The model already has its parts: the floor, the four channels, the rules for scarce goods. Following the money around them matters, because a model that pays people but never asks where the money comes back from is a promise, not an economy.
Five steps around the circle
- Machines produce. Automation makes most goods and services: food, buildings, transport, energy, routine care, routine law. The firms that own it earn revenue when what they make is bought.
- A public share returns. Part of that return belongs to the public: equity stakes taken as the price of public inputs such as the grid, permits, public data, and public research, plus levies on automation rents and a share on natural resources drawn down. This is capacity circulation made concrete.
- The share funds the floor and the commissions. The public share pays every person’s floor credits first, then the commission funds that pay for care, mentoring, stewardship, and local research.
- People spend. Credits and income are spent on homes, food, travel, and the human work people value: a concert, a meal a person cooked, a teacher, a carer.
- Spending becomes income. What people spend becomes firms’ revenue and people’s contribution income, through exchange, commission, office, and venture. From that revenue the public share is taken again, and the circle repeats.
Two currents, one circle
Two kinds of value move together. One is goods: what machines and people actually make. The other is money: the claims people hold on those goods. A healthy loop keeps them in step. When the money grows faster than the goods, prices rise and every credit buys less. When the money stops reaching people, the goods pile up unsold. Most of what can go wrong with circulation is one current pulling away from the other.
The floor has a built-in guard. It is a standard of quality priced by the floor measure, not a fixed sum, so if prices rise, the measured cost of the floor rises with them and the credit follows. What the floor guarantees is a home and a life at a standard, not a number of credits. New money comes in the same way: issued by a published rule as sustainable output grows, it enters through floor credits and commission funds, never by buying assets from those who already hold them (who creates money).
Where saving fits
Not every credit is spent at once, and it should not be. Saving is how a person builds toward something larger, such as a share in a venture or a claim on a scarce good. Money saved by a person usually reaches the loop again through what it is lent to or invested in. The danger is not saving. It is money that leaves the productive circle entirely and sits in things no one can make more of, which is taken up in where circulation breaks.
The loop is not national
Goods cross borders, profits move, and credits are spent on things made elsewhere. Circulation happens across regions and the world, not inside one country’s borders. A region whose spending flows out and never returns is losing circulation even while its people are paid. The framework already measures this as ecological leakage: cost and value crossing a system’s boundary without being counted. A healthy loop has to be read at every scale where it can leak.
What every part of the model is for
Seen as a loop, each piece of the model has a job:
| Part | Its job in the loop |
|---|---|
| The public share | brings part of the return back from the owners of automation |
| Floor credits | put purchasing power in every hand, every month |
| Commission funds | pay for the work the market cannot price |
| The four channels | turn spending into income for people who contribute |
| The inheritance allowance | keeps accumulated wealth from leaving the circle for generations |
| The closed-field test | keeps any one holder from becoming the place the loop drains into |
Take any one away and the loop does not stop at once. It begins to pool.