Theory of People: Individuals and Laborers

Systems Economics Lexicon · Loci, Systems, Semiotics & the Theory of People

Every other Economic System the Locus Model describes is a system built from resources it doesn’t identify with — a company isn’t itself a resource. People are the one exception, and the Locus Model handles that exception by defining a person two different ways simultaneously: as an individual, and as a laborer.

Individuals: people as their own Economic System

As an individual, a person is an Economic System in exactly the same sense a company is — using resources, performing activities, producing a product. That product is an F subject resource: the person’s own labor, supplied to whatever systems use it, whether that’s an employer, a family, a community, or a volunteer group. At the agent level, an individual performs the locus 1.3.2 F — interpreted as providing labor temporarily to whoever is using it.

The choice to classify individuals as producing a resource rather than performing the activity of their job is deliberate, for two reasons. First, it captures the entire population, including people who aren’t employed — classifying someone by their job’s activity would leave no way to classify someone without one. Second, it captures everything a person does outside their job. If an individual’s system were oriented around their job as an activity product, only the activities feeding that product would count as part of their system — buying a mattress, going to the gym, cooking dinner would all fall outside it, despite being genuinely economically relevant activities that support a person’s ability to keep providing their labor at all.

Laborers: people as a resource inside someone else’s system

A laborer is the same person viewed from inside their employer’s Economic System — an F resource performing a particular job. A job is the specific set of tasks that resource performs for one employer; it’s not itself a system, just the functions performed within one. A doctor who diagnoses and treats patients is performing two tasks within a single job, since both functions serve the same employer and the same underlying role.

The boundary of what counts as “one job” gets genuinely harder to draw in edge cases. A person who teaches during the week and performs music on weekends, for two unrelated engagements, clearly has two separate jobs — no functional or legal connection ties them together, and they’re for different employers besides. But a teacher who also cleans the same school on weekends, for the same single employer, may reasonably be considered to have one job with two tasks, precisely because the employer is the same. Formally, employment exists wherever an economic actor has a person in service under a contract of hire — expressed or implied, oral or written — with control over that person, meaning the exclusive right to direct their activity for a defined period under whatever terms the contract or local law sets.

See also: Economic System (the Locus Model’s Frame Term) · Job Locus and Enterprise Locus

Part of Loci, Systems, Semiotics & the Theory of People, course 3 of 7 in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.