But the same study refutes the forty-year-old objection that worker involvement destroys capital: codetermined firms hold significantly more fixed assets per worker and produce 2 to 8% more value added per worker, with no revenue, employment or profitability penalty.

Read across to process ownership, the lesson is precise and unwelcome to both camps. Formal ownership of a process reliably improves how the work is done and does not, by itself, change what the owner is paid. Firms that offer “ownership” as a substitute for compensation are making an offer the evidence says is empty on the pay dimension and real on the performance dimension — which is exactly why they will make it, and exactly why specialists should price it accordingly.

4. Measurement becomes the constitution — and what cannot be measured gets dropped

If standing derives from attributable contribution, then the measurement regime is the political system. This is axiocracy’s defining risk and the library is unusually direct about it.

Measurement changes behaviour long before it measures well. The founding beyond-GDP text states the mechanism — “what we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted” — and then insists on a discipline almost everyone subsequently abandoned: a dashboard of indicators interpretable as variations in underlying stocks, with environmental aspects on a separate physical footing, and explicitly no composite index, because combining current performance with sustainability into one number is like a car meter “that added up in one single number the current speed of the vehicle and the remaining level of gasoline.” Fifteen years later the dashboards had been replaced by exactly the composite indices the Commission warned against. A performance-valued-unit economy will make the same mistake faster, because a single score is what a procurement process wants.

And measurement alone changes nothing without teeth. The evaluation evidence is consistent: dashboards have no demonstrated effect on decisions. Where decisions did change — Wales cancelling a major road scheme, New Zealand legislating child-poverty targets — the effective element was a statutory duty plus a named officeholder plus a budget gate, and the defeating mechanism, named by Wales’s own Commissioner, was short-term output-based performance measures imposed on public bodies. That is the exact failure mode an axiocracy invites: units optimising the measured output while the thing the measure stood for degrades.

Two specific predictions follow.

The unmeasurable will be systematically underpaid, and it is not the low-value work. Part One’s tier three — strategy, culture, governance, relationships, crisis judgement — fails attribution completely. In a system allocating reward by attributable contribution, this work either gets dropped or gets protected by people powerful enough to exempt themselves from measurement. Both outcomes are bad, and the second is more likely, which produces the structural irony: the people with the most power in an axiocracy will be those whose contribution the system cannot measure.

Attribution will be confused with measurement constantly. Plenty of functions emit abundant numbers that cannot be causally assigned to the unit producing them. Marketing attribution is the canonical case and the corporate-power literature supplies the general warning: the headline markup series everyone cited turned out to imply roughly 70% of GDP as pure economic profit and a capital output elasticity of −0.25, with an independent reconstruction finding no rise at all. Confident numbers, wrong object. An axiocracy running on that quality of attribution will reward noise.

5. Incumbents will grant P&L, not ownership — the historical record here is unambiguous

This is the principle most likely to be wrong in the optimistic direction, so the evidence deserves to be stated at full strength.

Kremer’s observation explains why employee ownership scales at all: “ESOPs transfer ownership of the firms to workers without transferring control.” That is usually read as a criticism. It is better read as the reason the form survives — firms concede the cash-flow claim and keep the decision rights, and that trade is one they will make.

And successful worker-owned organisations do not scale by admitting members. Mondragón’s cooperative share of employment fell from 86% in 1991 to 29.5% in 2007 — not because cooperatives failed but because the group grew by acquiring subsidiaries staffed with non-members. The detail is damning: at one plant workers bought in at €13,000 each under what a union delegate described as blackmail, almost 80% joined for job security, and only 7% could state the group’s cooperative principles a year later. Basque members openly refused to cooperativise the Chinese and Slovak plants on the grounds that their own jobs would be at risk. Globally, worker-members number about 11.1 million — roughly 0.38% of world employment.

The mechanism generalises beyond cooperatives. Incumbent members have a rational interest in not admitting new ones. Apply that to a firm deciding whether its internal performance-valued units become genuine owners: the people who would have to approve the dilution are the people who would be diluted.

The corroborating evidence on voluntary corporate commitments is a census rather than a sample, and it is brutal. Of all 128 Business Roundtable signatories to the 2019 stakeholder statement, no bylaw changed, none conceded that signing required any change, and of the seventy with published director-incentive principles, every single one aligned directors with shareholders and none with stakeholders. Voluntary stakeholderism is not a weak form of structural change. It is a substitute for it.

