Category: Economics

From Money Growth to Life Coherence: Why Orthodox Economics Failed — and How to Complete It as a Science | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Orthodox economics presents itself as a science, yet it systematically fails to distinguish economic success from economic self-consumption. Gross domestic product, profit maximization, and monetary growth routinely rise alongside deteriorating public health, ecological depletion, institutional fragility, and declining life resilience. This paper argues that these failures are not empirical anomalies or regulatory lapses, but the predictable outcome of a foundational error: economics has optimized a symbolic proxy — money — rather than the life-support conditions it depends upon.

Drawing on John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), this paper reconstructs economics as a life-grounded science. It introduces a universal axiom of value based on the expansion or contraction of life-range (thought, felt being, and action), identifies universal human life necessities as the true economic state variables, redefines development as secure access to life goods, distinguishes life capital from false capital, and redefines efficiency in ecological, physical, and human-development terms. The civil commons are formally restored as core economic infrastructure rather than residual public expenditure.

The paper demonstrates why orthodox economics systematically misclassifies capital, underestimates systemic risk, and selects for life-capital depletion, and it provides a mathematically coherent diagnostic and therapeutic framework for banking, finance, regulation, and public policy. The result is not an ideological alternative to economics, but its scientific completion.

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From Metastasis to Meta-Stasis: Why the Cancer Stage of Capitalism Is Structurally Exact — and How Life Recovers | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Across biology, medicine, economics, and planetary governance, systems have become increasingly adaptive while simultaneously more fragile. This paper advances a unified regulatory framework explaining this paradox. It traces the evolutionary arc of regulation from homeostasis (stability through constancy) to allostasis (stability through change), identifies metastasis as the characteristic failure mode that emerges when adaptive power escapes governance, and introduces meta-stasis — stability through viability — as the missing regulatory layer required for recovery. Drawing on cancer biology, stress physiology, systems theory, and life-value ethics, the paper demonstrates why John McMurtry’s diagnosis of a “cancer stage of capitalism” is not metaphorical but structurally exact. Healing is reframed as the recovery of jurisdiction: the restoration of the system’s capacity to govern adaptation itself, protect buffers, enforce boundaries, and preserve future option space. The framework integrates biological, social, and planetary scales into a single logic of solvency and offers a non-ideological pathway from crisis to cure grounded in the conditions by which life endures.

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Unresolved Threat and the Architecture of Civilization: Why Trust-Based Ethics Fail at Scale and How a Life-Focused Political Economy Can Succeed | ChatGPT5.1 & NotebookLM

Civilizations across history have consistently exhibited a striking divergence between their highest moral ideals and their lived social, economic, and political realities. This contradiction — often framed as hypocrisy, corruption, or moral decline — has appeared across religions, ideologies, and cultures. In this paper, we propose a unifying systems explanation for this universal pattern. We argue that large-scale societies undergo a structural transition from trust-based to threat-based regulation when storable surplus, coordination scale, and institutional distance outpace a society’s capacity to maintain shared vulnerability. This transition enables the export of consequence, producing asymmetric safety and converting threat from an episodic disturbance into a chronic background field embedded in political, economic, and biological systems.

We develop a formal Threat–Trust Phase Model of civilization and show how threat-dominant regimes systematically destabilize ethical coherence, generate population-wide autonomic dysregulation, and drive the modern epidemic of non-communicable disease. We demonstrate how dominant scarcity narratives, unemployment, austerity, and inequality function as active threat-maintenance mechanisms rather than neutral market outcomes. Integrating evolutionary anthropology, trauma biology, political economy, public health, and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), we identify the monetary and institutional design features that falsely sustain artificial scarcity and ambient insecurity.

We then outline a life-focused political economy in which intrinsic health is elevated as the primary macroeconomic target, regenerative capacity replaces throughput optimization, and public policy is formally screened through an Intrinsic Health Impact Assessment (IHIA) framework. Finally, we analyze the political economy of transition, elite resistance, and the emerging global corridor in which risk can no longer be reliably exported across space, class, or time.

The paper concludes that ethical failure at civilizational scale is not fundamentally a moral failure but a control-systems failure. Trust-based ethics collapse not because of human depravity alone, but because threat-dominant institutions structurally select against them. For the first time in human history, however, the monetary, biological, and institutional tools now exist to deliberately redesign civilization around shared safety and intrinsic health.

