Five Core Propositions
The following five core propositions form the propositional foundation of Abundantics, each with falsification conditions and testable corollaries. Excerpted from Preprint v1.6, Part II.
Scarcity Migration
(Ontology)Statement: Technological progress does not eliminate total scarcity, only changes its distribution; the dominant institutions of any era organize around the dominant scarcity of that era.
Falsification condition:
If some technology causes the overall density of allocation conflict in society to persistently decline rather than migrate, Proposition 1 is falsified.
Testable corollary:
Price structures will concentrate on residual scarcity — relative prices of automatable goods will persistently decline while relative prices of positional and relational goods persistently rise.
Value-Anchor Shift
(Axiology)Statement: When the exchange value of some category of output approaches zero, the center of gravity of social valuation migrates to non-reproducible attributes: relationship, meaning, authenticity, provenance.
Falsification condition:
If some category's authenticity premium and presence premium both go to zero after marginal cost reaches zero, Proposition 2 is falsified.
Testable corollary:
Authenticity certification (provenance proof, human-creation marks, presence credentials) will become one of the fastest-growing industry categories.
Allocation Precedes Exchange
(Mechanism Theory)Statement: Exchange is a special case of allocation, not the whole; prices, queues, lotteries, reputation, algorithmic matching, and gift-giving form a family of allocation mechanisms, whose applicable domain is determined by category attributes and social values.
Falsification condition:
If the coverage of non-price allocation mechanisms persistently shrinks rather than expands as the abundance layer grows, Proposition 3's predictive power is in doubt.
Testable corollary:
As per-capita abundance rises, the list of non-price allocated categories within each economy monotonically expands.
Multi-Ledger
(Measurement Theory)Statement: No single scalar can losslessly aggregate social well-being; once any single indicator becomes a governance target, its information content decays with strategic behavior.
Falsification condition:
If some single well-being index maintains high correlation with independent well-being measures for over a decade after becoming a hard governance target, the second half of Proposition 4 is weakened.
Testable corollary:
For jurisdictions using a single happiness/development index for evaluation, the divergence between the index and independent measurements will increase with evaluation intensity.
Institutional Endogeneity
(Political Economy)Statement: Given technological capability, the distributional form of abundance is determined by institutions; technology determines the possibility frontier, institutions determine the landing point within it.
Falsification condition:
If distributional outcomes systematically converge across economies with drastically different institutions at the same AGI penetration level, Proposition 5 is falsified.
Testable corollary:
The next twenty years are a natural cross-country quasi-experiment — AGI technology is nearly simultaneously available while distributional institutions differ greatly; Proposition 5 predicts outcomes will diverge along institutional variables.