Technical Reference
Civilization Progress Score
Structural conditions, the EOH→TEH pipeline, and the fiscal mechanisms that sustain a floor from subsistence to post-scarcity.
The Constitution
The HOURS economy runs without inflation, and stays that way, as long as Conditions I–III all hold at once. Condition IV is not required for monetary stability — but is strongly recommended for long-term resilience.
Every unit of currency (TEH) in circulation must correspond to a verified record of entropy-reduction labor performed. Currency is created only through registered work — the fulfillment of entropy obligations across any of the four domains — and destroyed through terminal consumption (a good consumed in its final use) or capital write-down (an asset that degrades beyond recovery).
Spending that transfers TEH between parties is circulatory, not destructive. Levies and fiscal mechanisms redirect TEH into capital investment and the Trust, but do not destroy it. Only terminal consumption and capital write-down remove TEH from existence.
The ledger identity must hold at ε = 0 (where barely any TEH is created or destroyed) and at ε = 0.99 (where both creation and destruction approach zero from price collapse). A verification mechanism that works only in the middle of the arc is incomplete.
supply = cumulative_creation − cumulative_destruction
creation = registered_eoh × mean_multiplier
destruction = terminal_consumption + capital_writedown
An independent governing body assigns skill-tier multipliers to recognized occupations based on entropy-reduction leverage — how many hours of entropy obligation does one hour of this person's labor address? The four-factor assessment measures four dimensions of this leverage: training requirements, demand intensity, practitioner scarcity, and measurable societal impact.
A Tier 1 worker fulfilling personal EOH reduces entropy at a near 1:1 ratio. A high-tier engineer designing water infrastructure works one hour but reduces thousands of personal EOH hours across a population.
The population-weighted average multiplier should be maintained within a defined band. Grounding the multiplier in measurable entropy-reduction leverage rather than social convention makes it harder to corrupt politically while maintaining its role as an incentive for human capital development.
mean_multiplier ∈ [1.8, 2.1] (target 2.1)
individual_max ≤ 6.0
teh_per_hour = eoh_per_hour × tier_multiplier
Stored currency may not generate additional currency through any mechanism — no lending at interest, investment returns, or financial instruments that produce currency without corresponding labor. Account balances change only through earnings and expenditures.
EOH obligations compound physically — a neglected roof generates escalating repair obligations. This resembles compound interest but is fundamentally distinct: it measures physical reality rather than enforcing a social convention; it rewards no party; and its behavior is nonlinear with sharp threshold failures, not smooth exponential curves. Adding monetary interest would measure entropy that does not exist.
Condition III eliminates passive wealth accumulation and requires that monetary stabilization be achieved through labor, stewardship investment, and fiscal policy rather than interest-rate manipulation.
Δbalance = income − expenditure (never += interest)
eoh_compounding = physics(capital_state) ← not monetary
teh_created_from_deferred_eoh = 0 ← until labor performs it
Conditions I–III define the foundational monetary architecture. Condition IV is not structurally required for the currency to function — but is strongly recommended for any implementation intended to operate over the long term.
If automation handles 99% of EOH fulfillment and then fails, the full entropy burden returns to human labor instantaneously. The Sufficiency Guarantee promises a floor of real purchasing power — but purchasing power requires goods and services to exist. If no human workforce can step in, the floor becomes a nominal promise the real economy cannot honor.
A minimum share of the workforce must maintain certified, current competency across essential infrastructure domains: agriculture, construction, energy, water, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics. A minimum annual labor obligation (260 hours) is divided among competency rotation, stewardship service, and regular employment. The multiplier system can recognize and incentivize this maintenance even when automation makes it economically unnecessary under normal conditions.
competency_reserve ≥ 15.5% of workforce
min_annual_hours ≥ 260 (rotation + stewardship + employment)
domains: agriculture, construction, energy, water,
healthcare, manufacturing, logistics
The Mechanism
Physical reality generates entropy obligations. Human labor fulfills them. Currency records the fulfillment. Here is the exact sequence — and where ε correctly belongs.
What the world is. The actual measurable state of the civilization's capital, ecology, population, and knowledge. This is the input to EOH generation — not ε.
What entropy demands across all four domains. EOH is a property of physical reality — it does not depend on the automation level. A neglected bridge generates infrastructure EOH regardless of ε.
How much of the total entropy obligation falls on human labor. Machines handle the rest (total_eoh × ε). This is the first and only place ε appears in the pipeline.
ε enters hereHow much the collective admits to its ledger. Personal EOH starts near-zero at ε = 0 — subsistence household work is private, not collective. The other three domains enter the ledger earlier and follow different curves. These are fundamentally different registration mechanisms.
The EOH on the collective ledger — what the monetary system can see and compensate. Registration is the boundary between the private economy and the collective economy.
Currency enters circulation. The multiplier (Condition II) applies the worker's skill tier — one hour of high-leverage work creates more TEH than one hour of base-tier work, because it addresses more entropy per hour of labor.