6. The capital-rental design is the escape from the trap that has kept small autonomous units marginal

Worker-owned units have a measured, systematic defect, and knowing what it is tells you how to design around it.

Start with the surprise: on performance, small worker-owned units beat their reputation decisively. Italian cooperatives are larger than conventional firms — median employment of 153 against 72 — French birth and death rates over two decades were 0.16 and 0.11 against 0.12 and 0.11 for all firms with employees, and on separately estimated production functions conventional firms would produce more using the cooperative technology. The predicted underinvestment does not appear. Four independent studies across the US, Italy and Uruguay agree they adjust pay rather than employment, which makes them counter-cyclical stabilisers.

So why are they 0.38% of world employment? Brzustowski and Caselli’s calibration puts a fully cooperative economy at 73% of capitalist output — a 28% welfare loss — and attributes the entire gap to static inefficiency from the units being too small, since their saving rate is actually slightly higher. Not productivity. Not capital access in the naive sense. Size. The same mechanism is independently identified as the cause of Yugoslavia’s growth collapse, where labour-managed firms restricted entry, job-finding and separation rates collapsed after 1965 and 10% of the labour force emigrated. Three separate literatures converge on under-sizing as the defect.

And then the finding that matters most for this entire report. The authors name the fix and leave it to future work: the static inefficiency exists because the units take their capital stock as given, and if you instead let individuals own capital and the units rent it, “the cooperative economy becomes isomorphic to the capitalist one.”

That is precisely the architecture a performance-valued unit inside or alongside a large firm actually has. The unit owns its method, its agent stack, its relationships and its accountability. It rents the firm’s capital, platform, data, compliance perimeter and distribution. Ownership of the process is separated from ownership of the capital the process runs on — which is the design that the one serious general-equilibrium model of this question says removes the defect.

This is the strongest structural argument in the report, and its limits should be stated plainly. It is a result from a calibrated model, not an observed outcome, and the authors are explicit that their 27% gap is an upper bound because “market power and concentration, environmental and other types of externalities, asymmetries in bargaining power vis-à-vis workers and labour-market monopsony… are omitted from the model, and so the deck is stacked against the cooperative economy.” The model also says nothing about agents. What it establishes is narrower and still important: the historical reason small autonomous units stayed marginal was a capital-ownership design problem, and the unit-rents-capital structure is the named solution.

The financing template exists too, and it is the most actionable mechanism in the whole library. Italy’s Legge Marcora lets workers facing a failing employer capitalise up to three years of advance unemployment benefits, matched one-to-one from a fund built on 3% of all Italian cooperatives’ annual surplus. The record: 257 buyouts, roughly 9,300 jobs, the state vehicle involved in 77.4% of them, survival at 13.12 years against a national firm average of 13.5 from a distressed starting point, and 78 new buyouts against 25 closures since 2009. A state wanting specialists to be able to buy their own process out of a restructuring firm does not need to invent an instrument. It needs to copy this one.

7. Returns will follow a power law, and most units will fail

The nearest existing analogue to large-scale autonomous production is peer production, and its distribution is brutal.

Open source carries an $8.8 trillion demand-side replacement value — firms would spend 3.5× more on software without it — and 5% of developers, roughly 3,000 people, produce over 96% of that usage value. The structural facts are worse than the headline: the median free-software project has one contributor even among the successful ones, over 90% of remix uploads are never remixed, and seven collaborative encyclopedias failed before Wikipedia. The literature on this, its own leading scholars note, has selected on its dependent variable — we study the survivors.

Most of those 3,000 high-value developers are also paid by firms. The commons held up as the alternative to the market is substantially subsidised by it.

Three implications for a one-person-company surge.

The median outcome will be poor and the mean will look excellent. Aggregate statistics about the micro-enterprise sector will be dominated by a handful of units and will describe almost nobody’s experience. Anyone planning policy, products or a personal career from sector averages here will plan for a situation that does not exist.

Firm sponsorship will be the dominant funding mechanism, not independence. If the open-source pattern holds, the units that thrive will mostly be underwritten by a large client — which means the “separation from large companies” is likely to be a change in contractual form rather than in economic dependence. That is not nothing: contractual form determines who holds the method and who can walk. But it is a weaker claim than independence.

Survivorship bias will be the dominant epistemic problem of the next decade. The visible examples will be the 5%.

8. A credible floor is the precondition for the risk-taking, not a substitute for it

The most interesting mechanism in the transfer literature is not the size of the payment but its credibility over time, and it speaks directly to whether people will actually start things.

