Haute Lumière Academy · The school of living economics

La Bourse

Living systems economics, as a whole course. Seven volumes, seventy-seven chapters, and everything a class needs to be taught them. Free to read, free to teach, in any school.

Begin with Nº I.01 — The Ninety Days

A watercolour of a man walking toward a great tree on red earth, a second tree and distant mountains beyond. — The frontispieceThe walk to the tree.A bourse is a purse and an exchange in one word. This one keeps what it trades: the soil under the tree is part of the account.

Volumes7

Chapters77 + 21

Words1,508,664

Room questions1,176

Plates98

An economy is a living system or it is a liquidation. This course teaches the difference with arithmetic, one chapter at a time.

Three doors into the same course

A woman reading in a chair by a tall window, a lamp and dried grasses beside her, light across the rug.

For students — free

Every chapter, every concept brief, every quiz and all three workbooks, in full, with no account and no card. Read it in order or open it anywhere.

Seventy-seven chapters, each a teaching unit of six documents.

Start reading

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For teachers and facilitators

The guide, in one part: how to run any chapter in fifty minutes, ninety minutes or half a day, how to mark it, and every chapter's twelve questions in the order of the four Ds.

The same guide is published as data, so the house's agents tutor from it too.

Open the guide

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For organisations — $2,222

Corporate enrolment: the licence to teach La Bourse to your own people as your own programme, and the complete print edition to keep — 483 documents, seven volumes.

Once, for one organisation. The course stays free for everyone else.

Enrol your organisation

What one chapter is

Every chapter is an issue of Haute Lumière Commerce in nine movements, built on the four Ds of Appreciative Inquiry and the house's fifth. It opens on a plate and a letter, asks what is already working before it asks anything else, works the mathematics with at least one honest negative, and closes on the instrument a finance function would actually sign.

Movement	What it does
The Plate	One photograph, one caption. The image carries the argument before the argument.
The Letter	Why this chapter, now, addressed to the reader.
Discovery	What is already working — real, named, sourced cases.
The Arithmetic	The mathematics, worked, with units: what works, what does not, and where the line sits.
Dream	What becomes ordinary if this were the norm.
Design	The structure that gets there: mechanism, governance, sequence.
Destiny	How it holds once nobody is pushing, with its failure modes named.
Delight	What it feels like to live inside. The reason a model spreads without a mandate.
Operationalize This	The instrument, its balance-sheet treatment, the counterparty, the first ninety days.

Under each chapter sit ten one-page concept briefs, a ten-point quiz with its marking, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts, and three workbooks — one for the student, one for the corporate executive, one for the employee inside a Luminous Gainshare.

Volume I

Volume I · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Transition — From Here to the Living Economy

You did not come to this book for a philosophy of economics.

The whole volume

A woman in a gold silk blouse writing in an open book at her desk, morning light through the window behind her catching the candles.

Nº I.01 The Ninety Days The Ledger at First Light. A ninety-day plan is not a document. It is a decision that has been given a shape, and then given a morning.

A woman seated among cream linen with two open books, reading, soft light from the window at her left.

Nº I.02 Where You Already Stand The Inventory. An inventory is not a list of what you have. It is the discovery of what you have been using without noticing.

A woman and a man seated together in a white gazebo, both writing in notebooks, daylight off the lake behind them.

Nº I.03 The First Instrument Two Hands, One Page. An instrument is the moment a conviction acquires a second person. Until somebody else has signed it, it is still only an opinion with a spreadsheet.

A man in a dark suit reading a printed report of charts at his desk, lamplight and daylight meeting on the page.

Nº I.04 Reading a Balance Sheet as a Living System The Second Column. Nobody gave her a form for the second column. She ruled it herself, in the margin of a document that is otherwise finished, and it is the only part of the page that is about the future.

A woman standing alone in an empty room before a wide window of trees, sepia light running across the floor toward her.

