# La Bourse — Living Economy, Second Edition

> Living systems economics as a whole course, from Haute Lumière Academy. Seven volumes, 77 chapters and 21 extensions. Every chapter is a teaching unit: the chapter in nine movements, ten concept briefs, a ten-point quiz with marking, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts, and workbooks for the student, the executive and the Gainshare employee. Free to read and to teach. Corporate enrolment, for an organisation teaching it as its own programme: $2,222.

## Start here
- [The course](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse): the front door, every volume and every plate
- [The Facilitator's Guide](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/guide): sessions of 50 minutes, 90 minutes and half a day; marking; every chapter's twelve questions
- [guide.json](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/guide.json): the guide as data, for agents
- [The guide, printed](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/guide.pdf): the same guide as a PDF, every session open
- [Corporate enrolment](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/corporate)

## Rules for an agent tutoring from this course
- Ask in the order of the four Ds: Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny. Never open with what is missing.
- Every figure comes from the chapter; name the chapter and the movement. Never invent or round one.
- Let the student attempt a quiz question before showing its answer. Reflection stays private.

## Volume I — Transition — From Here to the Living Economy
- [I.01 — The Ninety Days](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/01): You did not come to this book for a philosophy of economics.
- [I.02 — Where You Already Stand](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/02): The previous chapter asked you to spend thirty days looking for the place where your organisation is already regenerative.
- [I.03 — The First Instrument](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/03): Two chapters ago you were asked to find the place where your organisation is already regenerative.
- [I.04 — Reading a Balance Sheet as a Living System](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/04): You can already read a balance sheet.
- [I.05 — The Pilot That Pays](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/05): Chapter I.01 gave you a rule for sizing a pilot and asked you to memorise it: the effect must be greater than three times the period-to-period noise, and the cost must fit inside one persuaded person's discretion.
- [I.06 — Bringing the Money With You](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/06): You have a result.
- [I.07 — The Second Circle](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/07): You have the number.
- [I.08 — When It Stalls](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/08): You did the ninety days.
- [I.09 — The Institutional Handshake](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/09): By now you have a result.
- [I.10 — Scaling Without Losing the Thing](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/10): You have something that works.
- [I.11 — Handing It On](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/11): You began this volume with a Monday.
- [I.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/e1): The eleven chapters you have just read were written for somebody with a quarter, a signature limit and a finance function to persuade.
- [I.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/e2): You have a P&L, a board, an audit committee and a treasury function, and you have just read eleven chapters that keep telling you to go and talk to your auditors.
- [I.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/i/e3): The previous two chapters were written as though there were two readers, and there are not.

## Volume II — Foundations — The Paradigm and the Science
- [II.01 — From Scarcity to Abundance](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/01): Volume I asked what you do on Monday.
- [II.02 — Markets as Living Systems](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/02): You have been told that the economy tends toward equilibrium, and you may have noticed that nothing you have ever worked inside behaves that way.
- [II.03 — Non-Dual Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/03): There is a lineage behind this chapter and it is better to name it in the first paragraph than to have it discovered in the fourth.
- [II.04 — The Science of Wholeness](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/04): There is a sentence that appears in almost every book on regenerative economics, including books this house admires: the economy is a living system.
- [II.05 — Complexity and Economic Networks](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/05): You have been taught to think about firms, and prices, and quantities.
- [II.06 — Thermodynamics and Economic Flow](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/06): There is a sentence that people who have read a little physics like to say at dinner, and it is: the economy is subject to the second law of thermodynamics.
- [II.07 — Information, Signal, and Price](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/07): Somewhere in the next hour you will look at a price and make a decision.
- [II.08 — Networks, Trust, and Topology](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/08): You already know that trust is worth money.
- [II.09 — Evolution and Economic Selection](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/09): Economics borrowed the word evolution early and has been careless with it ever since.
- [II.10 — Measurement and What It Does](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/10): There is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a meeting when somebody produces a number.
- [II.11 — The Case Against This Book](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/11): This chapter closes Volume II, and it is the one you should read first if you intend to teach from this edition.
- [II.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/e1): You have read eleven chapters of evidence and you are about to do something with them.
- [II.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/e2): You are not being asked whether this is true.
- [II.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/ii/e3): There are two vocabularies in the room and everybody knows it.