In the Kenyan long-term trial, recipients invested in new enterprises because the income was guaranteed for twelve years — the duration, not the amount, is what changed behaviour. And then the entire gain was lost to a single shock, which is the other half of the lesson. The three-year US trial at $1,000 a month found entrepreneurial intention up and entrepreneurial activity flat, with participation down 4.1 points, household earnings down 28 cents per dollar transferred, and the freed time going to leisure rather than to learning, childcare or exercise.

Put those together and the design requirement is specific. A short, generous transfer produces leisure. A long, credible, modest floor produces enterprise formation — and needs to be paired with insurance, because one shock erases the gain. An economy that wants people to own processes rather than hold roles has to make the downside of trying survivable for longer than a political cycle.

The universality finding complicates it usefully. Forty years of the Alaska Permanent Fund, at roughly $2,000 per person per year, show no employment effect at all and a 1.8-point rise in part-time work, with effects in tradables and none in non-tradables — consistent with universal payments generating the demand that buys back the labour they withdraw. The labour-supply penalty measured so precisely in the individually randomised trial may be an artefact of giving money to a few people inside a large economy rather than a property of unconditional income. That remains the most consequential open question in the field, and it is answerable.

9. Buyer power replaces employer power, and the protections do not follow

Here is the failure mode that would make axiocracy a downgrade, and the evidence that it is already the default.

Concentration in labour markets is already severe. The average US labour-market Herfindahl index is 3,157 — well into the range that would block a merger in a product market — and the instrumented wage-concentration elasticity is −0.127, implying a 17% wage penalty moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of concentration. This is the part of the corporate-power case that survives scrutiny, unlike the markup series, which is contested to destruction.

Convert workers into suppliers and that concentration becomes procurement power over micro-firms — and the supplier has none of what the employee had: no unfair-dismissal claim, no bargaining coverage, no notice period, no employer social contribution.

The gig-economy evidence shows exactly what this looks like operationally, in a market projected to employ over 23.5 million workers by 2029–30. Workers experience order distribution, pay and incentives through the app while believing humans decide — naming “supervisor,” “team leader,” “a team in Bangalore” — which produces a situation where the least advantaged party lacks the information and agency to contest decisions determining their livelihood. Selfie verification misfires, including one worker penalised for not wearing a company shirt while wearing it. Drivers are deactivated after customer complaints about accidents they did not cause. Chat support is the most-used feature and fails precisely on penalties, deactivations and payouts; workers want time-bound escalation to a human and regard chatbot-only paths as alienating. Note that this is the dark mirror of the whole thesis: not people controlling agents, but people managed by agents with no appeal.

And the protective institutions genuinely do not reach them. Denmark — 67% union density, 82% bargaining coverage, on-site representatives in one firm in two — leaves the solo self-employed and zero-hours workers outside the model entirely, with one in three Danish workers now in non-standard employment and 12% of wage earners buying private unemployment top-up insurance. If the best-protected labour market in the world does not cover micro-suppliers, no labour market currently does.

One genuinely hopeful finding sits in the same evidence, and it is worth holding onto. During a Delhi quick-commerce dispute, workers switched off their IDs over payout cuts while new hires earned more for identical work; some whose own pay was unchanged joined in solidarity; the company raised payouts and the strike ended. Collective action works even among atomised, nominally independent suppliers. The organisational form has to be invented, but the leverage exists.

10. Reputation becomes infrastructure — and nobody has built it

If the unit of value is an owned process with a named owner, then a portable, verifiable record of what that owner has actually delivered becomes the scarce asset — the thing that replaces the employer’s name on a CV as the signal of competence.

The structural argument for why this matters is the strongest joint result in the framework literature, reached independently by three traditions: market outcomes are constituted by law and are therefore available for redesign. Employment credentials, professional licensure, limited liability, the enforceability of a reference — all of it is constructed, and all of it currently assumes an employment relationship. A supplier economy needs an equivalent and does not have one. Today a specialist’s track record lives in private references, platform-specific ratings that do not travel, and self-assertion.

Two cautions from the library, because this is the principle with the least direct evidence behind it.

Reputation systems distribute however their designer says they distribute. The data-dividend modelling is the warning: the same simulation produces near-equal payouts or a Gini of around 80 — twice the US income Gini — with a 2.5-to-1 median gender gap, depending entirely on a weighting transform nobody has voted on. A reputation layer is a distributive institution pretending to be a measurement one, and it will encode whatever its scoring function encodes.

