising initiatives like the GNH, UN's Human Development Index, Doughnut Economics and New Zealand's Living Standards Framework have made progress. Yet, none have captured global attention like GDP. In my attempt to understand why, I looked at the exact infrastructure that led to the success of GDP: standardisation, financial incentives and legal mandates. Until we build a similar 'Wellbeing Infrastructure', a global economy that sustains life will remain theoretical.

That's where the Global Brain Economy Initiative comes in. Through the lens of Brain Capital, value derives from the health and skills of the human brain and the ecosystems that sustain it.

Based on the work of these initiatives and Paradigm Makers Essential Elements, here are five proposed design principles for the new economic paradigm:

People: From Productivity to Agency

Old Paradigm: Your value is defined by your productivity
New Paradigm: Your value is found in your cognitive agency

Inherited logic treats education and health as mere inputs for market output. The new paradigm focuses on the cognitive capacities required for resilience. To do this, we must reframe mental health and human strengths from a peripheral social issue into core economic infrastructure and a strategic asset.

Question: What happens if you replace 'How many tasks did we complete today?' with 'Do my people have the agency to do the right work?'

Innovation: From Disruption to Infrastructure

Old Paradigm: Technological disruption
New Paradigm: Brains as infrastructure

We currently measure innovation through GDP-based metrics like patents and R&D spend. This overlooks the cognitive health that actually underpins these metrics. Reframing brains as infrastructure shifts innovation from building gadgets to a deliberative investment in the health and skills of human minds.

Question: If our teams 'Brain Capital' is our most critical infrastructure, is our current way of working building long-term capacity or extracting short-term output?

Technology: From Commodification to Augmentation

Old Paradigm: Attention extraction
New Paradigm: Human augmentation

Surveillance capitalism treats disengagement as an economic loss. The new paradigm moves toward Digital Public Infrastructure and data stewardships. Success is no longer measured by 'time on platform', but by how effectively a tool helps a human achieve their goals while protecting their mental wellbeing.

Question: If our digital tools were legally responsible for our team's mental health, would we still measure success by how much time we spend on them?

Economics: From Extractive to Regenerative

Old Paradigm: Value is transactional
New Paradigm: Value is redefined to honour people and planet

We cannot solve 21st-century crises using a 20th-century metric that rewards their destruction. Tools like Global Brain Capital Index provide a regenerative model where a national economy is in 'debt' if its primary cognitive and ecological assets are in decline.

Question: If our financial success were legally tethered to how we honour people and the planet, how would that change our definition of a 'profitable' quarter?

Norms: From Individualism to Interdependence

Old Paradigm: Success is an individual achievement
New Paradigm: Success is based on collective wellbeing

GDP ignores the social bonds and unpaid labour that make individual achievement possible. The new paradigm grounds itself in the concept of collective wellbeing, which has existed for centuries in cultures around the world (For example, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing model or Māori Waiora). Under collective wellbeing, success depends on how well the entire ecosystem functions in harmony.

Question: If success were measured by our collective ability to solve problems we couldn't solve alone, how would that change who we hire and how we share credit?

How these principles fit together

Taken together, these three layers may shift the foundation logic of our world:

• Economics and Norms redefine what is valued

• Innovation and Technology determine how value is created

• People reflect what becomes possible

When aligned, they shift our economy away from invisible extraction toward visible regeneration, where profit is a signal that you have successfully nurtured the system, rather than depleted it.

DESIGNING 2075: WHAT HAPPENS IF WE START NOW

^{Scenario Generation Approach: AI-assisted scenario, based on the 5 design principles proposed above and Paradigm Makers’ 2075 vision of a world where our systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where it's needed.}

The Design of Deliberate Economies

In 2026, we find ourselves at a historic inflection point, much like Kuznets in 1934 or Kennedy in 1968. Choosing to design around the Brain Economy now allows us to move away from a system that thrives on extracting human attention, toward one that finally values everything that makes life worth living.

By 2075, the question is no longer: 'How much growth can we extract from this quarter?' Instead, we ask: 'How much cognitive agency and ecological resilience did we cultivate today?'

This shift begins with the decisions we make right now. When designing your next project, team or strategy, consider these questions:

• Is this tool augmenting human intelligence or merely commodifying human attention?

• Are we investing in 'Brain Capital' as our primary infrastructure, or are we still treating people as depreciating assets?

• Does our definition of 'profit' include the restoration of collective wellbeing and the natural ecosystems we rely on?

If we redesign systems around these questions, the world in 2075 becomes one where:

• Standardised wellbeing metrics will sit alongside (or replace?) GDP as the global signal for investment, making it financially impossible to profit from human or environmental degradation.

• Cognitive agency is a protected human right, supported by digital public infrastructures that act as fiduciaries for our mental health.

• Interdependent success is the norm, where wealth is measured by the health of our communities and the depth of our relationships with humans and nature.

The systems we rely on today were designed for a different world. They are not broken, but rather working exactly as they were designed to. The decision for us is whether we continue to optimise for an industrial past or begin redesigning for a human future.

Until next time,

Jess

P.S The concept of the economy didn’t evolve in isolation. If you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:

• Rethinking Meetings

• Rethinking Communication

• Rethinking Disability

• Rethinking the Organisational Chart

• Rethinking Time

• Rethinking productivity through a farmer’s lens

• Rethinking work in the age of AI

• Rethinking corporate buzzwords

• The system of work contributing to psychosocial hazards

If you made it to this point, you are the person I imagine when I write the Moonlit Minds Journal, so thank you. You also have the makings of a paradigm maker!