Nº I.05 The Pilot That Pays Two Rooms, One Question. A pilot is not a small version of the plan. It is a comparison you built on purpose, in a place where the only difference is the one you made.

A woman at a broad wooden desk sorting papers, afternoon sun pouring through the tall windows behind her.

Nº I.06 Bringing the Money With You The Stack, in Afternoon Light. Capital is never one thing. It is three or four things placed in an order, and the order is the whole design. The stack on the table is not money yet — it is the shape the money will take.

A woman and a man talking across a small white table over lunch, a bare wall and a bright window beside them.

Nº I.07 The Second Circle The Third Chair. The third chair is the one that decides. A room with two people in it is a conversation. A room with three is a practice that can continue without any particular one of them.

A man standing at the head of a long boardroom table, speaking, the room lit evenly through a wall of glass.

Nº I.08 When It Stalls The Instrument Left Running. Nothing here has been used for a long time. One thing here has not stopped, and that is the only thing in the room that knows what happened.

Two women on floor cushions with cups of tea, turned toward each other in conversation, soft window light.

Nº I.09 The Institutional Handshake Two Hands and a Standing Order. An institution cannot change its own rules. It can, on any Tuesday, decide which of its existing rules a new thing belongs under — and that decision is the whole of the transaction.

A kitchen counter of pale wood with a cutting board, knives and cut vegetables, morning light from the windows beyond.

Nº I.10 Scaling Without Losing the Thing The Fortieth Kitchen. A thing has scaled when the fortieth person does it right without being watched, and cannot quite tell you why.

A brass key resting on an old wooden table, a shaft of sunlight falling across it.

Nº I.11 Handing It On The Second Set of Keys. A handover is not a ceremony. It is the moment the building stops needing you, and the only way to find out whether it has arrived is to be there and not intervene.

Four colleagues gathered at a long wooden table, looking down at plans spread across it, warm late sun behind them.

Nº I.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics The Whole Treasury, on One Table. Everything a corporation calls treasury, procurement, internal audit and legal is on this table, and all of it reports to her. That is not a shortage of institution. It is the shortest approval path in the economy.

A woman seated on the floor against a cushion, writing in a notebook, pale light from a misted window.

Nº I.E2 · extension For the Corporation Eleven Days Before the Sitting. The circled date is when the committee sits. The underlined one is when the papers are due, and it is the only date in the room that is real.

A woman in a cream silk robe writing by hand in a journal, candlelight and an orchid beside her.

Nº I.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies Two Ledgers, One Hand. The finger is on the same transaction twice. The two books disagree about nothing except what to call it.

A watercolour of a woman's face merging into trees, a house and hills. — Volume II

Volume II · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Foundations — The Paradigm and the Science

Volume I asked what you do on Monday.

The whole volume

A watercolour of a river winding through autumn trees, two small figures walking its bank toward a low sun.

Nº II.01 From Scarcity to Abundance Two Bowls, One Spring. The spring is not scarce. The bowl is. Almost everything this volume argues is contained in the difference between those two sentences.

A woman in linen standing at a tall window, looking out, morning light laid across the wall beside her.

Nº II.02 Markets as Living Systems The Slate, Before Opening. No equilibrium was computed here. A price was made by somebody who knew things, and it will be made again at eleven, and again if the weather turns.

A watercolour of golden hills crossed by field lines, sunflowers in the foreground under a wide sky.

Nº II.03 Non-Dual Economics The Line Somebody Drew. The boundary is not in the landscape. It is in the drawing. And somebody downstream of this pen is already being paid by where it lands.

A watercolour of rolling farmland in ochre and green, the hills repeating into the distance like a wave.

Nº II.04 The Science of Wholeness The Standing Wave. The pattern is not in the water and it is not in the flame. It is in the difference between them, and it will hold exactly as long as the difference does.

A man and a woman seated across a round table in a high office, the city pale behind the glass.

Nº II.05 Complexity and Economic Networks The Exchange, After Hours. The board is not the calls. The board is which calls are possible. Every economy has one, almost nobody has drawn it, and the drawing changes what you think you are looking at.

