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.

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.

The Great Divergence

For most of human 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. And in that shared slowness, there was a kind of balance.

During the last century technology removed many of those constraints.

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.

Why?

Commerce has a clear and measurable organizing incentive: profit.

Commercial institutions developed increasingly sophisticated ways to measure progress toward that goal. Price, revenue, and costs are just a few of the clear signals Commerce measures. Technology transformed that measurement into an increasingly global, persistent, and real-time feedback loop.

Governance has no clear and measurable organizing incentive. The public good is complex, contested, and varies across people, places, and time.

So while Governance did innovate, it did not produce comparable infrastructure for continuously measuring civic demand. Elections, polls, and petitions remain fragmented, and the civic feedback loop remains far from global, continuous, or real-time.

This is the imbalance we live with today, and it has consequences.

In the absence of equally legible measures of civic demand, commercial signals have become proxies for what people want more broadly.

This gives commercial institutions—and the signals they measure—remarkable influence over the choices societies make.

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

What we choose as consumers, workers, investors, or users cannot fully express what we want as members of society.

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 appeared. 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 remember thinking, “This is how democracy is going to work.”

It didn't.

The platforms that followed were built as commercial systems. Their organizing incentive was profit.

Views, likes, shares, comments, watch time, and engagement became increasingly sophisticated signals for understanding and monetizing attention.

They learned to measure attention, not civic demand.

Outside social media, we at least have civic measurement tools—elections, polling, petitions, and consultations. They are imperfect, but they are designed to capture civic demand.

On modern social media, civic measurement barely exists at all.

You can post a poll, but the platform treats it like any other post. It accumulates engagement and eventually disappears into the feed. The results don't connect, accumulate, or become part of a larger civic picture.

Social media gave us extraordinary new Agency as consumers, producers, buyers, and sellers—but remarkably little civic Agency.

Billions of people already express civic demand every day. What remains is to build the measurement infrastructure that allows those expressions to enter the civic system, accumulate, and influence what happens next.

.one is an attempt to build that infrastructure—to add civic Agency to the social media feed.