Falk & Tsoukalas (2026) show that even with perfect foresight, rational firms automate themselves into a demand crisis. Each firm gains; all firms lose. That’s not a bug. That’s competitive capitalism’s logic.
Their model: workers spend wages → automation destroys wages → demand collapses → even owners are worse off. The Nash equilibrium is Pareto-dominated by cooperation.
Sound familiar?
Marx described this 150+ years ago: capitalism’s contradictions destroy its own conditions (falling rate of profit, surplus extraction, crisis).
The paper’s model is Marx with equations.
But here’s the problem: the paper’s solution is a Pigouvian tax.
Piketty did the same in Capital (2014): identify r > g → propose a wealth tax.
Both identify systemic failure. Both prescribe a band-aid.
The Left is Trapped
Why?
Because mainstream left economics (Piketty, Falk, Stiglitz) accepts the capitalist frame.
They ask: how to manage capitalism?
Not: why wage labor at all?
Mudenda & Dasgupta (2025) make this explicit: Piketty ≠ Marx.
The Sabotage We Ignore
Veblen (1904) called it "business sabotage": firms restrict production to protect profits.
AI can produce abundance. But abundance destroys profit. So we get artificial scarcity. Again.
Polanyi (1944): labor is a "fictitious commodity." Treat it as one, and society tears itself apart.
Mazur & Włoch (2024) apply this to AI: the EU’s AI Act tries to re-embed markets, but leaves labor's status untouched.
We need decommodification, not better pricing.
The oil market proves the point.
Many countries could negotiate bilateral oil deals below the "market price." They don't.
Why? Because the market price is treated as sacred — even when it's driven by financial speculation, not physical scarcity.
That means only darkness
Same with AI.
The "correct" Pigouvian tax assumes we can find the right price. But the price itself is a speculative fiction, just like oil futures.
You cannot fix a system with more of what broke it.
The real solution.
Free basic rights: housing, healthcare, food, education, mobility.
Decouple survival from wage labor.
AI produces social capital, not private profit.
The goal isn't to "price automation correctly." It's to organize production for need.
Choose your future.
Falk & Tsoukalas wrote a brilliant paper.
They proved capitalism can't handle AI without collapsing demand.
Then they proposed a tax.
That's not a failure of economics. That's a failure of imagination.
AI is not a tax problem. It's a freedom problem.
Even the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2015) noted: Piketty never touches the labor-capital relation. He wants to fix capitalism, not end it.
To be clear: Falk & Tsoukalas are serious economists. Their paper is rigorous. The problem isn't them — it's that their own logic points beyond their conclusion. They stop at a tax. The logic stops at freedom.
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