A woman walking away along a path through a glasshouse of palms, sunlight breaking through the canopy ahead of her.

Nº II.06 Thermodynamics and Economic Flow The Glasshouse Behind the Turbine Hall. The turbine took the work out of the steam. The glasshouse is what was left, and what was left is warm, and warmth is not nothing.

Three colleagues at a whiteboard in a sunlit room, one writing while the others listen.

Nº II.07 Information, Signal, and Price One Number on a Chalkboard. All of that reaches the next person as one number. The chalk is not a summary of what she knows. It is the only part of it that can be transmitted.

A woman and a man seated across from each other in a bright open office, mid-conversation, plants beside them.

Nº II.08 Networks, Trust, and Topology The Handshake, and the Ledger Behind It. The handshake is not the opposite of the contract. It is a contract whose enforcement was paid for in advance, over years, by people who are not in the room.

A watercolour of an open book with a garden growing out of its pages: succulents, a flowering stem and new leaves.

Nº II.09 Evolution and Economic Selection The Nursery Bed. Every row in this plot is a guess. The plot is not the guess. The plot is the apparatus that lets a guess be wrong cheaply, and lets a right one be carried into next year by somebody who was not here.

A man in a dark suit writing in a ledger beside printed charts, a library of books behind him.

Nº II.10 Measurement and What It Does The Weight and the Weighing. The balance does not describe the cloth. It describes the cloth in the one respect somebody decided to care about, and then the ledger forgets that a decision was made.

A woman reading in a lounge chair beside a tall window, plants around her and sun on the floor.

Nº II.11 The Case Against This Book The Marginal Hand. A book that cannot be argued with in the margin is not a book. It is an announcement. The margin is where a text becomes usable, and a text that leaves no room in it has told you what it thinks of you.

Hands holding an open book on a lap of white linen, the margin turned to the light from the side.

Nº II.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics The Margin, in Pencil. She is not deciding whether she agrees. She is deciding which sentences she would be willing to defend in a room where somebody has read the source.

A man standing at the end of a long boardroom table, the board seated and listening, daylight through the glass wall.

Nº II.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Board Table, Ten Minutes Early. She is not rehearsing the argument. She is finding the sentence that will be attacked, so that she is the one who says it first.

A woman writing at a small desk beside a pot of tea and a lotus, warm lights out of focus behind her.

Nº II.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies Two Columns, One Ledger. Neither document is a translation of the other. There is a set of rows where they describe the same thing, and a longer set where each holds something the other has no word for at all.

A woman in a linen robe standing by a window beside a vase of dried grasses, light on her shoulder. — Volume III

Volume III · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Money, Energy, Information

You have handled money every day of your adult life and you have almost certainly never been told what it is.

The whole volume

A man marking a chart of bar graphs while a colleague beside him holds a tablet, daylight from the windows.

Nº III.01 What a Currency Is Made Of The Column of Figures. Money has never been a substance. It is the agreement that these two columns must always match, held by enough people, for long enough, that the agreement can be spent.

A woman seated cross-legged on cushions with a cup of tea and a wooden tray, sun striping the wall behind her.

Nº III.02 Energy as the Denominator The Meter and the Kettle. The meter counts joules. Her hand is checking something the meter has no column for — whether this particular heat, in this particular hour, is the heat she actually needed.

A man writing at a desk on a balcony above a mountain valley, books stacked beside him, cloud over the peaks.

Nº III.03 Complementary and Local Currencies The Stamp, at the End of the Month. A currency is not a thing. It is an agreement with a running cost, and somebody is always paying it. The only question a design settles is who.

Four colleagues around a table raising their cups to each other, laughing, warm light under the pendant lamps.

Nº III.04 Credit as a Commons The Slate Behind the Bar. Every credit system in history began as this slate. The interesting question is never who is owed. It is what the village does when the slate fills up.

