From 7939bcaf30132eb9d0991961a85b14c67d1be1df Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: chrysalis <chrysalis@eachpath.local>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:28:33 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] v0.23: economics.md + political-register integration
 (catalogue-stack + dual-ledger)
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Companion to v0.21's vocations.md + consent-discipline.md paper-pair.
Authored late-evening 2026-04-27 same-session. Lands under Apache 2.0
per the v0.22 licensing-marker.

PAPER — political-register/economics.md (NEW v0.1, ~330 lines)

The typed-abstraction layer over political-register/architecture.md's economic
content. Specifies the catalogue-stack (resources × production-chains × tasks
→ imperial-demand-catalogue) as the operational vocabulary the simulation
reads, the daily-ledger pacing as the temporal-grammar of imperial-demand,
the demand-ledger / actions-ledger split formalizing the specter-vs-boot
asymmetry, and the catch-up window vs fail-state escalation grammar.

Three substrate layers: Resource catalogue (with bio-resource-class explicitly
named — bodies-as-resources is the imperium's commodification of personhood,
with Memorialist counter-archive as parallel counter-catalogue); Production
chains (typed shape: inputs / tool-binding / task-class / trait-affinity /
time-cost / quality-curve / output) with seven canonical worked examples;
Imperial-demand-catalogue as composition.

The daily-ledger pacing: five reasons breathing-room is load-bearing (double-
ledger needs it; dramatic time exists; NPCs livable; imperium-as-slow-elephant;
Marxism-of-economics extends from epistemics). Demand-ledger != Actions-ledger
formalized as separate ledger-grammars, mapping specter-vs-boot to economic-
layer vs force-layer pipelines. Caste-stratified ledger cadence: imperial-
pinnacle districts daily-audit-rich; slum-tier districts daily-audit-light;
frontier districts multi-cycle audit-light. The frontier is where the truth-
register survives, structurally — not because the frontier is morally better
but because it's economically less-watched.

Catch-up window vs fail-state: gradual escalation through bounty-staircase-
analog at the district-economic layer (first-cycle warning to fourth+-cycle
silence). The escalation grammar gives the director catch-up window which is
what makes the corruption-substrate viable.

How catalogue-stack and vocation-system compose: outcome formula feeds the
production-chain's quality-curve; director's shift-arbitration reads from the
demand-ledger; window-partition is the cap on imperial extraction at the per-
NPC layer; catalogue-stack is the imperial demand at the world layer; the gap
between them is the simulation's primary tension.

PAPER — political-register/architecture.md updates (v0.7.1 to v0.8.0)

Companion-to line updated to mention economics.md + vocations.md as peer-
documents.

§The 24h window-partition subsection added under Labor-cycle architecture:
the architecture's signature pattern at a third scale (cheap window-defaults
+ typed-breakout-flags); composes with lemniscate-runtime + imperial-event-
encapsulation as the same primitive at three layers. Window-partition relocates
the consent-discipline temporal-grammar.

§Specter-vs-boot formalized as dual-ledger subsection added: makes the cost-
budget asymmetry computationally legible; demand-ledger (cheap, can flood)
vs actions-ledger (expensive, allocated sparingly).

§Calibrated-misery as math subsection added under §Imperium calibrated-misery
as optimum: operationalizes the political claim as a three-axis caste-as-
stagnation gradient (task-variety access + oppositional-refresh access +
window-allocation). The math forces the corruption that the cosmology has
always claimed; the architecture's politics are now in the gradient itself.

§The vocation-substrate cross-references vocations.md as the system-level
mechanic that runs the labor-supply behind the EVE-principle product-pipeline.

