Resources: The Six Categories of Economic Morphology

Systems Economics Lexicon · Activities & Resources: The Grammar

Activities are the Locus Model’s verbs. Resources are its nouns — and just as every activity resolves into one of thirty-six verbs, every resource in the economy resolves into one of six functional categories, identified by the letters A through F: Space (A), Equipment (B), Information (C), Money (D), Energy (E), and People (F).

Structural and Supporting resources

The six categories split into two functional groups. Structural Resources — People, Space, and Equipment — are used directly, performing a task, and stay physically persistent throughout an activity: a school building is in use when classes are in session, a pilot is in use while flying the plane. Supporting Resources — Energy, Information, and Money — are consumed enabling a Structural Resource to perform, rather than performing the task themselves, and are harder to catch in the act: money spent on equipment isn’t “in use” until the equipment actually produces something with it.

Staging: how close to ready

Within each category, individual resources sit at different levels of completeness. Five of the six categories are staged: four stages, numbered 1 through 4, each divided into three substages. Final resources (Stage 4) are finished and ready to serve as a subject resource. Constituent resources (Stages 1–3) still need refining, incorporating, or combining with something else before they’re ready. A hammer is a final resource despite being mechanically simple; a car engine is a constituent resource despite being far more complex — stage tracks completeness, not sophistication.

One category breaks this pattern entirely, and the break is deliberate rather than an oversight: People (F) is not staged. Every other category is procured, refined, and eventually used the way any resource is. People are procured like any resource too — but they’re also the agent performing every single locus in the system, a dual role no other category carries. That asymmetry is why the staging ladder runs on five categories, not six, and it’s arguably the single most structurally distinctive fact about how the Locus Model treats resources.

Edge cases the plain categories don’t cover

Real resources sometimes resist a clean single classification, and the model has named rules for the recurring patterns. A Combination Resource is made of parts from more than one category at once — a book is Equipment (the paper and ink) fused with Information (the content), classified by whichever part actually determines how it’s used. A Cross-Category Resource changes category as a result of being incorporated into something else — a loose brick is Equipment, but once installed in a wall it becomes Physical infrastructure, because part of what defines that category is being fixed in place.

Categories A and E are named Space and Energy — the labels used consistently across this vocabulary’s sources, including the earliest reference materials, with a single outlier exception elsewhere in the corpus that this vocabulary does not follow.

See also: Resource Stage and Substage · Structural Resources vs. Supporting Resources · Resource Edge Cases

Part of Activities & Resources: The Grammar, course 2 of 7 in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.