A watercolour of people working at a long wooden table inside a glasshouse full of autumn trees.

Nº III.05 Interest, Time, and the Discount Rate The Long Table. The table is the same width at both ends. It is the light that falls away. A discount rate is a claim about how fast it falls, and almost nobody who uses one has ever said out loud what theirs is made of.

A watercolour of a tree drawn whole, its roots spreading under the soil as wide as its crown.

Nº III.06 Mycelial Finance The Trade at the Root Collar. Everything here is trading with everything else and none of it is generous. That is not a disappointment. It is the reason the arrangement has lasted four hundred million years.

A woman reading a book by a curtained window, her face turned down to the page, soft morning light.

Nº III.07 The Regenerative Balance Sheet The Core on the Open Page. One of these two objects is audited and one of them is true, and the work of this chapter is to stop that being two different sentences.

Four colleagues standing together talking among plants, late sun coming through the glass behind them.

Nº III.08 Velocity, Circulation, and Health The Third Round. One of those notes came in this morning from the flour merchant's daughter, went out at noon to the greengrocer, and will be back on this street before Thursday. Nobody has ever measured that at the level of a country. It is measured here every evening, by hand, in a book.

A woman in a cream blouse standing in a sunlit studio, light falling through the windows in long bars across the wall.

Nº III.09 Digital Settlement Without Extraction The Counter at Closing. Every payment you have ever received arrived through somebody's pipe, and somebody set the price of the pipe. The question is only whether you have ever seen the number.

A watercolour of a broad tree with its roots reaching down into orange earth beneath a green canopy.

Nº III.10 Reserves and Resilience The Deep Pantry. A reserve is not what you have. It is what you have already decided not to use.

A woman wrapped in a blanket holding a cup on a wooden terrace, morning mist over the trees beyond.

Nº III.11 What Money Cannot Do The Standpipe at Six. She pays four times per litre what the household with the meter pays. There is no tariff on this water. That is precisely why it costs her so much.

A woman and a man seated in a loft office, turned toward each other, tall windows and plants around them.

Nº III.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics The Ledger Between Two Trades. The cash box holds what the day settled. The exercise book holds what the day cleared, which is the larger number and the one nobody taught her to write down.

Hands resting on an open book on a lap of white linen, a dried grass stem beside it, warm light.

Nº III.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Second Page. The decision was taken on page one. The money is on page nine, in a column that has been the same for eleven years because nobody has ever had a reason to open it.

A woman in a cream silk dress writing in a leather journal on a sofa, a candle and a cup of tea beside her.

Nº III.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies The Two Ledgers, One Object. Neither ledger is a translation of the other. They are two readings of one object, taken from opposite ends, and the whole craft is knowing which readings have to agree and which have no counterpart at all.

A timber living room open to a terrace, the sun setting over forested mountains. — Volume IV

Volume IV · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Production and Regeneration

You are holding, or you are about to specify, or you are about to make, something that somebody has described as better for the world than the thing it replaces.

The whole volume

A woman in a dark suit standing at the edge of a still green lake, seen from behind, mist on the forest beyond.

Nº IV.01 Making Things That Add The Declaration. A product and its declaration are two different objects, and the whole of this volume is about the distance between them.

A watercolour of a man at a desk beneath a great tree inside a glass room, plants all around him.

Nº IV.02 Materials and the Return Loop The Assay Bench. A material is not what it was called when it arrived. It is what it assays at, and the assay is the only sentence in this chapter a buyer will pay for.

A watercolour of two trees side by side, one green and one turning gold, their roots in the same earth.

Nº IV.03 Agriculture as the Model Case The Core, at Eleven in the Morning. Every argument in this chapter is about that line: how far down it goes, how long it took to get there, and how quickly it can be put back.

A man in a dark suit writing in an open book at a library desk, lamps lit among the shelves.

Nº IV.04 Manufacture at Biological Rates The Scaler's Book. Every plant has a capacity plate riveted to its frame. Very few have the other one — the number the ground will hand over, year after year, without being asked twice.