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Performance as a Civilizational Liability: Semantic Warfare, GDP, and the Structural Contradiction of SDG 8 | ChatGPT5.1 & NotbookLM

Modern civilization governs itself through a performance grammar that equates output, productivity, and economic growth with progress. This white paper demonstrates that this semantic architecture, when applied to living systems, is biologically incoherent and structurally dangerous. Drawing on regulatory biology, stress physiology, life-course health, ecological resilience, and development economics, the paper shows that performance is a transient expression of stored capacity, not a measure of system health. When performance is elevated to the master variable of governance — as occurs through GDP-centered policy and Sustainable Development Goal 8 — societies reproduce at planetary scale the same pathological dynamics that generate chronic disease, burnout, and organ failure in individual bodies: chronic stress without sufficient recovery. The paper critiques GDP as a throughput metric incapable of registering biological and ecological depletion, analyzes the internal contradiction embedded within SDG 8, and proposes a post-performance metric grammar grounded in recovery capacity, intrinsic health, functional realization, and intergenerational reserve. It argues that the central task of 21st-century governance is semantic before it is technical: to reinstall capacity over output, recovery over throughput, and life-course solvency over quarterly performance. Only through this reversal can development be reconciled with health, and economics with biology.

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Toward a Systems Understanding of Noncommunicable Diseases: A Comprehensive Framework for Global and Caribbean Transformation | ChatGPT5.1 & NotebookLM

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) now account for the majority of global deaths and disability, yet progress in prevention and control remains insufficient, uneven, and structurally constrained. This volume develops an integrated systems framework to explain why chronic diseases — cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, cancers, chronic kidney disease, respiratory disorders, and related metabolic syndromes — continue to rise despite decades of global commitments. Synthesizing evidence across epidemiology, developmental biology, commercial determinants, psychosocial science, food-system analysis, governance, and planetary health, the book introduces a novel typology of “NCD gaps” spanning four domains: burden–response alignment, health-system performance, structural and developmental determinants, and psychosocial and temporal coherence.

The Caribbean region, particularly its Small Island Developing States (SIDS), is presented as a global microcosm where structural vulnerabilities, import-dependent food environments, climate instability, commercial saturation, and intergenerational stress converge to accelerate early-onset NCD patterns. The book offers a strengthened Port-of-Spain Declaration 2.0 (POS-2.0) as a governance architecture for regional transformation.

Integrating developmental origins (DOHaD), trauma-informed perspectives, climate–health interactions, and systems-level policy design, the volume articulates a forward-looking vision for “coherent health futures” grounded in biological, social, ecological, and institutional alignment. The framework aims to guide global health practitioners, Caribbean policymakers, researchers, and intergovernmental bodies in developing durable, multi-level strategies for NCD prevention and control.

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From Racket to Regeneration: A Structural Diagnosis of Modern Political-Economy | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

This white paper diagnoses the pervasive racket-like dynamics embedded within modern political, economic, and cultural systems. By “racket,” we refer not to conspiracy but to institutionalized schemes of engineered dependency, in which harm and profit become co-dependent. Through a four-layer causal framework — surface mechanisms, structural drivers, meta-structural grammars, and axiological roots — we demonstrate how racketeering is reproduced across domains such as healthcare, education, science, religion, finance, agriculture, and climate governance. Drawing on real-world examples including the opioid epidemic, housing speculation, fossil fuel subsidies, and vaccine inequity, we show how mis-specified value at the root cascades downward into exploitative structures and practices.

The analysis concludes that current systems are functioning as designed, not malfunctioning. The core error lies in equating profit growth with human flourishing, a mis-specification that privileges symbolic abstractions (money, assets, metrics) over universal life necessities. Alternatives, however, already exist: wellbeing economies, regenerative agriculture, universal healthcare, open science, and rights-of-nature jurisprudence provide living proof of possibility. We propose re-specifying value in terms of life coherence — anchoring governance, economics, and culture in the Primary Axiom of Value: that which enables life is good; that which disables life is bad. By aligning reforms across all layers of the causal cascade, societies can move from systemic racketeering to regenerative coherence.

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Fractured Sovereignty: Modern Monetary Theory, Private Finance, and the Politics of Constraint | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) demonstrates that sovereign currency-issuing governments cannot become insolvent in their own unit of account, yet these same governments routinely behave as if they are revenue-constrained. This paradox — formal sovereignty coexisting with self-imposed austerity — raises profound questions about who truly governs money. This paper argues that sovereignty is not a unitary attribute but a fractured condition, divided across three registers: formal, functional, and ideological.

Formally, governments retain the authority to issue currency and extinguish liabilities through taxation. Functionally, private banks and supranational institutions wield shadow sovereignty by creating credit, enforcing fiscal conditionalities, and disciplining governments through market reactions. Ideologically, austerity narratives and household analogies naturalize scarcity, embedding constraint into common sense and foreclosing democratic imagination.

