Back to home page: Economic Architecture

<aside> ⛔

This is a page under construction; the reader is expected to read with caution and imagination

</aside>

Conceptual space

A basic sketch of the problem space.

Key Features

Observe important elements in the sketch.

• Scope. Economic Architecture is constrained to only apply to the parts of an economy that are subject to Central Planning, free-markets are outside of its purview. Note the implication, the scope of centrally planned features of an economy therefore needs defining.
• Democracy, Economics, Design and Delivery. I have selected these as 4 high-level ‘pillars’ that seem to do a good job of broadly defining the types of considerations that go into the process of starting/updating/running/ending a service. The list may need review in the future, butI find it serviceable, as-is.
  • Positioning. Economic Architecture is a way of managing the overall needs of the 4-pillars. It is therefore a solution and so it has a design and should be expected to need to be adapted and evolved over the course of time
• Why, What, How, From and With. The Economic Architecture approach is one of atomisation, it seeks to identify the unitary elements of each ‘vertical’ layer and ‘horizontal’ domain (domains not shown in the diagram). Atomisation is an important capability for gaining control and scalability in the face of large and complex governance challenges associated with national governments.
  • Why. The things people actually want to do with their life (eat, drink and be merry)
  • What. The end-user services that people use to accomplish what they want from life
  • How. Created things that enable end-user services to exist, the service design
  • From. Things that are used to create that service design
  • With. Things that must be given up in exchange for the service to be created
• Correlation. I perceive a correlation between [Democracy, Economics, Design and Delivery] and the [Why, What, How, From and With] layers of Economic Architecture. For example, primarily democratic needs relate to the questions of ‘Why’ and ‘What’
• Participation. Typically lots of people engage in ‘Why’ and ‘What’ and ‘With’, but only a few are interested in ‘How’ and ‘From’
• Human focus. It is my lived experience (read: ‘bias’) that when ‘Why’ is not being achieved humans prefer to change the ‘What’ and the ‘With’, but are reluctant to engage with the ‘How’ and the ‘From’
• Complexity. On the few occasions that I have been able to measure the complexity associated with each layer, I find the vast majority of complexity resides in the ‘How’ and the ‘From’ and in the dependencies between ‘How’ to ‘From’ and between ‘How’ to ‘What’
• Stability. I find that ‘Why’ we are doing things and ‘What’ service we want are resilient and change very little with the passing of time, ‘How’ we receive services and ‘From’ what they are composed tend to change and evolve in concert with changes to technology and social norms/expectations. This temporal volatility compounds with the already inherent complexity of these layers
• Definitions

A crude sketch to attempt to bring it to life

This image shows examples of services and the underlying capabilities that enable them to be offered to meet peoples’ needs in society.