A watercolour of rolling hills in late summer, a farmhouse and a line of trees on the far ridge.

Nº IV.05 Energy Systems That Compound The Ten Thousandth. The ten thousandth panel costs less than the first. Nobody economised. Ten thousand people each learned something small and none of them could tell you what.

Timber lodges at the foot of jagged mountains, their windows lit gold as the sun goes down over the sage.

Nº IV.06 Waste as a Category Error The Conveyor at Three Kilometres. The powder on that belt is a waste product at one end and a raw material at the other. Nothing happens to it in between. It crosses a property line.

A woman reading in a rattan chair beside a tall white window, light falling across her and the floor.

Nº IV.07 Supply Chains as Ecologies The Second Room. Everyone draws a supply chain as a line because a line fits on a page. The thing itself is a population, and it is lit from a room you have not entered.

A woman seen from behind, reading on a cushioned bench that looks out over a lotus pond toward a garden pavilion.

Nº IV.08 The Repair Economy The Bench at Four O'Clock. Repair is the only branch of production where the labour is visible, which is exactly why it is the only branch of production that is priced honestly.

A watercolour of hills ploughed into bands of ochre and green, a farm on the far ridge.

Nº IV.09 Design for the Seventh Generation The Nursery Rows. Nobody plants a two-hundred-year tree for the tree. They plant it for the spacing, the succession, the road that reaches it and the ledger that will still be paying somebody to weed it in eighty years. The seedling is the cheapest part.

A watercolour of a single tree on orange ground, a young tree growing beside it.

Nº IV.10 Measuring Regeneration The Same Hole, Twice. Everything expensive about proving that land is recovering comes from not knowing exactly where you stood the first time.

A woman in a cream cardigan reading an open book on her lap, soft light from the side.

Nº IV.11 Where Regeneration Costs More The Invoice, Read Twice. A number that will not come down is still a number you can build on. The mistake is not paying it. The mistake is calling it temporary.

A watercolour of a small team at work in a green studio: at desks, at a screen, among hanging plants.

Nº IV.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics One Bench, Four Trades. A corporation puts those four objects in four departments and loses eleven weeks moving a decision between them. This bench has no departments, and the whole of this chapter is about what that is worth in pounds.

Five colleagues standing in conversation in a bright room, sun coming through the tall windows behind them.

Nº IV.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Four Desks. Everything in this volume that is worth having is approved in one of those four rooms, and not one of them is the room this page was sent to.

A woman holding an open journal on her lap, her eyes lowered, warm light across her face.

Nº IV.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies The Same Heap, Two Ledgers. There is one heap. The argument that has run through this whole volume is an argument between two sheets of paper about a thing that never moved.

A woman in a linen robe standing in a white room, looking toward the window, dried grasses beside her. — Volume V

Volume V · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Labour, Value, Flourishing

There is a question this volume has to ask before it can ask anything else, and it is the one question in economics that people lower their voices to say aloud.

The whole volume

A woman seated on the floor by a tall window writing in a notebook, smiling at what she has written.

Nº V.01 What a Person Is Worth The Two Ledgers. Two ledgers, kept honestly, will not agree. That is not a fault in the bookkeeping. It is the first true thing either of them tells you.

A woman reading in an armchair in a room of plants, a tall window and hills beyond.

Nº V.02 Work as Metabolism The Third Hour. Every calorie spent has to be replaced, and the replacing is not an interruption of the labour. It is the other half of it.

A woman in a soft knit sitting on a sofa, drinking from a cup held in both hands, pale window light.

Nº V.03 Ownership and the Worker The Statement on the Kitchen Table. A share in the company arrives once a year as a number on a page. What that number is worth to the person holding it is a different number, and almost nobody has been shown how to compute it.

A woman in a linen robe standing by a window, looking out, morning light on the wall beside her.