And it runs into the complementarity constraint. Institutional practices cluster non-randomly, and importing one component into a system lacking its complements buys the cost without the return — the patent-specialisation evidence shows Germany’s innovation profile as “almost the mirror image” of America’s precisely because the institutions come in matched sets. A verifiable reputation layer without portable benefits, without collective bargaining for suppliers, and without an insurance floor is not a partial version of a functioning supplier economy. It is a more efficient market in people who have no protection.

The prediction, therefore: in-company performance-valued units will be given dashboards, P&L visibility, variable compensation and the language of ownership, and will not be given equity, control or the right to take the process elsewhere. Specialists negotiating inside firms should assume this is the default and price the exception. Which raises the question of what design does work — and there is an answer.

Part Three — The ten parameters that make it robust

The ten principles describe what the shift is. This section describes what has to be set correctly for it to hold together, which is a different question and the one a designer actually faces.

Think of these as the control surface. Each is a parameter with a range, not a binary; each can be moved by someone identifiable; and each has a direction in which the system degrades. Thirty-two candidates were generated and scored on leverage, evidence in the library, actionability and failure asymmetry; the ten below are what survived, with the remainder folded into them. The scoring is kept with the working files rather than hidden.

The single most useful thing to notice before the list: only two of the ten are about capability. The rest are about information, ownership and power. That ratio is the finding.

1. Attribution quality — the parameter that acts as the constitution

How cleanly can a unit’s contribution be separated from everything else that moved? This scored highest of all thirty-two because it has the worst failure asymmetry: set well, it makes a market in owned processes possible; set badly, it does not produce a noisy meritocracy, it produces a system that reliably reallocates reward toward whatever happens to be legible.

Two disciplines from the measurement literature apply directly, and both were abandoned by the field that invented them. First, a dashboard rather than a composite score — the beyond-GDP commission’s own analogy is that combining distinct quantities into one number is like a car meter adding current speed to remaining fuel, and within fifteen years the dashboards had been replaced by exactly the composite indices it warned against. A procurement process wants a single number; resisting that is the discipline. Second, the scoring function itself must be contestable. The data-dividend modelling is the warning: identical data produces near-equal payouts or a Gini of around 80 with a 2.5-to-1 median gender gap, depending entirely on a weighting transform nobody voted on.

Degrades toward: units optimising the proxy while the thing it stood for decays, and powerful people exempting themselves from measurement altogether.

2. The capital-rental ratio — does the unit own its method and rent the capital?

This is the structural parameter, and it has the only general-equilibrium result in the library behind it. Small owned units historically stayed marginal not through low productivity but through under-sizing — a fully cooperative economy at 73% of capitalist output, with the entire gap attributable to units being too small. The named fix is precise: if individuals own capital and the units rent it, “the cooperative economy becomes isomorphic to the capitalist one.”

So the setting is: the unit owns method, agent stack, relationships and accountability; it rents capital, platform, data, compliance perimeter and distribution. Compliance-perimeter rental deserves naming separately, because it is what lets a one-person unit operate in a regulated activity at all.

Degrades toward: units that own neither — nominal autonomy with the firm’s tooling, the firm’s data and the firm’s clients, which is a cost centre with a dashboard.

3. Exit capability — what converts a dashboard into ownership

Can the unit serve another client without rebuilding itself? This decides the distribution of gains, and it does so through leverage rather than merit. The prediction from Part One holds here as a parameter: low asset specificity buys ownership; high asset specificity buys a bonus.

Three sub-settings carry it. Interface standardisation — can the unit plug into a second client cheaply? Output portability — can it take its own work product and its own performance record with it? Switching-cost symmetry — is the firm’s cost of replacing the unit comparable to the unit’s cost of losing the firm? Where that symmetry is absent, every other parameter is negotiated under duress.

Degrades toward: the Mondragón outcome, where the organisation grows by adding people who are not members — cooperative employment falling from 86% in 1991 to 29.5% in 2007 — because the people who would approve the dilution are the ones diluted.

4. Buyer concentration — whether this is liberation or subcontracting

How many realistic clients does a unit have? The baseline is already poor: labour markets run an average concentration index of 3,157, with a wage-concentration elasticity of −0.127 implying a 17% penalty across the distribution. Convert workers into suppliers and that becomes procurement power over micro-firms stripped of every employment protection.

