A crystal lattice, its repeating structure evoking a fixed grammar of positions

Locus Model Lexicon

General systems theory has never produced a linguistic model of a system — a fixed lexicon of its components, a syntax for combining them, and semantics binding each term to something real. The Locus Model is one.

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Systems theory has never lacked for vocabularies. What it lacks is grammar. Biology has one: a fixed lexicon of parts, a syntax for combining them, and semantics tying each term to a real structure in the world. Economics never received the same transfer — until the Locus Model.

The Locus Model is a closed lexicon of two parts of speech and no others — verbs and nouns — combined by one rigid syntax, and bound to the world by semantics that make every position a checkable claim rather than a label. From that fixed set of words, the grammar generates the activities and resources required for any living system to operate and sustain itself. This page walks the lexicon end to end: the words, the syntax, and the semantics that make it a language rather than a notation.

“General systems theory has never created a linguistic model. A lexicon — from a fixed set of words, the grammar generates the activities and resources required for any living system to operate and sustain itself.”

The Grammar in Three Numbers

Thirty-six verbs. Sixty nouns. One rigid syntax pairing each verb with the resource it acts on. The arithmetic of the lexicon is small on purpose — a closed vocabulary is what makes every position derivable by rule instead of assigned by judgment.

36

Verbs — the activities, in four functional groups of nine.

60

Nouns — the resources, across six lettered categories.

2,160

Possible loci — every verb paired with every noun it can act on.

Verbs: The Activities

Activities are the verbs of the lexicon, comprehensive of the functional roles required to keep a living system running. They divide into four groups: the first two are the input and output activities of producing a product; the third and fourth are the input and output activities of generating cash and returning it to the production system — the regeneration steps, without which the cycle runs once and stops. Each group divides again the same way it divided the first time: an approach, the activity proper, and a transition out, applied twice over. Nine sequential activities per group, thirty-six in all. The full sequence is mapped in the Activity Cycle and its grammar in Systems Syntax.

Nouns: The Resources

Resources are the nouns, and each resource category is represented by a letter: A for Space, B for Equipment, C for Information, D for Money, E for Energy, F for People. Five of the six are staged by complexity — four stages, the first three constituent products and the fourth final, with three degrees within each — giving twelve positions per category.

The sixth, People, is the one that does the work. Every activity in the economy is performed by a person using the other five, which is why F sits apart: it is a resource like the others, procured and drawn on at every locus, and it is also the agent at every locus. The other five are staged because they are made — ore becomes metal, and metal becomes a machine. People are not made by the economy; they are procured by the same activity cycle by which every resource is acquired, and what the economy does afterward is train them, employ them, and take care of them. Five staged categories at twelve positions each gives sixty resource nouns.

A Locus: Where the Grammar Meets the World

Work Locus Pillar term

The syntactic pairing of a verb with the resource it acts on: an activity, and the thing that activity is performed on. It names something an economic system might do. Thirty-six verbs by sixty nouns gives 2,160 possible loci — and the model takes its name from this pairing, because the basic functional unit of any system is a locus. Read more →

Loci are important because they are where the lexicon stops and composition begins. The words produce a fixed number of positions; the positions produce an unlimited number of arrangements. Loci rarely operate alone — what one produces, another takes in, and connected loci form the familiar groupings: a supply chain, an industry, a community. We call these collections work groups. A single shop, an industry, the whole interconnected system — the same ninety-six words describe each of them, because a functional role has no size. What changes is only how deep the composition runs.

Semantics: Why the Grammar Is Real

A lexicon and a syntax alone would make a well-formed notation about nothing. What makes the Locus Model a language is that it also supplies the semantics — what each word denotes in the world. Every verb is an activity that occurs, every noun a resource that exists, every locus a working position someone actually occupies, and the connections between loci are real flows between them.

Fixing those denotations is why the same facts always yield the same position: the meaning of each word is settled before anyone applies it. It is also why a position can be checked and audited. A locus is not a label. It is a claim about the world, and a firm placed at one is either doing that work or it is not.

Why It Matters

Before coordinates, land was described by landmarks — from the oak to the stone wall and so many paces north. Boundaries depended on things that moved and witnesses who died. Coordinates made a parcel a fact anyone could compute, and the machinery of deeds, title, and mortgage was built on top of that. Functional coordinates do the same for economic activity. In finance, risk groups have rested on stipulated boundaries — sectors drawn in advance by committee, and redrawn whenever they stop fitting. Functional coordinates make those groupings rules-based: derived from what companies do. Like a land deed, financial risk groups built bottom-up from coordinates do not move.

The Locus Model gives systems economics the tools to follow a developmental path analogous to that of systems biology: a methodological transition from historically stipulated populations, categories, and risk classifications toward functionally derived states, risk models, and causal, intervention-relevant representations. Both fields are enabled by large-scale, coordinate-based functional information systems that make it possible to locate, compare, and navigate entities within closed, integrated systems — where an entity is represented by its derived functional position rather than a preassigned label. For systems economics, this makes it possible to derive dynamic operational and risk positions across networks of production, finance, regulation, information, and exchange.

Go deeper, term by term

106 approved terms, searchable and cross-linked, organized the way Rory Riggs organizes them himself: the foundational construct, the pillar frameworks built on it, and the supporting vocabulary each pillar breaks down into — complete with sourcing, patents, and articles behind every term.

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