EOH Accounting¶
EOH as Demand Signal¶
EOH are not currency. They are the unit of measurement for the labor demand that physical reality generates. Every element of the capital stock — including every living person — generates EOH continuously through the action of entropy.
EOH measures the obligation physics generates; the register decides which of it the collective recognizes. Machines and people both fulfill it, but only registered human fulfillment is minted: TEH is that fulfillment, recorded at its multiplied rate. Human labor is the bridge between obligation and money.
Two gates stand on that bridge, and they move in opposite directions along the arc. Machine-fulfilled EOH never mints, so as automation takes a larger share, less of the obligation passes through human hands. And human fulfillment mints only if it is registered: cooking your own dinner resists entropy just as a paid meal does, but it is off the ledger and creates nothing. Registration widens as ε rises while the human share narrows, so the TEH minted is not a simple function of automation — through most of the arc it grows, because more of the shrinking human work is admitted to the ledger, and it falls only late in the arc, when the human share is small enough to outweigh that. When a registered obligation is fulfilled, the EOH is retired and TEH is created through verified labor.
EOH measures what the world needs. TEH measures what a worker earns for providing it.
Fulfillment of EOH creates TEH at the worker's applicable multiplier rate — 100 EOH of infrastructure maintenance performed by a Tier 3 worker at a 3.0 multiplier creates 300 TEH. The multiplier system applies to all entropy-reduction labor uniformly.
The EOH → TEH Pipeline¶
Physical state drives generation. ε drives the fulfillment split. Registration gates what enters the ledger. The multiplier scales TEH creation.
| Step | Function | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| Physical state → EOH | total_eoh(physical_state) |
core/eoh_generation.py |
| EOH → human/machine split | human_eoh_per_domain(eoh_dict, ε) |
core/eoh_fulfillment.py |
| Human EOH → registered EOH | registered_eoh(human_eoh, share) |
core/eoh_fulfillment.py |
| Registered EOH → TEH | teh_created = registered_eoh × mean_multiplier |
core/eoh_fulfillment.py |
The Dual Ledger¶
The system tracks two quantities:
- TEH — entropy resistance performed (what workers have earned)
- EOH — entropy resistance owed to physical reality (what the world demands)
The gap between accumulated EOH and fulfilled EOH constitutes deferred maintenance — a deficit that is visible, quantifiable, and structurally distinct from monetary debt. No one earns TEH from this deficit existing. No one charges interest on it. It persists until labor is directed toward it or the underlying capital fails.
EOH and Compounding¶
Unfulfilled EOH may generate additional EOH. A roof neglected for five years does not need five years of routine maintenance — it needs replacement, which demands more labor than the original maintenance would have.
This resembles interest but is fundamentally distinct:
- It measures physical reality rather than enforcing a social convention
- It rewards no party and punishes all through degraded systems
- Its behavior is nonlinear and discontinuous — long periods of slow accumulation punctuated by sharp threshold failures
EOH compounding generates obligation without labor. TEH is created only when someone actually does the work. The zero-interest condition (Condition III) prohibits arbitrary human mechanisms that generate currency without labor — EOH compounding does not violate this because it generates no TEH.
EOH and Automation¶
At any automation level, the total EOH generated by the capital stock remains determined by physics. What changes is the share fulfilled by human labor versus machines.
- At ε = 0: All EOH fulfillment is human labor — though only the share registered in the collective ledger generates TEH; the remainder is private subsistence.
- At ε = 0.99: Human labor carries a small share of the obligation — more than the 1% the capability index implies, because personal components such as care keep automation floors — and only the registered part of it creates TEH.
This means the TEH supply contracts naturally with automation. But so do TEH-denominated floor prices, because less human labor goes into everything. The floor's purchasing power remains stable or increases. The system contracts on both the supply side and the cost side simultaneously, producing the automatic floor-rise described in Design Principle 5.
TEH Lifecycle¶
TEH is created when registered human labor enters the ledger. Six destruction mechanisms close the circuit:
| Mechanism | What it is |
|---|---|
| D1 — Capital write-down | TEH embodied in failed capital is destroyed when the asset degrades beyond recovery |
| D2 — Income-driven consumption | Spending at the income level (calibrated to mid-arc) |
| D3 — Biology-anchored consumption | Terminal spending tied to biological consumption cycles |
| D4 — CPI delivery | Basket delivery destroys TEH at the sufficiency floor |
| D5 — Estate dissolution | TEH in excess of the accumulation ceiling dissolves at death |
| D6 — Accumulation ceiling | Excess TEH above the ceiling is progressively reclaimed |
Levies and Trust spending are circulatory — TEH moves between parties, it is not destroyed.
The Registration Boundary¶
Not all entropy resistance is an economic event. EOH exists at every scale — individual, household, community — but TEH is created only when labor fulfills EOH that has been registered in the collective ledger.
Key registration rules:
- Self-care is a zero event. A person who cooks their own dinner has resisted their own entropy, but no monetary event occurs.
- Household EOH is private. Labor exchanged within the household to maintain shared assets does not enter the collective ledger.
- Land is held by the collective. Structures on that land generate infrastructure EOH that falls to the assigned stewards as a private obligation.
- Collective EOH generates TEH. When the collective registers a person as a member, that person's existence creates personal EOH in the collective ledger, and care labor fulfilling it generates TEH.
The registration boundaries are themselves functions of ε. At ε = 0, most labor is internal to the family unit — subsistence, private, unregistered. As automation and institutional capacity grow, more categories of EOH become registered. Each registration boundary follows its own sigmoid — all are monotonically non-decreasing: the collective cannot un-admit an obligation once recognized.
Collective demand drives care registration. The admission of care labor is driven by the collective's own increasing dependence on the quality of its human capital. As automation rises, the collective's systems grow more complex — requiring trained judgment, deep education, and a pipeline of capable adults. The share of care EOH admitted to the collective ledger follows a sigmoid: slow onset, rapid mid-range acceleration, full registration before ε reaches 1.0.
See also: Regenerative Labor — labor that reduces future EOH generation rates.