Supporting Cycles

Understanding Supporting Cycles

The convention of treating supporting cycles as seven follows from the requirement that every Economic System draw at least one subject resource from each of the resource categories plus at least one input, giving one cycle per subject-resource category plus one for inputs; this is a simplifying convention rather than a hard limit, since in practice there could be many distinct subject resources or inputs within a single category. Each supporting cycle is itself a full Economic System in its own right, complete with its own central cycle and its own seven supporting cycles beneath it — for example, an A4ii subject resource’s production cycle has its own seven supporting cycles — and it is this self-similar nesting that makes the model recursive rather than flat.