A Republic Reimagined by Joshua Schmude: What If We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Economic Question?

What if the real problem with our economic debate is not that we have chosen the wrong system, but that we have become too comfortable believing there are only a few systems to choose from?

That question stayed with me while reading A Republic Reimagined: A New Economic Model for a New Age by Joshua Schmude.

Schmude challenges the familiar argument that economies must ultimately choose between capitalism and socialism. Instead, he explores a hybrid economic model in which private enterprise, competition and individual economic freedom continue to exist alongside stronger public institutions, shared ownership and broader participation in the wealth generated by the economy.

But the book becomes particularly interesting when it moves from economic theory to

the future of work.

What happens when machines do more of the work?

For generations, the economic relationship has been relatively straightforward.

A person works. An organisation pays. That income becomes the primary means of survival.

But artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and advanced manufacturing are beginning to complicate that arrangement.

What happens if machines can increasingly produce more with fewer human workers?

Does economic security remain primarily tied to employment?

And if fewer people are required to produce more, who owns the systems producing that wealth?

This, for me, is the most interesting question in A Republic Reimagined.

Schmude argues that we may need to rethink the relationship between citizens, ownership and production. He explores ideas such as revenue sharing, public investment and mechanisms that could allow citizens to have a greater economic stake in productive activity rather than depending almost entirely on wages.

I found myself agreeing with the question more easily than with every answer.

And that distinction matters.

The difficult part is not designing the system

An economic model can look remarkably coherent on paper.

Reality is less cooperative.

Who decides what should be publicly owned?

Who controls those institutions?

Who determines how the resulting wealth is distributed?

And how do we prevent public ownership from simply creating another concentration of power?

These questions become particularly important because economic systems do not operate in isolation. They operate among corporations, governments, bureaucracies, citizens, political interests and institutions that have their own incentives.

Schmude does consider accountability, citizen oversight and participation. But these are also the areas where ambitious economic blueprints encounter something much harder to design around: human behaviour.

We often create systems assuming people will behave according to the rules.

History suggests that people eventually learn how to behave around the rules.

Why the history matters

One of the strengths of the book is that Schmude does not begin his economic argument in the present.

He travels through ideas from Aristotle and Polybius, the American founding,

industrialisation, Progressive Era reforms, the New Deal, deregulation and financialisation before arriving at today's technological questions.

The larger argument is compelling even when one remains unconvinced by particular proposals.

Institutions are products of their time.

An economic structure created for one technological age may not automatically remain adequate when technology changes the relationship between production, labour and ownership.

That becomes increasingly relevant as artificial intelligence and automation challenge an assumption we rarely stop to examine: that human labour must remain the primary way people participate economically.

When the book looks beyond Earth

The book becomes considerably more speculative when Schmude looks towards future projects such as the proposed “Moon Avatar” programme, involving robotics, AI, remote operation and potential lunar economic activity.

I found this section fascinating.

Not necessarily because I accepted every possibility it presents, but because it reveals the scale of Schmude's thinking.

He is not simply asking how we repair today's economic system.

He is asking whether we are still designing tomorrow using yesterday's assumptions.

That is an important distinction.

But imagination has its own danger.

The further an economic argument moves into the future, the easier it becomes to underestimate the messy details of implementation.

Human incentives do not disappear because a blueprint is elegant.

Neither do competing interests, institutional resistance or unintended consequences.

My reservation about A Republic Reimagined

This is where I found myself most divided.

The questions are often stronger than the certainty surrounding some of the answers.

I was interested in Schmude's challenge to the capitalism-versus-socialism binary. I was interested in the idea that citizens could have a broader stake in economic production. I was particularly interested in what automation might mean for an economy built around the assumption that people must earn their security primarily through employment.

But I wanted even more attention on the question of power.

Changing who owns productive assets is only one part of the problem.

Changing who controls that ownership may be an even bigger one.

The question I carried away

I closed A Republic Reimagined without adopting a new economic ideology.

And I don't think I was supposed to.

What changed was the question in my head.

We usually ask whether capitalism or socialism works better.

Perhaps the more useful question is:

What kind of economic system makes sense when the nature of work itself is changing?

I am still unsure what the answer should be.

But I appreciate books that leave me with uncertainty of that kind.

A Republic Reimagined is ambitious, sometimes speculative and likely to invite disagreement. Its greatest value for me is not that it provides a finished economic destination. It is that it asks us to examine assumptions that have become so familiar that we rarely notice them anymore.

Sometimes a book doesn't change your mind.

Sometimes it changes the question you ask.

This one did that for me.