Working papers
Three papers, one argument
Each paper takes up the question the previous one creates. The first two name no asset at all. The third names one and then declines to recommend it, which is the only way the sequence stays honest.
Research working papers, posted for comment. Citations, counterarguments and the case against are inside each paper rather than summarised here.
Paper I
Temporal Compensation
A Theory of Compensation as the Transfer of Purchasing Power Through Time
What it does. Establishes the definition the other two papers build on, and does the naming. It opens with two hires forty years apart, one of whom received a promise denominated in outcomes and one of whom received a balance denominated in dollars, and asks what changed between them beyond the numbers.
It then names the Delivery Assumption and its corollary the nominal fallacy; moves the unit of analysis from the compensation event to the compensation journey; documents the Executive Exception; partitions delivered value into the Four Jobs and identifies Preservation as the one without a mature science; argues that the carrier is part of the design rather than a neutral container; sets out preservation criteria; and corrects the boundary from one employer to one journey across many employers. It closes with the case against itself and a research agenda.
Version 3.5 · Sections: the lens, how the assumption got into the walls, the ground moved twice, the Executive Exception, the Four Jobs, the carrier, the criteria, the boundary correction, existing frameworks reread, implications for practice, the case against, research agenda.
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Paper II
Preservation Architecture
Converting Human Capital Into Durable Financial Capital Across Time
What it does. Asks the question the first paper creates. If deferred value has to travel, what must the thing carrying it actually do?
It begins from first principles, with labour as the expenditure of finite and irretrievable human time, and locates a system-level design problem that no single discipline currently owns: connecting compensation delivery to durable future consumption. It defines the preservation target as the worker's future liability rather than any property of assets. It steelmans the existing inventory of preservation institutions and finds that they solve more of the problem than reformers usually assume. It establishes that risk-bearing is an architectural choice even when nobody consciously makes it, with pooling, diversification and prevention as the only genuine mechanisms of reduction. It develops the architecture as a stack of ten layers across six domains, in which layers substitute across normal ranges but each has a failure region no other layer can cover. It treats property and promise as complements. And it proposes that architectures be judged first by the failures they survive.
It ends with the Six Tests and deliberately declines to rank any candidate, leaving the question of which forms of property, promise, institution and monetary architecture best carry the value of human time open for separate examination.
Ninth draft · Paper II of three.
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Paper III
The Monetary Denominator
Compensation, Purchasing Power, and the Price of Human Time
What it does. The first two papers treated money as an exogenous condition. This one treats it as a variable of compensation design.
Compensation is delivered in money and measured in money. The profession pays in a unit and measures in the same unit, which means it measures the payment with the payment, and the purchasing capacity of the unit changes between the moment of measurement and the moment it matters. The paper proposes that modern monetary architecture separates the medium of payment from the principal instruments of long-duration preservation; that some worker investment risk is preservation-motivated rather than growth-motivated; and, by counterfactual, that monetary properties add three incremental burdens to a preservation problem that would exist even under perfectly stable money.
Elastic money is defended at full strength before its residual risk is assigned. Six desiderata for a monetary denominator are derived from the Six Tests before any candidate is named. Bitcoin then enters as a downstream test case, and the verdict is bounded: it reassigns risk rather than eliminating it, fails Arrival for floor liabilities, fails the Human Test under self-custody, and cannot pool. It is not a pension. Its candidate contribution is a bounded form of portable monetary property.
Author's disclosure, as it appears in the paper. The author is the founder of a company that offers an employer-sponsored Bitcoin savings benefit. That interest is stated so the reader can weigh it, and the paper is written under the second paper's rule that any application of the framework must disclose its weights, justify them against a specified liability, and evaluate complete architectures rather than isolated assets. Where the analysis finds Bitcoin's role small, conditional or unsuitable, it says so.
Fifth draft, post-review · Paper III of three.
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The book
What Is an Hour Worth is the book-length version, in draft. Nineteen chapters. It expands the trilogy, adds the historical material the papers had no room for, and runs a deliberately conditional final section that asks what compensation would look like under a monetary regime the papers only gesture at. That section is marked as a laboratory rather than a forecast, and it is written to be dismissible without the rest of the argument collapsing.
There is nothing to buy yet. When there is, it will be announced here first.
Reading order
If you only read one, read Paper I. It contains the definition and all the naming, and the other two are answers to questions it raises.
If you work in benefits or retirement design, Paper II is the one with practical consequences. The Six Tests are usable on Monday against a plan you already run.
If you came here from a monetary argument, read Paper III last rather than first. Read out of order it looks like advocacy. Read in order it is a constrained conclusion that spends most of its length defending the incumbent.
Comment and correction
These are working papers, which means the errors in them are still fixable. Corrections, counterarguments and citations that would change a claim are genuinely welcome, and several have already changed drafts. Contact details are here.