Article by Francis Taylor. This article was developed with Claude AI assistance.
Conflict of interest: the author is the founder of the Consilium Dignitatis Institute.
The design gap
We use the word dignity a lot. In policy documents, in manifestos, in mission statements. Most mean it when they say it.
But meaning it has not made it structural. And that distinction – between dignity as aspiration and dignity as design principle – is, I’d argue, the central unsolved problem of economic reform.
The gap between the word and the architecture
Every serious attempt at economic reform in the last fifty years has included dignity somewhere in the preamble. And yet the systems we have built continue to prioritise output over wellbeing, to treat the floor as a last resort rather than a foundation, and to measure human worth in units that have nothing to do with human dignity.
This isn’t a values failure. We have the values. It’s a design failure. No serious attempt to build an architecture in which dignity is a structural requirement rather than a stated intention has yet been constructed.
There’s a difference between a safety net and a floor. A net catches people after they fall. A floor is what they stand on. The first assumes failure as the default condition. The second does not.
What structural dignity would actually require
If we tried to design dignity into the architecture – not reference it – what would that specification look like?
At minimum, three things.
First: An unconditional foundation. Something every citizen stands on regardless of what they contribute, or their circumstances. Not means-tested. Not time-limited. Not dependent on behaviour. A floor.
Second: Recognition that is earned, not bought. One of the oldest objections to any universal floor is: what about the people who contribute? It’s a fair question. A well-designed system answers it architecturally – it recognises contribution and gives something material back. Something that cannot be purchased. Something that distinguishes between contributing and receiving without punishing either.
Third: Investment in the future. A system that takes the surplus generated by collective contribution and directs it toward long-horizon problems. The kind that do not pay back within an electoral cycle. The kind that an advanced civilisation needs to take seriously if it intends to be one.
These aren’t new ideas individually. What is new is treating all three as a single design requirement – and then actually trying to build it.
What happens when you treat it as an engineering problem
I spent some time doing exactly that. I’m a service engineer, not an economist. I approached it the way I’d approach any design brief: requirements, constraints, what does a working solution look like?
The result is the Consilium Dignitatis – a proposal to replace personal income tax with a contribution-recognition system. Everyone contributes a percentage of income into a shared pool based on their earnings stratum. The pool funds the floor – there for every citizen who would fall below it, without assessment, without conditions. Contributors receive material discounts – half their contribution rate – on goods and services from within the architecture. The surplus, after the floor is funded, goes into a long-horizon investment fund for civilisation-scale work.
I’ve modelled it across six economies on two continents. In every model, the pool covers the floor and generates a surplus – and the government’s fiscal position holds or improves. The arithmetic holds. The politics is a harder problem – and a separate article.
A piece of the architecture worth pausing on is the post-nominal layer. Contributors earn a designation – something money cannot buy and only contribution earns. This is not vanity. It is a direct architectural answer to the “what about contributors?” objection. The system sees them. It says so publicly.
The question worth sitting with
I’m not claiming this is the answer. I’m claiming it is a serious attempt to take the design requirement seriously.
We’ve spent decades describing what we want from an economic system. We’ve written it into preambles, carved it into mission statements, argued about it in good faith. And we have very rarely asked: what would a system actually look like if dignity were the brief?
That question seems worth asking. Not because the current system is failing – though it is – but because we have had the aspiration for a long time now, and aspiration alone has not been sufficient.
The RSA has always been interested in the gap between ambition and architecture. This is an attempt to bridge it.
More at consiliumdignitatis.org.
Photo: Ravikant / Pexels
I’m a service engineer and the founder of the Consilium Dignitatis Institute. I can be reached at founder@cdinstitute.org.
Two documents follow, the first is a summary of the concept, the second is the philosophical rationale.