Authors here (writing under a collective pseudonym). This paper started as an attempt to map the structural drivers of modern economic inequality: not the downstream symptoms (wealth gaps, wage stagnation, polarization) but the upstream mechanisms producing them.
We expected to land on the usual suspects: regulatory capture, rent-seeking, declining competition. And those are real. But what kept surfacing was something more fundamental — a pattern where the gap between what it costs to produce something and what people pay to access it had grown so grotesque that standard explanations (R&D recovery, information asymmetry, natural monopoly) couldn't fully account for it:
- Gene therapy manufacturing at ~$65K, priced at $850K (triangulated from Spark Therapeutics' SEC filings and AAV manufacturing economics)
- Insulin markups of 30-100x that dropped 70-78% under federal pressure — manufacturers publicly confirmed they remained profitable at the lower price
- Academic publishers earning 38% margins on research scientists wrote for free, reviewed for free, and often paid to publish
- 10.6 million non-seasonal vacant U.S. homes alongside 771,000 homeless people
The economics literature calls this artificial scarcity: deprivation maintained through institutional design rather than resource constraints. Once we had that lens, it was everywhere. And it became clear that these weren't isolated market failures but a systemic coordination problem: institutions optimized for a world of genuine scarcity now applied to conditions increasingly capable of abundance.
Building a coherent framework pulled us into literatures we didn't expect — Ostrom's commons governance, the thermodynamics of information copying (Landauer/Bennett established that duplication approaches zero energy cost — every paywall is literally a dam against physics), Wright's Law applied to solar deployment curves, and Sen/Nussbaum's capabilities approach as an alternative to UBI.
The result proposes five design primitives for abundance-oriented institutions: Universal Capabilities, Commons Infrastructure, Polycentric Governance, Partner AI, and Market Residuals.
We try to steelman objections seriously — dedicated sections on free-rider problems (Section V, applying Ostrom's 8 design principles), the political economy of entrenched resistance, and genuine transition difficulties.
The sections we're LEAST confident in and most want pushback on:
1. The "stratified allocation" model — is the boundary between market/commons/guarantee principled or arbitrary?
2. Free-rider mitigation — do graduated sanctions + contribution recognition scale beyond small communities?
3. AI governance — are "constitutional limits on autonomous decision-making" enforceable or aspirational?
PromethApeiron•8h ago
We expected to land on the usual suspects: regulatory capture, rent-seeking, declining competition. And those are real. But what kept surfacing was something more fundamental — a pattern where the gap between what it costs to produce something and what people pay to access it had grown so grotesque that standard explanations (R&D recovery, information asymmetry, natural monopoly) couldn't fully account for it:
- Gene therapy manufacturing at ~$65K, priced at $850K (triangulated from Spark Therapeutics' SEC filings and AAV manufacturing economics) - Insulin markups of 30-100x that dropped 70-78% under federal pressure — manufacturers publicly confirmed they remained profitable at the lower price - Academic publishers earning 38% margins on research scientists wrote for free, reviewed for free, and often paid to publish - 10.6 million non-seasonal vacant U.S. homes alongside 771,000 homeless people
The economics literature calls this artificial scarcity: deprivation maintained through institutional design rather than resource constraints. Once we had that lens, it was everywhere. And it became clear that these weren't isolated market failures but a systemic coordination problem: institutions optimized for a world of genuine scarcity now applied to conditions increasingly capable of abundance.
Building a coherent framework pulled us into literatures we didn't expect — Ostrom's commons governance, the thermodynamics of information copying (Landauer/Bennett established that duplication approaches zero energy cost — every paywall is literally a dam against physics), Wright's Law applied to solar deployment curves, and Sen/Nussbaum's capabilities approach as an alternative to UBI.
The result proposes five design primitives for abundance-oriented institutions: Universal Capabilities, Commons Infrastructure, Polycentric Governance, Partner AI, and Market Residuals.
We try to steelman objections seriously — dedicated sections on free-rider problems (Section V, applying Ostrom's 8 design principles), the political economy of entrenched resistance, and genuine transition difficulties.
The sections we're LEAST confident in and most want pushback on:
1. The "stratified allocation" model — is the boundary between market/commons/guarantee principled or arbitrary? 2. Free-rider mitigation — do graduated sanctions + contribution recognition scale beyond small communities? 3. AI governance — are "constitutional limits on autonomous decision-making" enforceable or aspirational?
Full text readable on GitHub (no download needed): https://github.com/Prometheus-Apeiron/The-Abundance-Declarat...
Where does this framework fail? Where does it succeed?
Released under CC0.