adjective · first recorded 2019 · status: emerging
Post-economic
1.Rich enough that money no longer gets a vote in what you do next. You still work, obviously, but now it is for purpose, status, or a podcast.
At dinner he said he was post-economic, then spent twenty minutes explaining why his nonprofit needed a seed round.
01Origin
The compound is older than the flex. Alvin Toffler introduced “post-economic work” in a 1966 paper about an affluent, automated future where work would be valued more for personal growth than economic output. That was a theory about society, not a label for your friend after his secondary sale. ([files.eric.ed.gov](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED011096.pdf))
The modern personal-status sense is documented in San Francisco by October 2019, when Tim Ferriss told The New York Times that people with no financial need to work were called post-economic. Ferriss later said he did not invent it and had heard it from someone in Silicon Valley. My First Million subsequently made it a recurring concept and even put it on a T-shirt, while the AI wealth boom pushed it into 2026 discourse about newly liquid founders and lab employees. ([businesstimes.com.sg](https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/lifestyle/why-dont-rich-people-just-stop-working?utm_source=openai))
02Notable sightings
Deedy Das · @deedydasIn a thread about SF's AI wealth divide, described founders who went from ordinary tech salaries to more than $50 million and quoted one post-economic founder saying that if he sold his company, he would only have money and people would stop wanting to talk to him.
Chris Brown · @almostcmbOne reason to be excited for the SpaceX IPO is that a bunch of post-economic, highly liquid alumni will go build cool sh*t nobody else would bother building.
Danielle Krage · @daniellekrageThe discussion about post-economic people craving difficult challenges was interesting and overlapped with the people joining her creative quest project.
03Spread the ism
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