Viability Economics: The Viability Control Loop

Viability Economics presents a control-oriented framework for diagnosing coordination viability failure in economic, organizational, and institutional systems. The framework addresses a limitation common to standard economic and organizational models: coordination is typically treated as given until failure becomes visible in output, performance, or prices. In many real systems, however, coordination can degrade substantially while output remains stable. During this period, decision processes escalate, rules and controls accumulate, enforcement burdens increase, and locally rational interventions increasingly generate adverse side effects. Once output declines, causal attribution is often confounded by secondary responses to deterioration. This framework treats coordination viability as a feasibility condition rather than an implicit assumption or performance outcome. It specifies the conditions under which coordinated action can remain coherent over time in recursive adaptive systems—systems that retain past adaptations as constraints on future action. Rather than offering a predictive model, equilibrium analysis, or optimization objective, Viability Economics provides a control specification. Coordination stress is made operational through a single leading variable, coordination friction, defined as the recurring cost of aligning action under ambiguity in systems that must coordinate repeatedly. The framework imposes a strict time-ordering requirement: admissible explanations of coordination failure must predict changes in coordination friction prior to changes in output or performance. Coordination viability failure is partitioned into four necessary and diagnostically distinct failure modes—alignment failure, recursion viability failure, legible progress failure, and variance containment failure. Each failure mode is defined by a unique structural mechanism, early discriminators, and falsifiable predictions. Diagnosis is constrained to a single primary failure mode per cycle to preserve causal isolation. Interventions are treated strictly as tests of diagnostic claims. Only bounded, reversible structural interventions are admissible, and all diagnoses are explicitly rejected when predicted changes in coordination friction do not occur. Rejection is treated as epistemic success rather than implementation failure, and exit conditions are specified where inference is no longer admissible. The framework is non-normative and non-behavioural. It introduces no assumptions about preferences, incentives, culture, motivation, or intent. Instead, it constrains when behavioural, institutional, or economic explanations are admissible by specifying the feasibility conditions under which coordination itself remains viable. This repository contains the full framework specification, including diagnostic rules, intervention and rejection logic, measurement protocols, applicability boundaries, misuse patterns, and reusable templates. The document is intended to function as a control framework for inference, not as a descriptive theory or a program for organizational or policy reform.