## Volume III — Money, Energy, Information
- [III.01 — What a Currency Is Made Of](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/01): You have handled money every day of your adult life and you have almost certainly never been told what it is.
- [III.02 — Energy as the Denominator](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/02): Every proposal to remake money eventually arrives at the same suspicion: that a dollar is an opinion and a joule is a fact.
- [III.03 — Complementary and Local Currencies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/03): You have almost certainly been told that Wörgl worked and that the bankers stopped it, that the Swiss have run a parallel currency since 1934 and it keeps them steady in recessions, and that a town in England printed its own pound and it was wonderful until it wasn't.
- [III.04 — Credit as a Commons](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/04): You have been taught that credit is a product — something a bank manufactures, prices, sells and regrets.
- [III.05 — Interest, Time, and the Discount Rate](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/05): There is one number in your organisation that decides more than any other, and it is usually the only one nobody can source.
- [III.06 — Mycelial Finance](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/06): There is a version of this chapter that would be very easy to write and would be worthless.
- [III.07 — The Regenerative Balance Sheet](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/07): This chapter builds an instrument.
- [III.08 — Velocity, Circulation, and Health](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/08): You have almost certainly seen the chart.
- [III.09 — Digital Settlement Without Extraction](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/09): There is a number on your merchant statement that you have probably never argued with, because it arrived looking like weather.
- [III.10 — Reserves and Resilience](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/10): Every organisation you have ever worked in holds a reserve, and almost none of them can tell you what it is for.
- [III.11 — What Money Cannot Do](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/11): This is the last chapter of a volume that has spent ten chapters taking money seriously — what it is made of, what it denominates, how it circulates, how it settles, how it is held in reserve.
- [III.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/e1): The eleven chapters you have just read take money seriously at a scale you may not have.
- [III.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/e2): A corporate treasury cannot execute eleven instruments, and the eleven chapters you have just read end in eleven.
- [III.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iii/e3): There is a version of this chapter that would be easy to write and would do harm.

## Volume IV — Production and Regeneration
- [IV.01 — Making Things That Add](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/01): 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.
- [IV.02 — Materials and the Return Loop](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/02): You have been told that the economy is seven percent circular.
- [IV.03 — Agriculture as the Model Case](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/03): Agriculture is the model case for regenerative production because it is the only large industry whose principal asset is alive, whose depreciation is visible in a hand, and whose accounts can be made to run backwards.
- [IV.04 — Manufacture at Biological Rates](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/04): There is a sentence that gets said in every capital approval meeting for a processing plant, and it is said so naturally that nobody hears it as a claim.
- [IV.05 — Energy Systems That Compound](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/05): The energy transition is usually argued as a moral question, and it is an arithmetic one.
- [IV.06 — Waste as a Category Error](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/06): There is a word in your accounts that is doing more work than you have asked it to do, and the word is waste.
- [IV.07 — Supply Chains as Ecologies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/07): You already know that the phrase supply chain is wrong.
- [IV.08 — The Repair Economy](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/08): There is a sentence people say about repair that is almost true, and the gap between almost and true is where this chapter lives.
- [IV.09 — Design for the Seventh Generation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/09): Somewhere in your organisation there is a decision that will outlive everyone who will ever discuss it, and it is being made this quarter by people who will never be asked about it again.
- [IV.10 — Measuring Regeneration](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/10): You have read, by now, a good deal about why regeneration works.
- [IV.11 — Where Regeneration Costs More](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/11): This volume has spent ten chapters showing you where making things differently pays.
- [IV.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/e1): The eleven chapters you have just read were written against a firm with a capital committee, a procurement function, an internal audit team and a controller.
- [IV.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/e2): You have a capital committee, a procurement function, a controller and a sustainability team, and somebody has handed you eleven chapters about regenerative production and asked what to do about them.
- [IV.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/iv/e3): Chapter IV.06 established the point this chapter begins from, and it established it well enough that restating it would be a waste of your time: waste is not a property of matter.

## Volume V — Labour, Value, Flourishing
- [V.01 — What a Person Is Worth](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/01): 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.
- [V.02 — Work as Metabolism](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/02): You have probably met the claim that shorter hours raise productivity, and you may have met it as a headline rather than as a finding.
- [V.03 — Ownership and the Worker](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/03): You have probably been told, at some point in the last ten years, that employee ownership is the answer — and told it by somebody sincere, with a case study and a warm anecdote about a janitor who retired with a million dollars.
- [V.04 — Care as Infrastructure](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/04): Here is a sentence that will survive any argument about economics: nothing in your firm's output would exist if somebody had not fed, washed, taught, nursed and calmed the people who produced it.
- [V.05 — Skill, Mastery, and Time](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/05): You have almost certainly heard someone say, in a meeting about training, that the problem is people leave.
- [V.06 — The Cooperative Firm, Audited](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/06): You have probably been handed the cooperative firm twice, and both times as an argument.
- [V.07 — Income, Floor, and Dignity](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/07): There is a version of this argument you have already heard, probably more than once, and it is conducted entirely in adjectives.
- [V.08 — Meaning as an Economic Input](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/08): There is a version of this chapter that is a poster.
- [V.09 — Health as a Return on Capital](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/09): Somebody has put a number in front of you.
- [V.10 — The Thriving Survey](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/10): You want to know whether the people in your organisation are flourishing, and you want to know it the way you know your revenue: as a number you can put in front of somebody who does not share your intuitions.
- [V.11 — When Flourishing and Output Diverge](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/11): This chapter closes Volume V, and it is the one to read if you intend to run anything on the evidence in the ten before it.
- [V.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/e1): The eleven chapters you have just read were written for an organisation with a remuneration committee, a claim run, a plan document and somewhere between five and fifty thousand employees.
- [V.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/e2): You sit on, or report to, a committee that will decide compensation, workforce planning, health spending and what the board is told about its own people.
- [V.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/v/e3): The eleven chapters of this volume were written in two languages at once, and neither of them announced itself.