Currency creation eventSteps ①–② are pure physics. They take the actual state of the world and return the entropy obligations that state implies. ε does not appear here. Using ε as a stand-in for untracked physical conditions inside EOH generation blurs what is being measured and prevents the model from describing civilizations that don't follow the ideal path — fast automation with low capital investment, for example.
TEH is destroyed by two events only: terminal consumption (a good or service consumed in its final use) and capital write-down (an asset that degrades beyond recovery). Levies, transfers, and spending are circulatory — they move TEH between accounts but do not remove it from existence. Supply = cumulative creation − cumulative destruction. No exceptions.
Sovereign Wealth Architecture
The Trust is the fiscal mechanism that keeps the floor rising with automation. Its two co-equal structural obligations — stewardship and ecological — are funded from the same pool as the sufficiency guarantee.
As automation reduces the human labor content of the Sufficiency basket, the Guarantee's purchasing power increases automatically. This is not a policy decision — it is a mathematical consequence of the system's structure. TEH-denominated prices fall as automation handles more EOH, so the same nominal TEH buys more. Any modification that allows the floor to decline in real terms — redefining what counts as "enough," applying it differently by region, or adding eligibility conditions that weren't there before — violates the system's core commitment.
The levy collects TEH and routes it to the Trust, which funds allocations and the guarantee. It does not destroy TEH. TEH is destroyed only by terminal consumption (a good consumed in its final use) and capital write-down (an asset that degrades beyond recovery). Spending, transfers, and levy flows are circulatory — they redirect TEH through the economy but do not remove it from existence.
Condition III (Zero Interest) prohibits stored currency from generating additional currency through any mechanism. The Trust's revenue comes from labor levies — current entropy resistance — not from returns on accumulated balances. EOH obligations compound physically (a neglected roof escalates its own repair cost), but the monetary system must not compound artificially. Adding interest would measure entropy that does not exist.
Questions
Common questions about how the framework works — organized by topic.
EOH is the unit of measurement for the labor demand that physical reality generates. It is not currency — it is a measure of what the world needs done. Every element of the capital stock, including every living person, generates EOH continuously through the action of entropy.
When a worker fulfills an entropy obligation that has been registered in the collective ledger, the EOH is retired and real TEH is created through verified labor. EOH measures what the world needs. TEH measures what a worker earns for providing it.
TEH is the unit of currency. One TEH represents one verified hour of human contribution to the collective resistance of entropy, adjusted for the worker's skill-tier multiplier. A Tier 3 worker fulfilling 100 EOH at a 3.0 multiplier creates 300 TEH.
TEH enters circulation through registered labor (creation) and exits through terminal consumption and capital write-down (destruction). Spending and levies are circulatory — they move TEH but do not destroy it.
Read more: The Multiplier →ε is derived by comparing actual machine EOH fulfillment to total physical EOH demand. The physical state of a civilization — its capital stock, ecosystem health, population structure, and knowledge base — determines what EOH obligations exist. ε emerges from how much of that obligation machines are actually fulfilling.
Setting ε by decree would be like announcing a temperature without changing the thermometer's environment. You can describe the score you want; you cannot produce it by decree. You produce it by building automated capital that actually fulfills entropy obligations.
This distinction shapes the entire architecture. The physical state of the world determines what obligations exist. ε shows up only in the layer that divides those obligations between human labor and machines — which is exactly where it belongs.
Entropy is measured in time. Systems degrade over time. Biological needs recur on time cycles. Maintenance is scheduled in time. The hour is not an arbitrary social convention — it is the natural unit of the phenomenon the economy exists to manage.
Using the hour makes the currency's relationship to physical reality explicit and auditable. It also means the unit does not change as the economy evolves: one TEH is always one hour of entropy resistance, regardless of what zone of the arc the civilization occupies.
Yes — within structural bounds of 260 to 3,120 hours per year. Workers are not assigned a fixed schedule. Because the multiplier scales compensation per hour while the sufficiency basket is denominated in the same stable TEH, a higher-multiplier worker can meet their needs in fewer hours and choose to reclaim that time for family, rest, or community.
At the national scale, this creates an Hours Reserve — the aggregate gap between workers' chosen hours and their maximum capacity. That reserve activates automatically through the price mechanism when the economy faces a shock, providing a counter-recessionary buffer with no legislation, no debt, and no centralized decision required.
Read more: Liberation by the Hour →The four-factor assessment that produces each occupational multiplier is empirically grounded, not politically negotiated. Training duration is validated against actual competency outcomes — if practitioners reach benchmarks at year four but credentialing mandates year six, the effective score uses four. Scarcity is measured as functional shortage, not licensing-restricted supply; the assessment body distinguishes genuine shortage from artificial barriers.
Every tier assignment expires after five years and must be reassessed from current data. And a population-weighted average multiplier band (1.8–2.1) creates a system-wide constraint: no occupation can argue for more without creating countervailing pressure on others. This makes the trade-offs transparent rather than invisible.
Read more: The Multiplier →An economy with almost no automation is not an edge case. It is where most of human history has lived, and where any civilization can find itself again after a disruption — infrastructure collapse, ecological crisis, pandemic, energy failure. The framework must be fully defined there, not merely degrade gracefully to it.
