Yin Yang Economics

The Distribution of Agency

Yin Yang Economics views both Commerce and Governance through the distribution of Agency.

Agency is the capacity to make choices that enter a system and influence what happens next.

Within Commerce, Agency can be more concentrated or more distributed, from economic choices being controlled primarily by a relatively small number of actors to those choices being increasingly available to individuals.

Within Governance, the same continuum exists, from power concentrated in a ruler or small group to power distributed among the people being governed.

Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Despotism, and Democracy, viewed this way, are not fixed categories but positions along these continua.

The D.I.R.T. Framework

Yin Yang Economics considers four characteristics that shape Agency:

Data
How completely and accurately can the system capture what individuals want and do?

Inclusivity
How broadly can individuals participate and have their choices represented?

Responsiveness
How quickly and effectively can the system respond to those choices?

Trust
How confidently can people rely on the integrity of participation, data, and response?

Together, these dimensions shape how effectively Agency can operate within a system.

Changes in Data, Inclusivity, Responsiveness, and Trust can expand Agency while also changing how that Agency is distributed.

The most powerful force changing these conditions is technology.

Technology and Agency

Technology continually expands both what actors are able to do and how that Agency can be distributed.

Transportation expands mobility and trade. Communication expands the movement of information. Computing makes information increasingly legible and actionable. Networks expand participation and coordination across distance and scale. AI expands our capacity to interpret complexity, anticipate outcomes, and respond.

How those expanding capabilities are distributed depends on the choices made within the system.

Both systems evolve according to the incentives that drive them, the signals they measure, and their capacity to respond.

Incentives and Signal Measurement

Technology expands what systems can do. Incentives shape what they measure and optimize.

Commerce has a powerful organizing incentive: profit.

To compete effectively, commercial actors need to understand what people want, what they value, and what they will choose.

That creates a continuous incentive to improve the measurement of commercial demand.

Over time, we built institutions around this relationship and increasingly sophisticated systems for measuring and responding to it.

Profit provides the incentive. Demand provides the signal.

Governance has a different objective: the public good.

But the public good is not a single measurable outcome. Governance must reconcile competing interests and make collective choices about rights, resources, priorities, and the society we want to build.

To do that democratically, Governance also needs signals from the people it serves.

We have created mechanisms for producing those signals—elections, polls, petitions, consultations, and other forms of public participation.

But these signals remain largely fragmented and episodic, measured differently at different times and places.

Commerce has developed increasingly sophisticated systems for continuously measuring demand and responding to it.

Governance has not developed an equivalent system for continuously measuring civic demand and informing our pursuit of the public good.

The Great Divergence

For most of history, Commerce and Governance operated under many of the same technological constraints.

People, goods, and information moved slowly. Geography limited participation and choice, and both commercial and civic demand were difficult to capture and measure.

Commerce was slow. Governance was slow. In that shared constraint, there was a kind of balance.

But during the last century, and particularly over the last 50 years, technology changed things.

Transportation became faster. Communication became instant. Computing collapsed the cost of processing information. Networks connected billions of people across distance and borders.

But Commerce and Governance did not adapt to technology in the same way.

Commerce defined signals, learned to measure and aggregate them, and built increasingly sophisticated systems to respond to commercial demand.

That commercial feedback loop became increasingly global, continuous, and real-time.

Governance innovated too, but it did not produce equivalent infrastructure for continuously measuring civic demand. Elections, polls, and petitions remained fragmented across different times and places.

The civic feedback loop remains far from global, continuous, or real-time.

But the divergence did more than make Commerce more responsive.

As commercial systems became more capable, commercial signals became increasingly influential in shaping the choices societies make.

But commercial demand and civic demand are not the same thing.

When Signals Collide

The difference between these feedback loops matters because we participate in both systems at once.

Imagine buying a $5 T-shirt.

Your purchase sends a clear commercial signal:

“I want this shirt at this price.”

The transaction is recorded. Demand is measured. Supply responds.

But buying the shirt doesn't mean we're indifferent to everything about it besides price. We might also believe:

“I don't want someone exploited to make it.”

“I don't want its production to poison a river.”

“I don't want its disposal to damage the environment.”

The usual response is: “Then don't buy it.”

But that forces us to express civic demand through a commercial choice. The market sees only a lost sale — it was not designed to measure whether we objected to worker exploitation, water pollution, or environmental damage.

When the wider consequences of production are not visible at the point of purchase, the transaction captures only our commercial demand.

Neither buying nor refusing to buy can accurately measure civic demand.

Our desire for the shirt becomes a clear, measurable signal. Our concerns about its consequences are far harder to capture and aggregate.

Economists call these unaccounted-for costs externalities. Yin Yang Economics sees them from another angle: as symptoms of an imbalance between two feedback systems.

The problem isn't that Commerce is failing — it may be responding perfectly to the signals it receives. The imbalance is in what each system is designed to measure.

Social Media and the Missing Civic Layer

I remember when MySpace first came out. Suddenly, ordinary people could publish their thoughts, connect with others, and speak to audiences far beyond their immediate communities.

Expression became real-time and global.

I thought, “This is how democracy is going to work.”

But the platforms billions of people now use for expression were built as commercial systems.

They learned to measure attention, not civic demand.

Views, likes, shares, comments, watch time, engagement—our expressions became signals, but signals optimized primarily for commercial purposes.

Elsewhere in civic life, elections, polling, petitions, and other civic mechanisms give our choices ways to enter the Governance system.

Social media gave civic expression somewhere to go, but it didn't give those expressions somewhere to land.

Social media gave us extraordinary new Agency as consumers, producers, buyers, and sellers.

But those same platforms offer remarkably little civic Agency when we express ourselves as members of society.

Billions of people already express civic demand every day.

What remains is to build a platform that can structure, connect, and aggregate those expressions into measurable civic signal.

.one is an attempt to build that platform.