Today's Wealth, Tomorrow's Desert
We increasingly hear about a future in which artificial intelligence will make it possible to build million-dollar businesses with a single employee. The prospect is presented as an extraordinary triumph of efficiency: lower costs, fewer employees, higher productivity, and greater profits. Yet almost no one seems concerned with asking a basic question: what happens when an economic system becomes increasingly capable of producing wealth while becoming less capable of distributing the income people need to buy what it produces?
As a former economics student, I see a contradiction in this vision that deserves closer examination. Not because a business with a single employee is necessarily abnormal, or because automation should be resisted, but because the success of an individual company does not automatically translate into the sustainability of the economic system in which it operates. A business can become extraordinarily profitable by reducing its need for human labor. If this logic spreads without the development of alternative mechanisms for distributing income, the collective outcome could be very different from the sum of individual successes.
Industrial capitalism found one of its principal engines in mass consumption. The Ford Model T represented a transformation in which standardized production made automobiles accessible to a broader public. Henry Ford is also remembered for the wage increases he introduced in 1914, which helped make industrial employment more attractive, although it would be simplistic to interpret his strategy as merely an attempt to enable workers to buy the cars they manufactured. The underlying point remains: production, employment, and consumption could reinforce one another.
Artificial intelligence could weaken that connection. If machines allow goods and services to be produced with an ever-smaller workforce, those who own the technology may increase their returns without necessarily sharing the benefits with the rest of society. The question will not simply be how many jobs are eliminated or transformed, but also who owns the means of production and how the resulting wealth is distributed.
The Locust Economy
Perhaps, however, we are still reasoning as though capitalism must necessarily have an interest in ensuring the prosperity of consumers. What if a growing part of the economy could afford to disregard that concern, at least in the short term?
Consumers might continue to spend through accumulated wealth, investment income, and inheritances. But this possibility does not solve the problem. It shifts the issue to the distribution of ownership. A society in which a small minority owns the means of production while many depend on inherited wealth risks turning access to prosperity into a family privilege, diminishing the role of work as a source of economic independence and social mobility.
The mobility of capital already allows many investors to move their resources among companies, industries, and countries in search of better returns. Large corporations can relocate operations, reorganize supply chains, or abandon markets that are no longer profitable. Not all investors pursue short-term strategies, and not all businesses behave in the same way. The problem is structural: when the social and environmental costs of economic decisions are not adequately reflected in financial calculations, private gains can be achieved while substantial consequences are left to others.
This is the logic of locusts. A swarm arrives in a field, consumes what it finds, and moves on when the food runs out. It has no need to restore the soil because its survival depends on finding another place to exploit. Applied to the economy, this image describes a system in which capital can profit from a resource, a territory, or a community without assuming a proportionate responsibility for its future.
Loretta Napoleoni's Rogue Economics provides a useful point of reference for examining the contradictions of the global economy, its opaque corners, and the activities that flourish when oversight and the regulatory capacity of institutions prove inadequate. The locust metaphor extends this criticism to the risk that the pursuit of returns becomes a process of extraction, in which what matters is the value obtained today rather than what remains tomorrow.
Fossil Water and a Mortgaged Future
In some arid regions of the world, communities rely on fossil groundwater accumulated underground during geological periods that were far wetter than the present. These reserves can sustain agriculture, supply settlements, and encourage economic development. However, they often recharge so slowly that they are effectively nonrenewable on a human timescale. When extraction consistently exceeds replenishment, present prosperity is financed by consuming a resource that future generations will not have access to under the same conditions.
The metaphor applies equally well to the economy. Natural capital, professional skills, public trust, productive capacity, and household purchasing power can all be treated as reserves to be depleted. A company can improve its margins by cutting training. A region can lose expertise when production moves elsewhere. A community can see its tax base shrink just as its social needs increase.
Consumer demand, too, can be treated as a resource that cannot be taken for granted. If income becomes increasingly concentrated among those who own capital, the purchasing power of a substantial part of the population may weaken. The system can continue operating through the spending of the wealthy, investment income, credit, or public expenditure, but these mechanisms do not automatically guarantee widespread prosperity. Credit, for example, can temporarily support demand, but it cannot indefinitely replace inadequate income.
The danger is creating wealth that consumes the very conditions on which its existence depends. No one needs to deliberately decide to destroy those conditions. It is enough for each participant to pursue an immediate advantage without bearing an adequate share of the collective costs.
Degrowth and the Difficulty of Slowing Down Without Consequences
In response to these contradictions, the idea of happy degrowth proposes reducing waste, limiting unnecessary consumption, easing pressure on natural resources, and making more room for human relationships. It is a perspective worth discussing, particularly when economic success is measured almost exclusively through growth in gross domestic product. Yet there is a considerable gap between the ideal of a more restrained society and the practical possibility of achieving it without serious repercussions.
Modern economies are interconnected systems. Employment, pensions, public debt, mortgages, investment, and essential services depend on income flows and financial arrangements that do not automatically adjust when production declines. If demand falls, businesses may cut investment and jobs. If employment and incomes decline, tax revenues may contract precisely when the need for social protection increases. An unmanaged contraction can therefore trigger a recessionary spiral in which lower consumption generates further income losses.
