Systems Economics
The founding claim
Every economic classification system in general use answers one question: what industry is this business in? NAICS, SIC, ISIC, NACE, GICS, ICB, TRBC, and RBICS all differ in granularity and governance, and all of them are answering that same question. None answers the different question: what does this business functionally do, and where does that fall in the order of work?
Industry is a category label. Function is a coordinate. Space has latitude and longitude. Time has date and hour. Economic activity has had no equivalent — no address that survives a change of language, border, technology, or century. Systems Economics is the formal field built to supply that third frame, and its founding coordinate system is documented in depth on the Coordinate System page.
The source disciplines
Systems Economics is drawn from three disciplines that each solved the same class of problem in their own domain: how to organize complex entities by function rather than by surface appearance or historical convention.
Biological systems
Living systems built from repeating, ordered functional activities and the resources that staff them — the model for economies as self-sustaining, self-initiating cycles rather than static snapshots.
Botanical classification
Taxonomy that organizes by function and structure rather than appearance — the precedent for a classification method that survives changes in convention.
Categorical theory
The mathematics of structure-preserving relationships — the formal grounding for a coordinate system that composes and computes rather than merely labels.
The proof
The textbook
Systems Economics: The Parts and Processes of Economic Systems (Locus Analytics, 2019, 3rd edition, 294 pages) is the primary technical specification of the Locus Model and the FIS® methodology.
The patents
15+ granted U.S. patents, inventor Rory Riggs, assignee Locus LP, spanning Functional Coordinates, the Functional Coordinate System, Functional Location, Functional Space, Functional Proximity, Functional Trajectory, the Functional Information System, and Systems Syntax. Representative grants include US 9,361,358, US 9,910,910, US 10,019,509, US 11,151,096, US 11,657,026, and US 12,242,431. See the full Justia patent index.
The applications
Financial markets, agriculture, and pharma royalties are each an application of the same coordinate logic — proof that the system works at any scale, in any domain. See Applications.
Systems Economics is a field. FIS® is what it produces.
Systems Economics names the discipline; the Locus Model is the framework within it, and Functional Coordinates the instrument it produces. The full vocabulary — Economic Physiology, Economic Morphology, the Enterprise Barcode, and more — is documented in the Lexicon.