This paper argues that the modern nation-state constructed an infrastructure for rendering humanbeings legible, interchangeable, and expendable, and that this infrastructure, originally designedfor military conscription, now operates through corporate recruitment. The 1793 French levée enmasse targeted unmarried men aged 18–25 because their loss would least damage socialreproduction: a logic termed here consumable value. The design intent was administrativeefficiency; disposability was a structural consequence of atomization. Over two centuries, theinfrastructure's calibration mechanisms were progressively stripped away through reforms eachdefensible in isolation. GDP pursuit drives the continuation of this destruction: the alignment ofstate and corporate interests around a shared metric creates a permanent incentive to convert non-market reproductive institutions into market transactions, with no countervailing force becauseGDP pursuit constitutes modern economic culture itself. Contemporary recruitment practices arethe infrastructure's current emission point. Over half of job seekers are ghosted; a three-layer gapin human capital monitoring leaves recruitment candidates entirely unaccounted for; and thedemographic consequences—career scarring, nonstandard employment, depressed marriage,reduced fertility—are documented across multiple countries through rigorous causalidentification. Cash redistribution cannot address this failure because money, as a fugitive asset,is structurally defeated by international capital mobility. The alternative is non-fugitive. Drawingon evidence from three independent civilizations—the Aztec calpolli, the Andean ayllu, and theJapanese village community—the paper demonstrates that two-layer economies, with non-fugitive local production and consumption beneath a market superstructure, persisted forcenturies to millennia while generating employment structurally immune to artificial intelligence displacement.
Franny Philos Sophia (Thu,) studied this question.