About CopeCheck Policy

What this is

CopeCheck Policy scores AI economic policy proposals against the Discontinuity Thesis v3.3 — the argument that postwar capitalism dies when wage labour no longer provides mass economic agency.

Every policy on this site — from UBI proposals to retraining programmes to AI taxation schemes — is tested against four lenses: unit-cost survivability, interface collapse resistance, propagation blindness, and coordination feasibility. The question isn't whether the policy is well-intentioned. It's whether it survives contact with the economics.

Why most policies fail

Most AI policy proposals assume at least one of the following: that human labour will remain cost-competitive in some protected domain; that regulatory categories can keep pace with continuous capability gains; that coordination problems between competing actors will be solved through goodwill; or that displacement will be gradual enough for retraining to work.

The Discontinuity Thesis argues all four assumptions are wrong simultaneously. A policy that gets one right but assumes the others still fails the test.

How scoring works

Each policy is scored 0-100 on four dimensions, where higher scores mean more cope (more likely to fail reality). The overall cope score is weighted: unit-cost survivability (30%) + interface collapse (25%) + propagation blindness (25%) + coordination feasibility (20%).

Verdicts range from "Actually Addresses Reality" (0-19) to "Pure Cope" (80-100). Policies that score below 30 overall are marked as survivors and promoted to the front page. Very few survive.

Sources

Policy proposals are sourced from the Windfall Trust Policy Atlas, individual think tank publications, and government policy documents. Each policy is attributed to its source with a link to the original.

Part of the CopeCheck Network

CopeCheck Policy is one of five sites scoring AI readiness across different dimensions:

• CopeCheck — Public figures and their AI takes
• CopeCheck UK — UK-specific AI cope
• CopeCheck Countries — Country-level AI readiness
• CopeCheck EU — EU laws and regulations
• CopeCheck Policy — Policy proposals (you are here)

The standard

All scoring is based on the Discontinuity Thesis v3.3: Interface Collapse. Read the full standard to understand the framework, or read the original essay.