From the Industrial Revolution to the dawn of the Internet, income has been an imperfect but relatively adequate approximation for the value of a person's work. Of course, this approximates volunteerism and unpaid internships as worthless, which is clearly (usually) an undervaluation. More or less, though, (with some powerful exceptions beyond the scope of this work) income has worked as a way to measure the relative value of a person's (or a company's) societal contributions. Changes unimaginable to early economists have taken place, however, which severely detract from income's ability to represent value.

We have simultaneously increased both the human population and technological efficiency to the point that the current wages-for-work model does not have adequate capacity for workers. In the United States' coal industry, in the last quarter century, production has increased by 133 percent, even as jobs have decreased by 33 percent.²⁵The numbers vary by industry, but the trend is nearly constant. The world still has plenty of problems that could benefit from people working to solve them, but many of these problems have emerged with or since the Internet, and the current work-for-pay model is no longer a viable incentive-to-work machine.

Furthermore, many types of media and information can now be duplicated in per