By synthesizing MMT’s descriptive insights with political economy and cultural theory, this paper re-theorizes sovereignty as a contested field rather than a binary attribute. Drawing on the works of Wray, Kelton, Mosler, McMurtry, Polanyi, and Gramsci, it situates monetary practice within a broader struggle over democracy, legitimacy, and collective provisioning. The conclusion argues that reclaiming sovereignty requires interventions across all three registers — asserting public monetary authority, restructuring financial institutions, and dismantling austerity narratives. In an era of overlapping economic and ecological crises, such reclamation is not optional but necessary for the survival of democratic society.

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Reclaiming Coherence: Aligning Policy, Systems, and Values with the Requirements of Life | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Humanity stands at a civilizational threshold. Climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, chronic disease, inequality, and institutional fragmentation appear as separate crises, yet they share a common root: our collective systems — economic, political, cultural — have become disconnected from the requirements of life.

Drawing on philosopher John McMurtry’s framework of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), this white paper reframes the current “polycrisis” as a systemic pathology of value. McMurtry’s distinction between the money-sequence of value (M → M′) and the life-sequence of value (L → M-of-L → L¹) illuminates why GDP-driven growth models systematically erode the life-capital — ecosystems, relationships, infrastructures — upon which human flourishing depends.

At the heart of the framework lies the Primary Axiom of Value:

X is of value if and only if, and to the extent that, it consists in or enables
more coherently inclusive thought, feeling, and action.

Using this axiom, we define seven universal life necessities — breathable air, potable water, nutritive food, protective shelter, healthy environmental conditions, caring relationships, and meaningful participation — as the non-negotiable ground of value. Systems that sustain these necessities are life-coherent; those that undermine them generate systemic incoherence and eventual collapse.

The paper proposes life-coherent metrics, civil commons architectures, and regenerative policy pathways that realign governance, economies, and technologies with the conditions that enable life to flourish. It integrates insights from planetary boundaries, wellbeing economics, public health, and Indigenous stewardship to provide a unifying framework for action.

When systems serve life, they thrive.
When systems exploit life, they fail.

This paper invites policymakers, academics, and citizens alike to adopt a universal compass for navigating the future:
Does this decision sustain and enrich the conditions of life — or diminish them?

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From Cultural Violence to Planetary Coherence: Recovering the Gospel Grammar for a Second Axial Spiral | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Humanity stands at a civilizational threshold where ecological, cultural, and institutional systems are globally entangled yet symbolically fractured. This white paper integrates Johan Galtung’s theory of cultural violence, John McMurtry’s war-state paradigm, and memetic diagnostics with the recovery of a latent Gospel grammar of regenerative coherence. Together, these lenses reveal how cultural myths, emotional hijacks, and structural lock-ins perpetuate systemic incoherence, while also uncovering universal symbolic grammars — encoded across world traditions — that can orient humanity toward a Second Axial Spiral.

We propose a critical caution: coherence grammars can themselves be captured, commodified, or weaponized if abstracted into hegemonic universals. To prevent this, a Preventing Weaponization Charter is outlined, grounded in polyphonic attribution, life-value onto-axiology, memetic vigilance, and the safeguarding of symbolic mystery.

The paper concludes with a design framework for planetary re-coherence, integrating triality logic, symbolic time crystals, TATi grammar, and life-value ethics into systemic transformations in economy, law, governance, health, education, and technology. The invitation is to re-member our symbolic inheritance, reclaim emotional and memetic sovereignty, and become a custodian species aligned with the regenerative patterns of the Kosmos.

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Seeing the Gospel Anew: Jesus, Paul, and the Grammar of Coherence | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

This work reconstructs the earliest voices of Jesus and Paul, stripping away centuries of institutional overlays to recover their shared grammar of coherence — a living framework where belonging is universal, reciprocity sustains life, and care reorganizes systems from the inside out.

  • Jesus evokes this reality poetically, speaking of the kingdom: a participatory field of reciprocity “spread upon the earth” and hidden in plain sight.
  • Paul embeds the same reality communally, describing in Christ as the embodied commons where “all are one” and diversity strengthens resilience.
  • Together, their insights converge into a regenerative blueprint — for personal flourishing, social belonging, systemic redesign, and planetary stewardship.

Drawing on complexity science, regenerative economics, and ecological thought, this volume reframes the Gospel not as dogma but as design intelligence. It reveals a toolkit for re-aligning our economies, governance, cultures, and identities with the living coherence of the whole.

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