At ε = 0, the collective ledger sees almost no registered activity: most personal EOH is private, most production is household-scale, and TEH barely circulates. Any mechanism that only works at ε = 0.40 (the current calibration reference) is calibrated for a moment, not for the arc.
Prices fall, because less human labor goes into everything. TEH-denominated prices reflect the human labor content of goods and services. As automation fulfills a larger share of EOH, the labor content per unit of output falls, and prices fall accordingly.
The floor rises automatically: the same nominal TEH buys more as prices decline. This is not inflation management — it is what the math produces when the ledger identity holds and the Sufficiency Guarantee is denominated in real purchasing power.
At ε = 0.99, basket prices have collapsed to roughly 11% of their ε = 0 level. TEH creation and destruction both approach zero. The system contracts coherently on both sides of the ledger.
Read more: The Sufficiency Guarantee →Yes. Infrastructure collapse, ecological crisis, or pandemic can move ε downward. The framework models this via stress functions — automation failure shock, deferred maintenance crisis, demographic shock.
Condition IV (Distributed Competency) is the structural hedge against sudden reversal. A civilization at ε = 0.90 that maintains a 15.5% workforce reserve in essential domains can absorb the return of EOH burden to human labor. A civilization that has let that reserve atrophy cannot honor the floor it promised.
Read more: The Transition →UBI, Degrowth, Doughnut Economics, and Participatory Economics each identify something genuinely broken in conventional economics and propose genuine fixes. What they share is a common limitation: they operate within — or in reaction to — a monetary system that was never designed to express what they're trying to accomplish.
HOURS doesn't compete with these frameworks. It operates beneath them, providing a monetary and accounting foundation where their goals become structurally achievable rather than perpetually aspirational. UBI's floor is built into the price system, not bolted on top of it. Degrowth's stability is guaranteed by zero interest, not imposed by policy. The doughnut's ecological boundaries become ledger line items, not indicators. The pattern is the same in every case: HOURS is the layer they're all missing.
Read more: HOURS and the Alternatives →Yes — there are two coherent paths. The institutional path involves a two-decade phased transition with constitutional change, a Civilizational Labor Inheritance accounting for existing capital stock, and a formal parallel currency period. It is comprehensive, democratic, and deliberately reversible at each phase.
The market path is faster and requires no legislation: TEH is introduced alongside fiat and allowed to trade at a market exchange rate. Because TEH does not inflate — one hour is one hour, perpetually — rational actors in a dual-currency environment increasingly prefer it as a store of value. The two paths are not mutually exclusive; a civilization may need both, the institutional path for legitimacy and the market path for grassroots adoption.
Read more: The Transition →A levy on registered labor income. When a worker earns TEH by fulfilling registered EOH, a fraction is collected by the Trust. All levy revenue is circulatory — the Trust receives it and directs it to stewardship allocation, ecological allocation, and the sufficiency guarantee.
The levy does not destroy TEH — it redirects it. The Trust then uses that TEH to fund obligations that ensure the capital stock is maintained, ecosystems are stewarded, and no one falls below the sufficiency floor.
Read more: The Sufficiency Guarantee →Both draw from the full Trust balance independently. Neither is "what's left after the other." Treating one as residual would violate the physical co-equality of infrastructure entropy and ecological entropy as civilizational obligations.
Ecological EOH has historically been invisible — treated as a free externality. Making it a co-equal structural obligation alongside infrastructure is the mechanism that reverses the historical pattern of ecological collapse. If ecological allocation were residual, it would be the first thing squeezed in a fiscal contraction.
Monetary interest creates currency without labor — it measures entropy that does not exist. Condition III ensures the currency reflects only real entropy resistance.
Capital earns its place in this system by reducing EOH, not by accumulating money. A water main is justified because it eliminates more personal EOH than it generates in maintenance burden. The return on capital is measured in entropy-hours eliminated, not in TEH accumulated.
EOH obligations do compound physically — a neglected system escalates its own repair cost. But this is physics, not finance. The TEH is created only when someone actually performs the repair labor.
Read more: The Sufficiency Guarantee →Conditions I–III are required for monetary stability — ledger identity, multiplier band, and zero interest are the minimum set for a TEH-denominated economy to achieve stable, inflation-proof operation.
Condition IV (Distributed Competency) is strongly recommended for civilizational resilience. A system satisfying only I–III is monetarily sound but brittle under automation failure. The floor is only as real as the workforce's capacity to honor it when automated systems fail.
See the Framework Reference →Guardrail I (Physical Grounding): EOH generation rates must be derived from measurable physical indicators — sensor data, engineering standards, material science, ecological monitoring, public health data. Rates must be auditable against observable reality. When the assessment says a bridge generates 200 EOH per year, that figure must trace to inspectable conditions, not a budgetary target.
Guardrail III (Governance Independence): the body that assesses EOH generation rates must be constitutionally independent, with structural protections equivalent to those given the multiplier body under Condition II. Whoever controls EOH assessment controls the economy's labor demand signal. This power must not be subject to short-term political pressure.