Responsibility as Economic Primitive

This paper proposes replacing property with responsibility as the foundational unit of economic and legal measurement. Property, we argue, is constitutively opaque. Its social function requires severing present holdings from the causal histories that produced them, and this severance makes it structurally impossible to distinguish legitimate exchange from extraction. That opacity is the condition of property’s institutional operation, not a defect to be corrected. No reform, however structurally ambitious, can extract causal information from a system whose architecture suppresses it. In response, we develop a formal measurement system built on five base units, which we call thread vectors: Genesis (causal contribution), Sight (epistemic position), Sovereignty (capacity to intervene), Harvest (distribution of benefit and burden), and Restoration (capacity and obligation to repair). We demonstrate that these five dimensions are necessary together as much as they are sufficient to span the space of responsibility across the domains examined in this paper. We then develop the mathematics of their combination into weaves: calculable structures that enable forms of accountability no existing instrument achieves. These include the apportionment of systemic harms across distributed actors, the calibration of restitution to measured extraction, and the anticipatory detection of accumulating culpability. Keywords: responsibility, causation, property theory, thread vectors, economic primitives, distributive justice, multi-criteria measurement, commons governance, restorative justice, algorithmic accountability