After the Wage Link: A Research Programme on Participation and Stability Under Automation

This orientation paper maps a broader research programme investigating how participation, purchasing power and social stability may be maintained under increasing automation. Rather than proposing a specific solution, it identifies the programme's central question, the boundary at which conventional approaches may fail, the empirical measurement task on which subsequent work depends, the current space of candidate responses, and the conditions under which the programme would conclude that its central concern is not binding.

The paper is intended as a front door to the wider corpus. It does not assume that a circulation crisis exists, nor does it advocate a preferred mechanism. Its purpose is to organise the existing research into a structured inquiry and to identify the next priority task: measuring the extent to which automation-generated surplus remains reachable by existing economic and institutional mechanisms.