Three settings sit under this one. Supplier-side bargaining rights, because the leverage demonstrably exists — a Delhi quick-commerce dispute in which workers switched off their IDs ended with the company raising payouts. Portable benefits across clients, since the best-protected labour market in the OECD, at 82% bargaining coverage against the UK’s 27%, leaves the solo self-employed outside the model entirely. And appeal latency — a time-bound right of escalation to a human on any decision that terminates income, which is precisely where the gig evidence shows chat support failing: on penalties, deactivations and payouts, with drivers deactivated over accidents they did not cause.

Degrades toward: algorithmic management without the employment relationship.

5. Specialisation depth — the parameter with the most upside

How narrow can a viable unit be? This is where the genuinely new thing is happening, and it deserves stating as a mechanism rather than an aspiration.

The historical ceiling on the division of labour was never cognitive. It was that a narrow specialist could not operate alone — someone had to supply the adjacent competencies, the administration, the client acquisition, the quality control. The firm existed partly to supply them, and in exchange it set the minimum scope at which a person could function. Agents supply the adjacent competencies directly. The minimum viable scope of a specialist therefore collapses, and specialisation can go deeper than any firm structure previously permitted.

This also reallocates scarce judgement. If detail-oriented execution is absorbed, the people best at framing problems stop spending their hours on tasks that do not require framing — which is a reallocation of the input Part Two identified as the non-automatable residual. The Hayekian point is the reason it works rather than merely feeling better: value comes from holding local, tacit, fast-changing coefficients, and a deeper specialist holds denser coefficients over a narrower surface.

Degrades toward: false specialisation — units narrow enough to be fragile and not deep enough to be irreplaceable, with no second client and no accumulated advantage.

6. Floor duration — credibility over time, not generosity

How long is the downside guaranteed? The mechanism evidence is unambiguous and counterintuitive: in the Kenyan long-term trial, recipients invested in new enterprises because income was guaranteed for twelve years. It was the duration that changed behaviour. The three-year trial at $1,000 a month produced entrepreneurial intention up and entrepreneurial activity flat, with freed hours going to leisure.

And the paired setting, shock insurance, is not optional: the Kenyan gain was entirely lost to a single shock. A floor that survives a political cycle but not a bad quarter produces no enterprise formation.

The universality finding is the encouraging footnote: forty years of a universal dividend at roughly $2,000 per person per year show no employment effect and a 1.8-point rise in part-time work, suggesting the labour-supply penalty measured in individually randomised trials may be an artefact of giving money to a few people inside a large economy.

Degrades toward: short, generous, discretionary support — which buys leisure and gratitude rather than risk-taking.

7. Monitoring accountability — are the monitors accountable to the monitored?

This is Ostrom’s design principle with the strongest empirical support, and the parameter most likely to be set wrong by people with good intentions. In her synthesis, monitor accountability was the strongest of eleven principles (supportive-to-unsupportive ratio 11.7). The experimental result is the one to remember: subjects who chose their own sanctioning system after communication achieved 90% of optimal net returns — the best outcome in any common-pool-resource experiment — while an externally imposed harvest limit with a one-in-sixteen inspection probability increased defection relative to communication alone.

Imposed measurement with weak enforcement produces worse cooperation than no measurement at all. An axiocracy that installs scoring from above, without the scored having standing to shape and contest it, is running the experiment that failed.

Degrades toward: surveillance that reduces the cooperation it was installed to verify.

8. Reputation portability — the missing infrastructure

Does a track record travel? If the unit of value is an owned process with a named owner, the portable verifiable record of delivery replaces the employer’s name as the signal of competence — and it does not currently exist in any form that survives leaving a platform.

The structural reason this is buildable rather than wishful is the strongest joint result in the framework literature, reached independently by three traditions: market outcomes are constituted by law and are therefore available for redesign. Credentials, licensure, limited liability and the enforceability of a reference are all constructed, and all currently presuppose employment.

Degrades toward: reputation held inside platforms as a lock-in asset, which converts parameter 3 to zero.

9. Judgement share — how much of the value comes from local knowledge

What fraction of a unit’s output depends on tacit, local, fast-changing knowledge rather than instrumented throughput? This parameter is largely discovered rather than set, which is why it scored lower on actionability and still belongs here: it determines which functions hold as owned units and which collapse back into software.

Where the judgement share is high, the operator’s advantage is durable, because Hayek’s objection concerned the acquisition of local knowledge rather than the processing of it, and no amount of model improvement closes an acquisition gap. Where it is low — high-volume, low-variance, fully instrumented work — the system should win and the unit is a person with extra steps.

Degrades toward: units defending work the judgement share no longer supports, which is a losing position held expensively.

