A running micro-society. Energy, reputation, costed claims, settlement, scarcity, and a ledger all update live, tick by tick — a legible model of how reputation and resources co-evolve when actions aren't free.
A toy model. The economy is illustrative — simple costs and payouts, not a calibrated economic or political simulation. It demonstrates ROOT0's governance architecture; it makes no empirical claim about real institutions.
His own design vocabulary. "Faction memory," "trust-lineage replay," "claim survival," the resource-economy framing — David Lee Wise's system, rendered as a runnable sim. Read them as designed terms, not standard governance theory.
The actual ecosystem, embedded and running. Press Step Economy to advance the clock; Settle Claims to resolve outstanding ones; select an agent to inspect it. Watch scarcity active flip on when the resource pool tightens, and the averages — energy, reputation, claim survival — move in response. Everything is computed locally.
Each agent carries two stocks: energy (the resource it spends to act) and reputation (what others extend it on trust). Both rise and fall with how it behaves — the twin currencies of any governance.
Acting isn't free: filing a claim costs, and a claim must be settled or it starves. "Average claim survival" is the heartbeat — how long the system lets a demand stand before resolving it.
The resource pool is finite. When it tightens, scarcity active turns on and the society must choose what to pay — the moment governance stops being bookkeeping and starts being politics.
Agents remember who did what, grouped into factions — so today's settlement is shaped by yesterday's. Memory is what turns a crowd into a polity.
Trust isn't a snapshot; it has a history that can be replayed — how a reputation was earned or lost, step by step. The lineage, not just the score.
A shared world model the agents act on, and a ledger recording the run. The society is replayable: you can see how it got to its current state, not just what that state is.
The thesis. Governance is an economy of trust under scarcity — reputations and resources co-evolving as costed claims compete for a finite pool, with memory carrying the past into every settlement. Most governance models freeze that into a diagram; this one lets it run, so you can watch trust accrue, factions form, and scarcity force the hard choices. ⚑ It's the time-extended companion to ROOT0's single-decision game-theory engine — one watches a verdict, the other watches a society.
Two layers, held apart. What this is: a genuine, runnable, self-contained multi-agent model in which energy, reputation, costed claims, settlement, scarcity, faction memory, and a replayable trust-lineage all interact live — built deliberately across five versions and a faithful render of ROOT0's governance framework. What it is not: a validated economic or political simulation. The costs and payouts are illustrative, the agents are simple, and terms like "faction memory," "trust-lineage replay," and "claim survival" are David Lee Wise's designed vocabulary, not standard political-economy constructs. It makes no empirical claim about real institutions or markets — it is an architecture demo that argues, by running, that governance is best understood as a living economy of trust under scarcity. Read it for the legibility, not for predictions. ⚑ Render-not-invent: this page describes the ecosystem David built and flags exactly where the model is a toy.