Note
This text is a structural analysis. It makes no moral judgments and proposes no policy solutions.
All numbers are symbolic. They describe relationships, not empirical measurements.

Public debates across countries often isolate phenomena such as declining birth rates, weak domestic demand, burnout, or individual "failure".

What is rarely asked is a more fundamental question:

Under existing institutional arrangements, can an ordinary worker complete their own reproduction at all?

If the answer is no, then most observed social symptoms require no further explanation.

This paper proposes an extremely minimal model — the 1–3–X Model — to demonstrate a structural condition already in operation in many modern economies.

“1” denotes the maximum income an ordinary worker can realistically approach under conditions defined as “normal” by the system itself.

Key clarifications:

• “1” is not an average, but the effective upper bound for the majority;

• “1” is not naturally given, but the result of internal processing;

• “1” already assumes high levels of personal depletion.

Formally:

1 = 0.4 (unconditional return) + 0.6 (conditional return)

The conditional portion is recovered only through overtime, performance pressure, permanent availability, or similar mechanisms. It is not incentive, but redeemed subsistence.

Additionally:

1 represents a secondary allocation after primary surplus extraction.

“3” represents the minimum cost required to stably reproduce labor across time and generations.

It includes only:

• Stable housing and daily subsistence

• Risk coverage (illness, unemployment, aging)

• Basic upbringing and socialization of the next generation

“3” does not describe a high standard of living. It is the implicit threshold priced into modern institutional systems.

“X” refers to costs required to obtain “1” that are structurally excluded from accounting:

• Health degradation

• Loss of time sovereignty

• Erosion of dignity and subjectivity

X does not always appear as monetary loss, but it directly reduces future reproductive capacity.

In many systems, individual reproduction is assumed impossible by default.

The implicit institutional solution is:

Reproduction is outsourced to dual-worker households.

This yields the central inequality:

1 + 1 < 3

Not because workers are insufficiently productive, but because:

• Wage systems cover immediate survival, not reproduction;

• Reproduction costs are externalized to households;

• Cost pricing and wage pricing are structurally decoupled.

Households are thus forced to function as:

• Shock absorbers

• Risk pools

• Contradiction buffers

When households lose this capacity, the system does not self-correct. It expresses failure through declining fertility, demand contraction, and individual collapse.

When the 1–3–X condition persists at the household level, its effects necessarily scale upward.

Not a confidence problem, but a rational outcome:

Agents do not consume beyond reproduction-incomplete states.

Not a strategic preference, but a structural spillover:

Unsatisfied internal reproduction forces demand externalization.

Not due to lack of ideas, but constraint:

Any reform restoring reproduction directly reopens the cost structure.

Not external conspiracy, but exhaustion:

Long-term micro-level depletion erodes macro-level buffering capacity.

Across jurisdictions, empirical paths toward “1” tend to share features:

• Extended working hours

• Reduced rest cycles

• Informal risk transfer

• Partial or total abandonment of social protection

Thus, “1” is an extreme state, not a median condition.

If an institutional design satisfies the following:

• Provides survival wages rather than reproduction wages;

• Expands X through conditional returns;

• Systematically shifts risk downward to households and generations;

Then:

Low fertility, weak demand, burnout, and extreme individual events are not failures — they are designed outputs.

A system that sustains the present only by consuming its future does not suffer from moral failure or poor execution.

It suffers from a simpler condition:

Reproduction fails at the level of arithmetic.

CC0 1.0 Universal
This work is released into the public domain. You may copy, modify, distribute, and use it for any purpose, without permission or attribution.

Note
This text is a structural analysis. It makes no moral judgments and proposes no policy solutions.
All numbers are symbolic. They describe relationships, not empirical measurements.

Public debates across countries often isolate phenomena such as declining birth rates, weak domestic demand, burnout, or individual "failure".

What is rarely asked is a more fundamental question:

Under existing institutional arrangements, can an ordinary worker complete their own reproduction at all?

If the answer is no, then most observed social symptoms require no further explanation.

This paper proposes an extremely minimal model — the 1–3–X Model — to demonstrate a structural condition already in operation in many modern economies.

“1” denotes the maximum income an ordinary worker can realistically approach under conditions defined as “normal” by the system itself.

Key clarifications:

• “1” is not an average, but the effective upper bound for the majority;

• “1” is not naturally given, but the result of internal processing;

• “1” already assumes high levels of personal depletion.

Formally:

1 = 0.4 (unconditional return) + 0.6 (conditional return)

The conditional portion is recovered only through overtime, performance pressure, permanent availability, or similar mechanisms. It is not incentive, but redeemed subsistence.

Additionally:

1 represents a secondary allocation after primary surplus extraction.

“3” represents the minimum cost required to stably reproduce labor across time and generations.

It includes only:

• Stable housing and daily subsistence

• Risk coverage (illness, unemployment, aging)

• Basic upbringing and socialization of the next generation

“3” does not describe a high standard of living. It is the implicit threshold priced into modern institutional systems.

“X” refers to costs required to obtain “1” that are structurally excluded from accounting:

• Health degradation

• Loss of time sovereignty

• Erosion of dignity and subjectivity

X does not always appear as monetary loss, but it directly reduces future reproductive capacity.

In many systems, individual reproduction is assumed impossible by default.

The implicit institutional solution is:

Reproduction is outsourced to dual-worker households.

This yields the central inequality:

1 + 1 < 3

Not because workers are insufficiently productive, but because:

• Wage systems cover immediate survival, not reproduction;

• Reproduction costs are externalized to households;

• Cost pricing and wage pricing are structurally decoupled.

Households are thus forced to function as:

• Shock absorbers

• Risk pools

• Contradiction buffers

When households lose this capacity, the system does not self-correct. It expresses failure through declining fertility, demand contraction, and individual collapse.

When the 1–3–X condition persists at the household level, its effects necessarily scale upward.

Not a confidence problem, but a rational outcome:

Agents do not consume beyond reproduction-incomplete states.

Not a strategic preference, but a structural spillover:

Unsatisfied internal reproduction forces demand externalization.

Not due to lack of ideas, but constraint:

Any reform restoring reproduction directly reopens the cost structure.

Not external conspiracy, but exhaustion:

Long-term micro-level depletion erodes macro-level buffering capacity.

Across jurisdictions, empirical paths toward “1” tend to share features:

• Extended working hours

• Reduced rest cycles

• Informal risk transfer

• Partial or total abandonment of social protection

Thus, “1” is an extreme state, not a median condition.

If an institutional design satisfies the following:

• Provides survival wages rather than reproduction wages;

• Expands X through conditional returns;

• Systematically shifts risk downward to households and generations;

Then:

Low fertility, weak demand, burnout, and extreme individual events are not failures — they are designed outputs.

A system that sustains the present only by consuming its future does not suffer from moral failure or poor execution.

It suffers from a simpler condition:

Reproduction fails at the level of arithmetic.

CC0 1.0 Universal
This work is released into the public domain. You may copy, modify, distribute, and use it for any purpose, without permission or attribution.