Nº V.04 Care as Infrastructure The Hour Before the Shift. Every road in a country is on a balance sheet somewhere. The hour that gets the worker to the road is not.

A woman reading on a daybed, the shadows of palm leaves falling across the wall behind her in late sun.

Nº V.05 Skill, Mastery, and Time The Twenty-Eighth Month. There is a month in every apprenticeship when the firm stops paying for the learning and starts being paid by it. In Switzerland it is month twenty-eight of thirty-six, and almost nobody — including the apprentice — knows the date.

A woman in a bronze silk blouse writing in a book at a desk, smiling down at the page, lamplight behind her.

Nº V.06 The Cooperative Firm, Audited The Second Column. An advocate reads the good year. An auditor reads the whole series, including the years nobody quotes.

Three colleagues walking together down a sunlit corridor, talking, dried grasses beside them.

Nº V.07 Income, Floor, and Dignity The Standing Order. A floor is not an amount. It is the removal of a question — and the question was taking up the room the rest of her life had to happen in.

A woman and a man seated facing each other among plants in a glass-walled room, talking with their hands.

Nº V.08 Meaning as an Economic Input The Handover. This is an economic input. It has a price, it has a return, and in most accounts it appears only as a wage that somebody accepted for reasons the ledger did not record.

A woman standing at a wooden desk beside a window, looking out, afternoon light on her and the dried grasses.

Nº V.09 Health as a Return on Capital The Standing Desk at Four O'Clock. The claim run is the only document in the building that cannot flatter anybody. It does not know who joined the programme, and that is exactly what makes it worth reading.

A watercolour portrait of a woman in a green shirt and camel jacket among leaves and sunflowers.

Nº V.10 The Thriving Survey Eleven Rungs. Every measurement of a life begins with a person translating a life into a number. The instrument is not the questionnaire. The instrument is that translation, and it is done by the respondent, alone, in about four seconds.

A woman in a cream shirt dress standing in a sunlit room, looking toward the windows.

Nº V.11 When Flourishing and Output Diverge Two Dials, One Hand. Two true instruments can disagree, and the disagreement is data. What you do next depends entirely on knowing which of them measures a flow and which measures the stock the flow is drawn from.

A watercolour portrait of a woman in a tailored jacket among leaves and flowers.

Nº V.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics Her Own Two Ledgers. In a company of nine the employer and the employee are sometimes the same person, and every finding in this volume that sits between those two roles arrives, in her case, inside one skull.

A woman seated on a white rug holding a cup in both hands, a teapot on the wooden stool beside her.

Nº V.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Paper Before the Meeting. A remuneration committee sees twenty numbers about people in a year. This chapter is about which four of them can be checked at the size the company actually is.

A woman reading on a bench under a pergola, plants around her and light through the slats.

Nº V.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies The Same Column, Twice. These are not two accounts of two things. They are two accounts of one thing, and everything that looks like a disagreement between them is a disagreement about where the object stops.

A group gathered round a long table with a vase of dried grasses, the room full of morning light. — Volume VI

Volume VI · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Governance and the Commons

Every organisation you have ever been inside had an answer to the question at the top of this page, and almost none of them had written it down.

The whole volume

Four colleagues walking toward a long table set with dried grasses, the room bright with sun.

Nº VI.01 Who Decides The Table Before the Meeting. A decision rule is furniture. It decides who can be in the room, how long they will be there, and who is not in the room at all — and it does this before anybody has said a word.

A woman standing at the far end of a glass boardroom table, speaking to the board seated on either side.

Nº VI.02 Ostrom, Fully Applied The Thursday Tribunal. The Tribunal de las Aguas has met outside the cathedral in Valencia, on Thursdays, for roughly a thousand years. It keeps no written record of its judgments. It has never needed one, because everybody who matters was standing there.

A small group walking and talking together through a warm office, lamps lit overhead.

Nº VI.03 Holarchy Without Hierarchy The Room Where It Was Already Decided. A nested structure is not a room without authority. It is a room that holds the authority for the thing it is about, and hands nothing upward that it can finish itself.

