Virtual Economics: A Preview

Systems Economics Lexicon · Beyond the Theory

Virtual Economics: A Portrait of an Economic System is Rory Riggs’s forthcoming book, extending the Locus Model’s coordinate-based approach into territory the 2019 textbook doesn’t cover. What follows is a preview of its vocabulary, not a declaration of it — and the distinction matters enough to explain before the terms themselves.

Why the vocabulary here is different from everywhere else on this site

Every other pillar and spoke on this site is built from published, dated material: the 2019 textbook, granted patents, or the current lexicon. The nine terms below come from an unpublished manuscript. Under the same discipline that graded every other term on this site, that makes them EMERGING rather than PERSISTENT — real candidates, but not yet ones with the kind of dated public record that supports a first-creator claim. Declaring them individually, each with its own canonical page, before the book actually publishes would mean hardening a still-forming manuscript into a permanent public record — exactly the failure mode the practice’s own qualification discipline exists to prevent. That’s why this is one overview post, not nine term pages.

One term needs a separate note before the rest: the book’s own title. Virtual Economics the phrase is not new ground — there’s an existing peer-reviewed economics journal with that name, and “virtual economy” already means something specific and different (in-game economies). So the title is safe to use exactly as it’s being used here — as a book title, an uncontested and clean claim — but it can’t be declared as a defined term in its own right, separately from the book itself.

The vocabulary, previewed

Functional Address extends the Locus Model’s coordinate idea to a job specifically: what it does, what it produces, and where it sits in the functional order of work. Natural Functional Order names the invariant sequence of positions any ongoing economic system has to fill, regardless of who or what is filling them — which pairs directly with Bounded Order / Unbounded Fill: the order itself is fixed, but the actors, technologies, and outputs occupying it can vary without limit.

Functional Twins are accurate functional representations that mirror real-world resources and activities — with Economic Twin naming the specific counterpart this creates: the functional twin standing alongside the spatial twin GIS already gives us, and the temporal twin the calendar already gives us. Activity Axis and Resource Axis are the two coordinate axes underneath all of this — one ordering recurring economic activities, the other ordering resources by role, category, and stage. Together with a third axis for time, they form The Functional Triad: time, space, and function as a complete three-coordinate reference frame for any economic system.

Economic Cartography is what all of this adds up to doing: charting an economic system by its functional coordinates so the whole thing can actually be seen and managed at once, the way a map lets you see a territory rather than just a list of places within it.

See also: The Coordinate Family & the Patent Portfolio · The Locus Model

Part of Beyond the Theory, course 7 of 7 — the final course in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.