Owen McGrann is the author of *The Palimpsest* newsletter and the essay “The Dead Economy Theory.” His argument treats large-scale AI automation not only as a labor-market shock but as a demand, ownership, and democratic-governance problem.source: owen-mcgrann-dead-economy-theory-2026.md
McGrann’s central claim is that AI firms need a market as large as global labor to justify their capital requirements and valuations. If businesses replace workers faster than new income sources appear, each firm captures its own savings while distributing the lost consumer demand across the rest of the economy. He calls the resulting failure mode the dead economy.source: owen-mcgrann-dead-economy-theory-2026.md
The essay extends the argument beyond GDP. McGrann connects concentrated ownership of AI infrastructure to weaker labor bargaining power, a shrinking tax base, reduced democratic leverage, loss of purpose, and political instability. His framing is intentionally polemical; its causal claims and timelines should be read alongside the broader evidence collected in ai-labor-market and ai-compute-infrastructure.
Related pages: dead-economy-theory, ai-labor-market, ai-compute-infrastructure, ai-job-grief.