About the present state. Part the first.

The following propositions each invert a common axiom or assumption concerning the economic model.

1) Economics is a model by which we attempt to regulate social relations.

• Our entire system of codified laws supports a formal mechanism to govern how individuals interact with each other. Such laws may compliment or oppose much older social laws. (In liberal democracies, we have often demanded that codified law not to restrain social or moral norms.) It has been assumed that following the economic model yields socially desirable outcomes, and that such value generated is sustainable in general. Yet limited satisfaction appears only achieved at a meso scale.

2) Economics is not a model about resource management.

• The economic model is neither necessary, nor sufficient, to concentrate or distribute resources. Great spiritual works demonstrate non-necessity, while the many extra-legal exchange systems demonstrate demonstrate non-sufficiency. They work on social laws, such as trust and reciprocity.
  
  
• It may appear to be a resource management model since it has been implemented using physically scarce tokens, but the current implementation merely manipulates one of gazillions of electronic or magnetic bits in some computer. The condition of such bits only have meaning through the abstraction of external human ideas. The economic model is even less about knowledge management than about resource management, except at its non-linear and non-deterministic edges (STS, innovation, information systems, human behaviour).

3) "The economy" is not broken. Our model, dubbed "economy" is broken.

• Our economic model no longer faithfully represents key features of the empiric world. But the world clearly continues to function.
  
  
• Millions of individuals do not participate in the economy as the model would predict. Although they do not add monetary value to the economy, and sometimes behave contrary to the model, somehow such individual receive social and material support to exist as mostly healthy human beings. By contrast neither the invisible hand, nor the most intricately planned economic system, have resulted in any socially just arrangement of relations on a global or even macro-regional basis.
  
  
• We have exerted Ptolemaic efforts to add epicycles and exceptions, but the model misunderstands some underlying first principles. The increasingly elaborate model is increasingly costly in resources to maintain, while providing decreasingly less explanatory or predictive value.

4) "(Un)employment" is not a consistent concept.

• Individuals may or may not feel fulfilled through the /exchange/ of their labours for tokens. But they must be fulfilled by contributing to themselves and to society, minimally to meet basic physical and social needs. Humans and other sentients were happy or miserable long before economics necessitated the concept of employment.
  
  
• It's not clear that (un)employment has a consistent role or meaning in the economic model. Do unemployed individuals show a poorly functioning economy as value sinks, or do they show that an economy is functioning so well that it can sustain an excess of non-value-contributing labourers? Why does the model require us to become employed by 16 and unemployed by age 65, when individuals of all ages are capable of contributing value?
  
  
• Similarly, how many other apparently social concepts are based in the economy? Poverty. Empowerment. Some (or perhaps all) discriminatory -isms.

5) There is no "tragedy of the commons."

• Systems such as over-grazed plots of grass self-correct just fine in the long term. Our individual short-term needs conflict with our collective long-term needs.

6) Currency is an inadequate abstract representation of value.

• a) Economics makes the assumption that there is some logical pattern by which humans assign value to goods and services. It also assumes that all humans who want to engage in social relationships share the same pattern or at least that the patterns yield mutually intelligible outcomes. And that humans employ common ways to think about present and future value of things in linear or causal terms. Interest, risk, inflation, and many other economic concepts depend on the assumption that all of human social relations can be reduced to some currency unit that retains value when traded.
  
  
• Yet we have demonstrated that humans are more averse to risk of loss than risk of gain, that humans do not plan well for the future in terms of currency units, and that value is highly context sensitive and borderline irrational. Few, if any, of the theories offered by economics to package such unwieldy variables into a currency unit are intuitive.
  
  
• (Imagine explaining the following: "Hey, aliens, this pint of this ale poured at this location now is the same as the act of no longer owning 100 shares in Flooz seven years ago, but not the same as that pint of this ale poured 10 metres from here tomorrow night." The aliens would be right to ask to speak to the cognitively mature adults of the house.)
  
  
• b) Environmental economics, triple bottom lines, corporate social responsibility, and other in vogue concepts all tell us to look outside the economic model to consider how to act sustainably. They all highlight that the nearly infinite array of products, services, and other valuable instantiations cannot be reduced to one kind of information.
  
  
• While nature frequently transacts in common units (sugars, amino acids, gases, etc.), such units are either highly context dependent, or highly context independent. It doesn't matter where a molecule of water comes from, as long as it's a molecule of water. One cannot drink a 10 cent piece.

7) The abstract economic model should enable us to live more sustainably, we should not live to enable or sustain the economic model.

• Our social laws and relations have become subservient to fulfilling the needs of the economic model. It is of clear social benefit that some individuals undertake undesirable operational tasks. It is of *no* benefit to limit such individuals to performing only such tasks. The current economic implementation of society does not tell us how to justly allocate such tasks.

8) The economic model is a poor model for time.

• As with all models, pushing the economic model at its edges, such as through perpetual trusts (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/trust-issues.php?page=all), reveals the model's internal contradictions and inadequacies.
  
  
• A temporal dimension to the model, as currently kludged by amortisation, interest, "net present value", is empirically evident in that humans do set aside resources for times of scarcity, and the values of social relationships do change through time. However, temporal abstractions in the economic model do not take many non-linear factors into account.
  
  
• The economic model assumes that time can be treated in a linear, constantly ticking manner with all slices being of the same quality. (The value of an asset may change non-linearly through time, but the starting conditions to determine how that change occurs nonetheless require that time behave consistently.) People experience time as non-linear, and not all slices have the same quality or value.

While it's premature to discard the economic model completely, we should seriously examine whether model's assumptions--some several thousands years old--accord with present reality and future needs. In particular, the economic model assumes a mechanical time which sharply disagrees with manifestly ambiguous social time. It may or may not be patchable to function for a short while longer, but now would be a great time to ask /why/ there appear to be cycles and stratifications and interesting distributions and circular flows, so that each instance does not have to be an exception.