This does not mean that every form of degrowth is impossible. Reducing waste, repairing rather than replacing, using fewer natural resources, and prioritizing socially useful activities are all goals compatible with an economy that continues to innovate. But an economic contraction does not become happy simply because someone advocates it. We must distinguish between selectively reducing harmful activities and a recession that destroys productive capacity, jobs, and economic security.
International competition presents another obstacle. A country that unilaterally slows investment and production while others continue accumulating capital, innovating, and capturing markets could lose expertise, employment, and strategic autonomy. A transition would therefore require agreements, industrial policies, appropriate tax systems, and a reorganization of income distribution. It would not be enough to encourage citizens to want less while the cost of essential goods and services continues to rise.
The deeper difficulty is that capitalism is not designed to stop simply because society has reached a level of prosperity deemed sufficient. Competition pushes businesses to improve productivity and returns. Investment requires the prospect of future gains. Governments must sustain public spending systems built around particular economic foundations. A society can decide to change these priorities, but it cannot ignore the mechanisms that hold the system together.
Happy degrowth, then, is not necessarily an impossible theory. It is a difficult transformation to achieve without simultaneously addressing ownership, welfare financing, debt, employment, and competition among economies. Otherwise, the risk is that voluntary restraint becomes a lifestyle choice for those who can afford it and enforced poverty for those who have no alternatives.
When Wealth Disappears, Conflict Remains
Imagine a region whose prosperity has been built around a major industrial plant, an extractive industry, or a sector capable of attracting investment and employment. Supporting businesses, shops, housing, services, and family expectations develop around that economic activity. Then capital moves elsewhere, production becomes automated, or the resource that sustained the local economy runs out.
The investor can record a loss, sell the investment, and look for opportunities elsewhere. The community cannot liquidate its existence so easily. Homes, debts, infrastructure, families, and workers with skills tied to a declining industry remain. So do local governments, which must continue providing services even as the tax base that finances them shrinks.
This is where economic decline can turn into social conflict. When opportunities disappear, people lose more than disposable income: they lose the ability to imagine a future. Young people leave in search of opportunities their hometowns can no longer provide. Businesses close, services deteriorate, and families compete more fiercely for jobs and public resources. The loss of population and expertise can deepen the crisis further.
Poverty does not automatically produce conflict, much less violence. Yet it can manifest itself through strikes, protests, political polarization, hostility toward institutions, and tensions over the allocation of resources. When economic losses combine with inequalities perceived as unjust, a lack of prospects, and institutions unable to respond, resentment can become fertile ground for more serious confrontations.
The paradox is that the economic system may consider an enterprise finished while the society that supported its development is only beginning to face the consequences. Capital moves; people remain. The return on an investment can be measured in numbers, while the cost of social disintegration is spread across thousands of lives and may become visible only years later.
There is no need to imagine a conspiracy of businesses deliberately plotting to impoverish entire regions. It is enough for each participant to pursue its own interests without being required to bear an adequate share of the collective costs. The outcome can become irrational for society even when each individual decision appears rational from the decision-maker's perspective.
Universal Basic Income Is Not Enough
At this point, universal basic income is often proposed as a solution to technological unemployment. If machines produce wealth in place of human beings, the argument goes, a portion of that wealth can be redistributed so that everyone can continue to live and consume. Such a policy could provide protection and support demand, but it would not automatically solve the underlying problem.
Where would the necessary funding come from? How would the gains from automation be distributed? Who would control the technological infrastructure and the capital generating the profits? And how much autonomy would people retain if their survival depended on financial transfers without any meaningful opportunity to participate in economic decisions?
Universal basic income could form part of a new social contract, but it should not become the price paid to make the permanent exclusion of millions of people from productive life acceptable. Work is not merely a source of income. It can provide skills, relationships, recognition, and opportunities to contribute to society. Losing a job does not necessarily mean losing all these things, but a society that fails to create alternatives risks depriving some of its members of both economic independence and a recognized social role.
The issue is not whether every existing job should be preserved, even when it is unnecessary or harmful, nor whether technological progress should be prevented from improving productivity. It is whether technological progress will translate into greater freedom for people or increasing dependence on those who own the machines.
Who Will Remain When the Locusts Have Left?
The problem with contemporary capitalism is not necessarily that it will exhaust every resource or that all businesses will behave like destructive swarms. It is that a system focused on maximizing returns can continue to work for those able to move their capital even as the regions from which that capital extracted wealth become less productive, less livable, and less capable of offering their residents a future.
Artificial intelligence could intensify this contradiction by allowing increasingly small organizations to control economically significant activities with very few employees. But the outcome will also depend on ownership rules, competition, taxation, labor policies, and the ability of institutions to distribute the benefits of automation. Technology creates possibilities; it does not, by itself, determine who will benefit.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to choose between infinite growth and degrowth, automation and employment, or profits and redistribution. It is to build an economy in which the wealth produced is not systematically separated from responsibility toward the people and places that make its creation possible.
Locusts do not need to destroy the planet to prosper. They only need to keep finding another field to consume. But resources, communities, and opportunities to shift costs elsewhere are not infinite. When an impoverished region can no longer offer its residents a future, the problem does not disappear with the investors. It remains, becoming an economic, social, and political challenge.
Perhaps the decisive question is not whether capitalism will survive artificial intelligence. It is whether it can preserve the social conditions that make its own prosperity possible.
Because when there is nothing left to consume, who will still have an interest in rebuilding what has been destroyed?