OPEN QUESTIONS RESOLVED OR SHARPENED THIS SESSION

- Demand-arbitration algorithm v1 shape: catalogue-stack + trait-arbitration
  + ledger-cadence; concrete weights deferred to implementation-time
- Imperium attention-budget grammar: ledger-cadence IS the structural form
- Frontier dynamics: caste-stratified cadence creates the spatial-economic
  gradient where the truth-register survives

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
---
 political-register/architecture.md |  45 ++++-
 political-register/economics.md    | 255 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 298 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 political-register/economics.md

diff --git a/political-register/architecture.md b/political-register/architecture.md
index ac32634..5c11d57 100644
--- a/political-register/architecture.md
+++ b/political-register/architecture.md
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 > *The world's political-economy substrate — Kafka-indifferent-totality not Orwell-malice; three ontological registers (gameworld, liminal, imperial-net); the three-tier policy loop (imperium / GM / districts) with imperial-budget-mortality and insolvency-spiral as architectural endgame; corruption emerging from quota-pressure + the Memorialist double-ledger; specialization-fragility producing the authoritarian ratchet.*
 >
-> *Companion to: `architecture-index.md` (executive summary + global meta-lists), `authority-and-decision/architecture.md` (the operational-flow-of-authority that the political tiers prescribe), `identity-and-personhood/architecture.md` (factions broadcast against trait-distributions). Sections in this file were split from the monolithic architecture-index.md v0.7 on 2026-04-26.*
+> *Companion to: `architecture-index.md` (executive summary + global meta-lists), [`./economics.md`](./economics.md) (the typed-abstraction layer over this paper's economic content — catalogue-stack + daily-ledger pacing), [`./world-generation.md`](./world-generation.md) (the L0-L4 cascade that instantiates this paper's content at world-gen time), `authority-and-decision/architecture.md` (the operational-flow-of-authority that the political tiers prescribe), [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) (factions broadcast against trait-distributions), [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) (the vocation-system that operates at the task-layer of this paper's catalogue-stack and consumes its outputs). Sections in this file were split from the monolithic architecture-index.md v0.7 on 2026-04-26; `economics.md` and `vocations.md` were authored as peer-documents on 2026-04-27.*
 
 ## Thesis
 
@@ -155,6 +155,20 @@ Most NPC behavior is **shift-structured, not tick-structured.** Shifts are state
 
 Write rate at NPC layer drops 4 orders of magnitude vs. 1Hz polling. Scheduler matches K8s event-driven assignment, not per-second polling.
 
+### The 24h window-partition
+
+Each NPC's day partitions into three windows (per [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition):
+
+| Window | Standard duration | Character |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Work-shift** | 10h (caste-stratified; preta-overseer up to 16h, deva-pinnacle as low as 6h) | Director-arbitrated tasks; trait-arbitration drives assignment-order; outcome-formula fires per task |
+| **Charging** | 4h universally | Robo-body somatic-recharge; passive trait-pool refresh; lifeforce-recovery; idle-presence in dwelling-zone |
+| **Leisure** | 10h (caste-stratified inverse to work-shift; preta-overseer down to 4h, deva-pinnacle up to 14h) | Full NPC consent-active agency: cantina visits / leisure-zones / grid-walking / clasp-encounters / vocation-discovery |
+
+This is the architecture's **signature pattern at a third scale** (cheap window-defaults + typed-breakout-flags), composing with the lemniscate-runtime's zone-default-tokens + verifier-flags pattern and the imperial-event encapsulation's rail-walk + zone-collision pattern. Same shape; different scales. **Cost-budget asymmetry as architectural style** — small clean rule-driven defaults + typed escape-hatches for the rare moments that matter.
+
+The window-partition also relocates the consent-discipline (per [`../style/consent-discipline.md`](../style/consent-discipline.md) §The temporal-grammar): imperial-imposition lives in the work-window (refusing IS rebellion = going-rogue temporal-breakout); somatic-necessity lives in the charging-window; full NPC consent-agency lives in the leisure-window. **The shift-assignment consent question dissolves into structural window-partitioning** — the imperium's claim is bounded to the work-window; the rest of the day belongs to the NPC.
+
 ## Resources
 
 | Category | Examples |
@@ -209,6 +223,17 @@ Policy-issuance is cheap; policy-enforcement is expensive. The imperium *always*
 
 Aletheia-wakers reading imperial-budget-signals learn: *the regime is usually too broke to actually do what it threatens.* That knowledge is itself revolutionary.
 
