What economies actually produce in human terms.

The Problem

Economic systems measure productivity. AI systems learn from people who were already in the room.

Productivity tells us how much an agent moves through. It tells us nothing about who absorbs deprivation, who emits fulfillment, or how relational value flows through families and communities. The work of cycle-breakers stays invisible to the books: parents who experienced abuse and raised their children with care, organizers who turn scarcity into belonging.

AI alignment systems inherit a parallel exclusion. RLHF preference data comes from convenience samples of annotators. Constitutional AI is sourced from participants screened for technological literacy. The 771,480 people experiencing homelessness in the United States on a single night in January 2024 were absent from every process that decides what AI should value.