Debt, wages, profit

Debt. A borrower commits to producing future records. The future is not symmetric with the present — consequences run one way. That asymmetry has a cost, and that cost is the floor of interest.

The institutional rate adds default risk, liquidity, expected inflation, administration. And, where the borrower’s corridor is narrow, a premium extracted from that. The test asks which components track real cost and which extract. Debt is fine. Interest is fine. Leverage is fine. Debt the borrower cannot carry, rates calibrated to distress, compounding faster than capacity — parasitic.

Wages. A wage is a price resolved at the site of labour. With live alternatives, real information and comparable bargaining position, the field is rich. With housing, hunger, debt, dependants, papers, a single employer, suppressed organising — the field is constrained, and the wage is read at that constraint. Not pure market truth. Not exploitation by category.

Profit. Surplus after the real costs of production, risk, coordination, wear and labour have been honoured. Cooperative where it tracks innovation, coordination, risk borne, efficiency found. Parasitic where it was made by pushing costs onto people or ground not paid — suppressed wages, monopoly, captured regulation, ecological drawdown read as free. The question is never whether surplus exists. It is what made it.

This is the short edition of Ø Applications — a summary. Where a step is compressed here, the original carries it in full. The original book (PDF) · This edition (PDF)

The same page on the420code.org: the420code.org/models/applications/04-the-architecture-of-economics/