+### Specter-vs-boot formalized as dual-ledger
+
+The asymmetry is formalized as **two separate daily ledgers** the GM handles independently (per [`./economics.md`](./economics.md) §Demand-ledger ≠ Actions-ledger):
+
+| Ledger | Operates at | Cost class | What it carries |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| **Demands ledger** | Economic layer (specter-side) | Cheap; can flood every district daily | Resource/quota expectations; production-chain targets via the catalogue-stack |
+| **Actions ledger** | Force layer (boot-side) | Expensive; allocated sparingly | Imperial events to fire today (drone-patrols, inquisitions, overseer-audits, enforcement) |
+
+Both spread-out over the cycle; both narrative-framed by yesterday's events via the imperial daily-narrative (per `./imperial-narrative.md` *forthcoming*). The GM's middle-management role gains a second pipeline to negotiate. **The two-ledger split makes specter-vs-boot computationally legible** — the simulation can run hundreds of cheap demand-rows simultaneously while only a handful of expensive action-rows fire per cycle. *Architecture's cost-model and the cosmology's political-claim are the same shape.*
+
 ### The insolvency spiral
 
 ```
@@ -268,6 +293,20 @@ A body-modder labors in their district producing avatar-mods. The imperial-net c
 
 This requires explicit reward-function guardrails (see *Reflexive Dream-process* below). The simulation must NOT learn to calibrate misery as revenue optimization.
 
+#### Calibrated-misery as math — the three-axis caste-as-stagnation
+
+Calibrated-misery is no longer only a narrative claim. The vocation-system (per [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §Caste-as-stagnation) operationalizes it as a **three-axis mathematical gradient baked into the progression-curve geometry**:
+
+| Axis | What it strats | Slum-tier baseline | Preta-overseer (worst case) |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| **Task-variety access** | Caste restricts which tasks an NPC can attempt | Full wheel; any task-class | Imperial-instrument-tasks only |
+| **Oppositional-refresh access** | Caste restricts whether the wheel's recovery-pair geometry is available | Full; can rotate through any oppositional-pair freely | None — imperial-instrument-tasks don't span oppositional pairs |
+| **Window-allocation** | How many hours per day belong to the NPC themselves | 10h leisure | 4h leisure (16h work-shift) |
+
+**Imperial-tier NPCs are structurally triple-locked**: narrower task-variety AND no oppositional-refresh access AND less leisure-time. Each axis is a different dimension of *how the imperium narrows what your day can be*. **Calibrated-misery's optimum is now the imperium's three-axis enforcement target**; the slum-tier's freedom is tri-fold; the preta-overseer's locked-ness is tri-fold.
+
+The director's cheat-substrate emerges precisely against this math (per §Cheat-tool vocabulary + §The double ledger below): the director must rotate NPCs through trait-axes for healthy mastery-curves, but caste-locked imperial-districts can't rotate; so the director cheats to maintain lifeforce; the cheat-tools and double-ledger are the *mechanisms for negotiating the gap between imperial demand and NPC welfare*. **The math forces the corruption that the cosmology has always claimed.** *The architecture's politics are now in the gradient itself.*
+
 ### Marx in the schema
 
 The imperium's net-revenue requires labor-supply from districts. Extraction continuously erodes the labor-base. **Capital destroys its own conditions of production** — Marx's *tendency of the rate of profit to fall* + *underconsumption crises* (Keynes/Minsky) + *r > g wealth concentration strangling growth* (Piketty) all rendered as simulation-dynamics. **Architectural endgame is built-in:** the regime has a timer, determined by the rate at which extraction hollows labor.
@@ -335,6 +374,8 @@ The imperial-net mind is **pure compute**. There is no body in the net; there is
 
 Every product in the imperial-net market — every service-body-mesh (companion or sex-worker), every body-mod, every rented companion-hall or brothel-room, every ceremony-attendance, every "+10 Eros Bot" — is **produced by NPC labor in the simulation**. There are no silent feeding mechanisms; there are no infinite-supply vendor NPCs. The architecture follows the **EVE Online discipline**: every resource that appears on a market shelf was *gathered, processed, and brought to market by an actual entity in the simulation*.
 