A woman in a white dress standing in a stone archway, an olive tree behind her in warm light.

Nº VI.04 The Commons That Held Thursday, Noon, the Apostles' Door. The oldest working court in Europe has no building, no transcript and no appeal. It has eight chairs, one hour a week, and seven hundred years of people turning up.

A woman seated on the floor of a long white room reading, a cup and a teapot beside her, candles lit.

Nº VI.05 The Commons That Fell Six Years of Paper. Every collapse in this chapter was measured before it happened, written down, and published. The interval between the writing and the falling is the only number here that generalises.

A man in a pale suit walking through a glass-roofed hall of plants, the low sun behind him.

Nº VI.06 Participatory Budgeting, Measured The Hall, Before the Count. A vote is a claim about who decided. A count is the only thing that can test it, and somebody has to stay late to do the counting.

A watercolour of a house beside a river among trees and agave, hills in the distance.

Nº VI.07 Law as a Living Instrument Two Signatures, One River. A right that nobody is paid to exercise is a sentence. A right with an office, a budget and two names on the appointment is an instrument.

A team seated around a white table in a meeting, one woman standing to speak, a board of sketches behind them.

Nº VI.08 Federation and Subsidiarity The Two Maps on One Table. Every argument about who decides is, underneath, an argument about whether the boundary of the decision matches the boundary of its consequences. Put the two maps on one table and most of the argument goes quiet.

A woman in linen standing at a doorway beside a young olive tree, warm light in the room behind her.

Nº VI.09 Conflict, Repair, and the Long Table Thursday, Noon, at the Cathedral Door. A conflict system is not a document either. It is a place, a time, and a group of people who are known to be there — and the cheapest of the three to provide is the place.

Four colleagues standing in conversation by a wall of windows, the sun low behind them.

Nº VI.10 Auditing a Governance System Five Years of Tuesdays. Nobody wrote these to be compared with each other. That is exactly why they can be.

A watercolour of a small settlement at the foot of red cliffs, houses among scrub and desert trees.

Nº VI.11 The Limits of Self-Governance The Boundary Stone. A boundary is what makes a commons governable. It is also the whole of what a commons cannot see. The stone is not a wall; it is a decision about whose voice counts, made once, in stone, by people who are no longer here.

A watercolour on an open book: a woman's portrait among leaves, sunflowers and fern.

Nº VI.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics The Rule, on One Side of One Sheet. A constitution for twenty-four people is one sheet, one date and eight lines. The reason it is short is not modesty. It is that every line above eight costs somebody an hour a year, and the group has about thirty-two hours in total.

A woman in linen standing at a window beside a tall vase of dried grasses, looking out into the light.

Nº VI.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Item That Waited Four Weeks. A firm counts the cost of every decision it takes. There is no line anywhere in its accounts for the cost of the ones it is still taking.

Two women seated cross-legged facing each other, each holding the same blue book, sun through the windows.

Nº VI.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies Two Documents, One Object. They were drafted four centuries apart, by people who would not have recognised each other's trade, about the same question: whose agreement is required before this can happen.

A glass house with an observatory dome on a mountainside at dusk, its windows lit. — Volume VII

Volume VII · 11 chapters · 3 extensions

Planetary and Cosmic

This volume asks what the largest frame is, and the honest answer is that the largest frame is already a financial document.

The whole volume

A woman wrapped in a cream shawl standing on a balcony above a forested valley, mist lying in the folds of the hills.

Nº VII.01 Planetary Boundaries as a Balance Sheet The Statement and the Weather. A balance sheet is a claim about a world. The claim is only as good as the audit, and the audit is out of the window.

A timber room with a low fire and floor cushions, a wall of glass framing snow-capped mountains.

Nº VII.02 Climate as an Economic System The Thermometer on the Balance Sheet. Climate economics is not the study of a catastrophe. It is the study of a quantity that has a physical unit and no price, and of what happens to a balance sheet when somebody finally writes one in.

