Post-Transition Projections

These are not aspirational targets. They are structural projections based on current data — what happens to waste, work hours, and resource use when you remove the financial overhead that drives them.

Where your money actually goes

Of every $100 you spend on consumer goods and services, approximately $20–25 goes not to the product itself but to the apparatus that persuades you to buy it: advertising, branding, sales forces, market research, focus groups, PR, sponsorships, influencer marketing, and customer acquisition. This is the cross-sector median. In some industries, it's dramatically higher.

In pharmaceuticals, marketing-plus-sales spend regularly exceeds R&D spend. The argument that high prices fund innovation is structurally undermined by the fact that more goes to persuasion than to discovery.

In a transitioned society, none of this apparatus exists. The same products reach the same people — through need-based coordination instead of competitive marketing.

Currency-overhead workforce

Of approximately 165 million employed US workers, between 22 and 30 million — roughly 13–18% of the workforce — work in occupations that exist primarily because economic activity is mediated by currency. These jobs dissolve in a post-currency cooperative economy:

Beyond currency-overhead, additional labor goes to waste-production: planned obsolescence manufacturing (20–30% of consumer electronics), marketing-driven overproduction, and competitive duplication where multiple firms produce functionally equivalent products with parallel infrastructure. Combined with currency-overhead, approximately 16–22% of the US workforce produces no lasting value.

The 15–17 hour work week

When you remove currency-overhead occupations, waste production, planned obsolescence, competitive duplication, and marketing-manufactured demand, and redistribute the remaining necessary work across the adult population, the projected median work week drops to approximately 15–17 hours.

This is not a mandate — it's a structural floor. Many people will choose to work more because they find their work meaningful. Others will choose less, focusing on family, art, study, community, or other pursuits. The difference is that survival no longer depends on it.

What happens to waste

Current waste baselines and projected reductions after transition and retooling (which would take an estimated 12+ years, using WWII industrial mobilization as the closest historical analog):

What becomes possible

When the earn-money-to-survive mandate disappears, the way people spend their time transforms:

• Caregiving is liberated. Parents can be with their children. Adult children can be with aging parents. The $10–12 trillion of unpaid caregiving labor (overwhelmingly by women) is no longer squeezed by wage work.
• Education becomes continuous. Lifelong learning for its own sake replaces job-relevant credentialing.
• Creative and contemplative work flourishes. Art, music, writing, research, philosophy, and community-building are no longer foreclosed to those without inherited resources.
• Long-horizon projects become viable. Multi-generational restoration ecology, deep scholarship, slow craftsmanship — anything that doesn't pay within a single career arc.
• Civic engagement has room. Participation in local governance, mutual aid, and democratic life requires time the wage-economy claims.

Data sources

Marketing cost data: publicly traded firms' 10-K filings, Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025, eMarketer, Statista, IBISWorld industry reports. Workforce data: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2025. Waste data: UNEP Food Waste Index Report, Global E-waste Monitor 2024, Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Emissions data: EPA, Global Carbon Project. All figures are US-specific and approximate for 2025–2026.