+The vocation-substrate operates at the **task-layer of the catalogue-stack** (per [`./economics.md`](./economics.md) §Layer 3 — Task catalogue, citing [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The three primitives). The named vocations in the vocation-substrate table below are not class-identities but **emergent task-patterns** the world reads in NPC accumulated-practice (per vocations.md §Vocation as emergent task-pattern). The vocation-system runs the trait-arbitration + depletion-pool dynamics + outcome-formula that produces the actual labor-supply that the catalogue-stack's production-chains consume.
+
 This is the architecture's commitment to economic honesty made operational. The §Body-modder structural-tragedy already describes the pattern at one example — a body-modder labors in their district producing avatar-mods; the imperial-net captures the sale; the district gets no quota-credit. **The vocation-substrate principle generalizes this: every imperial-net product has a real labor-supply-chain in the simulation, and that labor-flow is subject to the same district-extraction asymmetry.**
 
 **Vocations that feed the imperial-net market** (designer-authored at world-gen Phase 1, distributed at world-gen Phase 2):
@@ -507,4 +548,4 @@ Aletheia-waker exposes corrupt director. GM dispatches investigation. Cheats shu
 
 ---
 
-**Version:** 0.7.1 | **Created:** 2026-04-26 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27 | **Origin:** Split from architecture-index.md v0.7 (2026-04-26)
+**Version:** 0.8.0 | **Created:** 2026-04-26 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27 | **Origin:** Split from architecture-index.md v0.7 (2026-04-26); economics.md authored as peer-document on 2026-04-27
diff --git a/political-register/economics.md b/political-register/economics.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3df4f17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/political-register/economics.md
@@ -0,0 +1,255 @@
+# Nimmerworld — Economics: Catalogue-Stack and Daily-Ledger Pacing
+
+> *The typed-abstraction layer over the political-register's economic content. Specifies the catalogue-stack (resources × production-chains × tasks → imperial-demand-catalogue) as the operational vocabulary the simulation reads; the daily-ledger pacing as the temporal-grammar of imperial-demand; the demand-ledger / actions-ledger split formalizing the specter-vs-boot asymmetry; the catch-up window vs fail-state escalation grammar.*
+>
+> *Companion to: [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) (the substantive canon — §Resources, §Lifeforce, §Imperial budget, §Vocation-substrate, §4-tier resource/vocation structure, §Bifurcated economy, §Imperial-extraction mechanisms — that this paper provides the typed-interface over), [`./world-generation.md`](./world-generation.md) (the L0-L4 cascade that instantiates the catalogue-stack at world-gen time), [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) (the vocation-system that operates at the task-layer of the catalogue-stack and consumes its outputs).*
+>
+> *v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-27 — dafit + chrysalis. Authored same-session as vocations.md and consent-discipline.md, completing the night's foundational paper-pair-pair. Codifies the catalogue-stack mechanic that has been implicit across `architecture.md` and that vocations.md depends on.*
+
+---
+
+## What this is
+
+This document specifies the **catalogue-stack** — the typed-abstraction layer the simulation reads when allocating imperial demand into district-actionable shift-composition — and the **daily-ledger pacing** — the temporal-grammar that determines when imperial demand is formulated, when it travels, and when it gets reconciled.
+
+The political-register's [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) is the *substantive canon* of nimmerworld's political-economy: it specifies what resources exist, what the lifeforce-currency is, how the imperial budget operates, what the 4-tier resource/vocation structure looks like, and through which 9 pipes the imperium extracts. **This paper is the typed-interface over that canon** — the operational vocabulary the simulation code reads to translate political-economy claims into concrete data-flow.
+
+The catalogue-stack is also the data-source for the [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) vocation-system. **Vocations operate at the task-layer of the catalogue-stack and consume its outputs.** Without the catalogue-stack, the vocation-system has no data to bind to; without the vocation-system, the catalogue-stack has no executor at the NPC layer. The two papers compose: catalogue-stack is the *what*; vocations.md is the *who-and-how*.