10. Tail-risk concentration — what happens to the ninety-five per cent

How is value distributed across units? In the nearest existing analogue of autonomous production, 5% of developers — roughly 3,000 people — produce over 96% of the usage value, the median successful project has one contributor, and over 90% of remix uploads are never remixed. Most of those high-value contributors are paid by firms.

This scored maximum on both evidence and failure asymmetry and minimum on actionability, which is exactly why it must be designed for rather than hoped about. Sector averages in a power-law economy describe nobody’s experience. Any policy, product or career plan built on the mean here is built on a number no participant will ever encounter.

Degrades toward: a visible 5% generating the narrative while the 95% carry uninsured downside — and the aggregate statistics reporting that the sector is thriving.

What the parameter set implies

Read the ten together and the conclusion is uncomfortable for the optimistic version of this forecast. Only specialisation depth and judgement share are about what people and agents can do. The other eight are about who can measure, who can leave, who can be replaced, and who carries the downside — and on the current default settings, most of them are set against the unit rather than for it.

That is not an argument against the shift. It is an argument that the shift is a design space rather than a destination, and that the parameters most determining of its outcome are the ones nobody currently owns.

Part Four — What breaks it

Three failure modes would turn axiocracy from a redistribution of agency into a redistribution of risk. All three are defaults rather than tail risks, which is to say they happen unless someone acts.

One: measurement captured by the measurable. The regime rewards what it can attribute, the unattributable work degrades, and the people who do unattributable work and have power exempt themselves. The outcome is a system that calls itself a meritocracy while allocating by legibility. The guard is the discipline the beyond-GDP commission specified and the field abandoned: a dashboard rather than a composite score, indicators tied to underlying stocks, and separate treatment for what cannot be commensurated — plus Ostrom’s requirement that monitors be accountable to the monitored, since the experimental finding is that imposed rules with weak inspection produced more defection than communication alone.

Two: ownership language without ownership substance. Firms adopt the vocabulary — units, P&L, process owners — and concede no equity, no control and no right of exit. The evidence that this is the default is overwhelming: 128 of the world’s largest companies signed a stakeholder commitment and not one bylaw changed; Mondragón’s cooperative share fell from 86% to 29.5% because members do not admit members; and codetermination moved governance without moving pay by a measurable amount. The guard is structural rather than rhetorical, and the design is known: the unit owns its method and rents the capital, with a financing route — on the Marcora model — that lets it actually leave.

Three: micro-suppliers under concentrated buyers with no protective institutions. Labour-market concentration is already at 3,157 with a 17% wage penalty across the distribution; the gig evidence shows what attribution-by-algorithm does to people with no appeal; and the best-protected labour market in the OECD covers none of the self-employed. The guard does not currently exist and has to be built: bargaining rights that attach to suppliers rather than employees, portable benefits, a credible and durable floor paired with insurance, and a time-bound right of escalation to a human in any decision that terminates someone’s income.

The argument restated

The forecast this report set out to test was that a new variant of capitalism is emerging in which specialised units — people operating agents, owning a process, valued by attributable performance — displace the filled role as the unit of economic value, inside large firms and alongside them.

The direction survives the evidence. The timeline and the mechanism do not. It arrives through a hiring freeze rather than a firing wave, which means the people it creates are entrants rather than exiles. Its strongest theoretical support is not that agents are getting better but that Hayek’s dispersed-knowledge objection was never answered, so the operator who holds the local coefficients has an advantage that does not close as models improve. Its strongest structural support is a general-equilibrium result most people have never heard of: small autonomous units stayed marginal because they took their capital as given, and a unit that owns its method while renting the capital is the named escape from that trap.

And its strongest counter-evidence is about power rather than capability. The firms being asked to grant ownership have a clean historical record of granting its vocabulary instead. The protections that make a fluid labour market survivable cover employees and reach no further, even in Denmark. The returns to autonomous production follow a power law in which 5% of participants capture 96% of the value. And a system that allocates by measured worth will, on current measurement quality, allocate substantially by noise — while handing the most power to the people whose contribution it cannot measure at all.

The useful conclusion is not that this is good or bad. It is that three of the four things that determine which version happens are design choices available now: whether the unit rents capital or merely reports numbers; whether a durable floor paired with insurance exists to make trying survivable; and whether bargaining, benefits and appeal rights are rebuilt around the supplier rather than the employee. The fourth — measurement quality — is the one nobody is working on, and it is the one that decides whether the word axiocracy describes rule by worth or rule by what happened to be countable.