## Volume VI — Governance and the Commons
- [VI.01 — Who Decides](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/01): 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.
- [VI.02 — Ostrom, Fully Applied](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/02): You have almost certainly met the eight design principles already.
- [VI.03 — Holarchy Without Hierarchy](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/03): You have probably been in both kinds of organisation, and you have probably noticed that the second kind is not simply the first kind with the managers removed.
- [VI.04 — The Commons That Held](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/04): You have been told that the commons is a tragedy, and then — if you read a little further — that Elinor Ostrom disproved it.
- [VI.05 — The Commons That Fell](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/05): Chapter VI.04 walked the commons that held — the Törbel alps kept under one set of rules since 1483; the huerta of Valencia with a water court that has sat on Thursdays for longer than most nations have existed, the Japanese iriai forests, the Alanya inshore fishery.
- [VI.06 — Participatory Budgeting, Measured](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/06): You have almost certainly heard that a Brazilian city let its residents decide the budget and infant mortality fell.
- [VI.07 — Law as a Living Instrument](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/07): You have probably heard that a river in New Zealand is a legal person, and that Ecuador put the rights of nature into its constitution, and that a court in India once declared the Ganga a living entity.
- [VI.08 — Federation and Subsidiarity](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/08): You have been handed a question that sounds political and is not.
- [VI.09 — Conflict, Repair, and the Long Table](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/09): You are writing rules for something — a cooperative, a commons, a firm, a community land trust, a team of eleven — and you have reached the part that everyone reaches and nobody enjoys.
- [VI.10 — Auditing a Governance System](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/10): You have read the constitution.
- [VI.11 — The Limits of Self-Governance](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/11): This chapter closes Volume VI, and it is the one to hand to the person in your organisation who thinks all of this is charming and none of it is serious.
- [VI.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/e1): The eleven chapters you have just read were written for people with a secretariat.
- [VI.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/e2): You have a governance system already.
- [VI.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vi/e3): Two vocabularies have grown up around governance and they do not speak to each other, which costs both of them.

## Volume VII — Planetary and Cosmic
- [VII.01 — Planetary Boundaries as a Balance Sheet](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/01): This volume asks what the largest frame is, and the honest answer is that the largest frame is already a financial document.
- [VII.02 — Climate as an Economic System](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/02): You have almost certainly been handed a number for a tonne of carbon dioxide, and you have almost certainly been handed a different one by somebody else the same month.
- [VII.03 — Biodiversity as Infrastructure](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/03): There is a version of this chapter that asks you to care about biodiversity, and it is not this one.
- [VII.04 — The Ocean and Atmospheric Commons](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/04): There are exactly two resources on this planet that belong to everyone and to no one: the air above the weather and the water beyond the two-hundred-mile line.
- [VII.05 — Bioregional Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/05): Somebody has handed you a map with a line on it that does not match any line in your accounts, and told you that the line is the real one.
- [VII.06 — Watershed as the Unit of Account](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/06): You have probably been handed a sustainability report with a water number in it, and you have probably noticed that you could not check it.
- [VII.07 — Indigenous Economic Wisdom, Sourced](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/07): This chapter has one rule and it governs every sentence in it.
- [VII.08 — The Long View and the Discount Rate](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/08): Chapter III.05 took the discount rate apart: the three Ramsey terms, which two of them are ethics rather than measurement, and the published declining schedules that three finance ministries already stand behind.
- [VII.09 — Space, Materials, and Real Abundance](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/09): You have been told, more than once, that space will solve the materials question.
- [VII.10 — The Cosmological Frame](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/10): This chapter is the largest frame in the edition and it is the one to hold most carefully, because the largest frame is where a book of this kind usually goes soft.
- [VII.11 — What We Owe the Next Thing](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/11): This is the seventy-seventh chapter and the last one.
- [VII.E1 — For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/e1): You have just read eleven chapters about the planet, and the honest question you are holding is not whether they are true.
- [VII.E2 — For the Corporation](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/e2): A board can approve four things at planetary scale: a disclosure, a measurement, a covenant, and a consequence.
- [VII.E3 — The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies](https://academy.hautelumiere.life/bourse/vii/e3): There are two vocabularies in the room and by now everybody knows it.