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Purpose and claim.
The paper advances a life-coherent, regenerative political economy whose explicit end is to secure, sustain, and develop universal life necessities — clean air and water, nutritious food, secure shelter, healthcare, education, meaningful social participation, and a viable environment — for all, across generations. It argues that monetary and credit systems are legitimate only insofar as they demonstrably advance these goods within ecological ceilings.
Diagnosis.
Prevailing rule-systems elevate GDP growth and price stability as terminal ends while tolerating three structural failures: (i) debt overhang — household balance sheets burdened by liabilities that crowd out essentials; (ii) credit misallocation — bank lending concentrated in real-estate and financial asset markets, inflating prices without expanding real capacity; and (iii) life-system degradation — economic throughput that overshoots biophysical limits. These failures persist because money creation — both sovereign spending and bank lending — is not normatively filtered by life-value criteria nor paced to real resources and ecological thresholds.
Integration logic.
The framework combines seven partial but true perspectives into a single rule-set:
- Normative compass (McMurtry). LVOA supplies a universal, decidable criterion — value is what enables a more coherently inclusive range of human life capacities; disvalue disables it. This is operationalised as a binding Life-Value Impact Assessment (LVIA) applied ex ante to all major policies.
- Floors and ceilings (Raworth). The social foundation (minimum provisioning) and ecological ceiling (planetary boundaries) specify the envelope within which the LVIA adjudicates proposals.
- Design grammar (Korten/Fullerton). Living-systems principles and regenerative design translate narrative intent into engineering constraints: robust circulation, empowered participation, right relationship, and balance — encoded in procurement, standards, and prudential rules.
- Operational engine (MMT). A currency-issuing state’s feasibility constraint is real resources, not prior savings. Fiscal capacity is therefore mobilised to meet life-needs, with taxes and bonds used primarily for demand management, distribution, and interest-rate control.
- Twin drivetrains for stability and allocation (Keen/Werner). Macro-stability requires stock correction (a targeted household debt jubilee) and flow steering (credit guidance via a green/amber/red taxonomy that channels lending to productive, regenerative uses and away from speculative/extractive ones).
- Pacing to capacity (Resource Board). A standing technical body maps labour, supply chains, productive capacity, and ecological thresholds to set the tempo of fiscal and credit injections and to manage inflation at source.
- Public accountability (Dashboard). Quarterly publication of the Life-Value Index, Debt Harm Index, Credit Map, Resource & Inflation Map, and Distributional Accounts enables transparent course-correction and democratic oversight.
Institutional architecture.
A Macro-Coordination Layer links Treasury, central bank, financial regulator, a public development bank, and an independent Life-Value Council. Mandates are aligned as follows: Treasury designs LVIA-consistent programs; the central bank supplies reserves and targeted funding facilities tied to the credit taxonomy; the regulator embeds the taxonomy in supervision and capital requirements; the public development bank anchors portfolios in life-coherent sectors; and the Life-Value Council governs LVIA methods, audits, and disclosure.
Policy instrument suite.
(i) Targeted Debt Jubilee retiring qualifying household debts that impede access to necessities, paired with anti-releveraging safeguards; (ii) Credit Guidance with differentiated risk-weights, facility access, and lending-share requirements by taxonomy colour; (iii) MMT-aligned fiscal operations including a Job Guarantee and place-based public investment; (iv) Public development banking for anchor co-lending; and (v) Procurement and standards that hard-wire regenerative design into market demand.
Measurement and triggers.
Legally defined thresholds in the LVI, DHI, CM, and RIM trigger automatic countermeasures: tightening red-lending ceilings, sectoral cooling taxes, emergency capacity investment, or pacing adjustments. All datasets are open and machine-readable; annual independent audits review accuracy and policy relevance.
Sectoral applications.
The framework is applied to four civil-commons priorities. In health, medical-debt relief and green credit for public health infrastructure expand preventive capacity. In education, targeted jubilee and investment in facilities and climate-skills programmes raise capability formation. In housing, red-credit ceilings suppress speculation while green finance and public co-investment scale affordable, efficient supply. In energy and food systems, green credit, public investment, and procurement accelerate renewable microgrids, storage, agroecology, and watershed restoration.
Risk governance.
Political resistance and regulatory capture are mitigated by statutory LVIA, entrenchment of the taxonomy, open data, and plural oversight. Inflation and external pressures are contained by Resource-Board pacing, bottleneck-relief investment, and transitional capital-management tools. Financial-system adjustment is phased and supported by low-cost green facilities and development-bank co-lending. Ecological risks are limited by independent verification, dynamic thresholds, and sufficiency-first planning.
Expected outcomes.
The architecture stabilises the macroeconomy by reducing destabilising debt stocks and speculative credit cycles; redirects money creation to productive, regenerative uses; and delivers measurable gains in universal life necessities within ecological limits. GDP and headline inflation become derivative indicators rather than terminal ends; the success metric is sustained improvement in the inclusive range of human and ecological life.
Contribution.
By binding value theory, living-systems design, and monetary operations into one enforceable order, the paper converts aspirational “life economy” narratives into accountable public law and practice — replacing money-sequence rule with life-sequence governance, without sacrificing operational realism or pluralism in ends-in-life.