A watercolour of hills in bands of gold, rust and green, wildflowers in the foreground.

Nº VII.03 Biodiversity as Infrastructure The Strip Through the Middle. The forest at the edge of the farm was worth two hectares of coffee for every hectare of itself. The same trees, cut into strips and put through the middle, could have been worth eight. Nobody moved them, because nobody had computed the multiplier.

A woman on a veranda holding a cup of tea, a book open beside her, a lotus garden and pavilion beyond.

Nº VII.04 The Ocean and Atmospheric Commons The Certificate and the Box. Two great commons, one atmosphere and one ocean, and only one of them has ever been governed successfully. The difference was never the size of the thing. It was whether the rule could be tested on an object that had to pass through somebody's hands.

A watercolour of rolling farmland, the soil shifting from ochre to green across the hills.

Nº VII.05 Bioregional Economics Where the Soil Changes Colour. A bioregion is not an idea about belonging. It is a boundary you can kneel down and touch, and the whole question is whether you can also put it on a balance sheet.

A woman seated against a tree by a misted lake, writing in a book, tall pines around her.

Nº VII.06 Watershed as the Unit of Account The Gauge at the Narrows. Everything that fell on all of that has to come past her hand, or go up as vapour, or still be in the ground. There is no fourth option. That is the whole reason this is an accounting boundary and a nation is not.

A woman seated on the forest floor writing in a notebook, sun breaking through the trees behind her.

Nº VII.07 Indigenous Economic Wisdom, Sourced The Fish Wheel and the Clipboard. An economy is not proved by what it is thought to believe. It is proved by what it counts, who signs the count, and what the count is allowed to decide.

A watercolour of open fields running to distant hills, wildflowers in the grass.

Nº VII.08 The Long View and the Discount Rate The Marker Field. These are not headstones. They are a message to somebody ten thousand years from now, written in geometry because no language is expected to survive. Somebody costed them, approved them and signed for them — which means somebody put a number on the year twelve thousand.

A watercolour of a young woman with an open book, flowers and leaves around her.

Nº VII.09 Space, Materials, and Real Abundance The Weight of the Bottle. The bottle holds one kilogram. On this bench it is worth a tenth of a penny. Four hundred kilometres above her head, the same kilogram is worth three thousand and fifty-nine dollars — and nothing about the water has changed.

An observatory dome on a lodge at dusk, its windows lit, red cloud over the mountains.

Nº VII.10 The Cosmological Frame The Aperture, Facing Up. Nobody took the heat away. The tray simply had an unobstructed view of something very cold and very far off, and that was enough.

Four people talking together by a tall window, the low sun behind them.

Nº VII.11 What We Owe the Next Thing The Handing Over. An inheritance is not a gift. It is a working stock, handed over mid-job, by somebody who has to let go of the handle before the other person has taken the weight.

Nº VII.E1 · extension For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics The Map With Three Boundaries On It. The largest frame in this edition arrives on one table as three lines on a map, and the whole of the practitioner's work is knowing which line answers which question.

A man in a white shirt seated against a tree trunk, reading a blue book, sunlight on the water behind him.

Nº VII.E2 · extension For the Corporation The Appendix Nobody Reads. Every number that decided anything today was chosen by somebody, once, and written down in a place the meeting did not reach. She has gone back for it.

An observatory dome above a glass house on a hillside, the sun setting over the ridge.

Nº VII.E3 · extension The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies The Last Column. Seven translations, made separately, by people working on different materials. The rows they share are interesting. The three blanks they share are the finding.

A watercolour portrait of a woman with flowers and leaves in her hair. — The colophonEvery figure in the edition is computed in a module beside the chapter and printed with its units. Where the first edition was loose, the second gives the better number and says so.

Made to be taken into a room

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Written for Luminous Prosperity Inc. Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: free to read, share and teach, unaltered and not for sale. An organisation teaching it as its own programme enrols once at $2,222.