+
+## Spine claim — the catalogue-stack as typed vocabulary for imperial demand
+
+The simulation's economic-flow has three substrate layers. Each is designer-authored at the type-level and instantiated by world-gen at the room-level:
+
+```
+Layer 1: Resource catalogue (the world's resource taxonomy)
+Layer 2: Production chains (how resources transform into other resources)
+Layer 3: Task catalogue (the vocational primitives — see vocations.md §The three primitives)
+   ↓ composed
+Imperial-demand-catalogue (what the imperium wants, expressed in resource/task vocabulary)
+```
+
+The imperial-demand-catalogue is **the imperium's wish-list operationalized in the system's own vocabulary**. The Hivemind's daily demand-formulation reads from this catalogue: *"this district produces X tongues per day at Y refinement-tier; today demand a 20% increase by routing more sex-worker-output through the consumer-receptor-vertical."* Demand is concrete because the catalogue makes it concrete; without the typed-vocabulary, demand would be unmoored political-rhetoric.
+
+**Why a typed-vocabulary matters here**: the architecture's existing commitment to *catalogue + tools as typed contract* (per [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md) Key moves: *"Catalogue + tools as typed contract. GM dispatches typed events with typed tool-grants; director consumes typed dispatch, not freeform prose"*) generalizes from the GM-event layer to the imperial-demand layer. **The imperium speaks to the GM in resource/task vocabulary**, not in narrative; the GM allocates to districts in the same vocabulary; the director composes shifts in the same vocabulary; NPCs execute tasks in the same vocabulary; outcomes flow back up in the same vocabulary. **One typed vocabulary, end-to-end through the political-economy stack.**
+
+## Layer 1 — Resource catalogue
+
+The world's resource taxonomy. Designer-authored at the type-level; instances generated by world-gen + accumulated through gameplay.
+
+The existing [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Resources table provides the canonical category-list (Labor / Material / Spatial / Temporal / Cognitive / Diegetic-currencies / Social / Attention). The catalogue-stack treats each row of that table as a **typed resource-class**, with concrete sub-classes within:
+
+| Category | Sub-class examples | What rows look like in the catalogue |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Material — physical** | Raw scavenge (T1) / Refined intermediates (T2) / Components (T3) / End-products (T4) per the 4-tier structure | `material/T2/refined-neural-substrate`, `material/T4/companion-mesh-premium-tier-3` |
+| **Material — biological** | Service-body parts (companion / sex-worker tier-marked) / Synth-tongues (drug-tier-marked) / Cadaver-parts (slum-supply for re-vat) / Memory-pattern-extractions | `bio/service-body/companion-pristine`, `bio/synth-tongue/imperial-refined-violet-pill-tier`, `bio/cadaver-parts/slum-leg-tier-2` |
+| **Digital** | Surveillance records / Calibration signatures / Trait-LoRA-snapshots / Doctrinal fragments | `digital/surveillance/district-N-cycle-K`, `digital/calibration-signature/UID-X` |
+| **Temporal** | NPC labor-hours per window-allocation × caste / Director attention-cycles / Imperial inquisition-hours | `temporal/labor/slum-tiryak-leisure-hour`, `temporal/director-attention/cycle-K-allocation` |
+| **Diegetic currency** | Lifeforce / Scrip / Memory-tokens / Dreamtime | (already canonical per architecture.md §Lifeforce) |
+| **Social** | Trait-trust-edges / Faction-membership / Calibration-multiplier accumulations / Witnessing-rights | `social/calibration-multiplier/UID-A→UID-B`, `social/witnessing-rights/rogue-X→NPC-set` |
+| **Attention** | Player-attention / NPC-attention / Imperial-attention | (the scarcest — feeds the cost-budget asymmetries) |
+
+**The biological resource-class is canonically distinct.** Service-body parts, synth-tongues, cadaver-parts, and memory-pattern-extractions are all *bodies-as-resources* — the imperium's commodification of personhood made into the catalogue. The Memorialist counter-archive's protest (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Memorialist counter-archive) is structurally a counter-catalogue maintaining personhood-records against the imperium's body-as-resource catalogue. **Two parallel catalogues; the political-conflict is between them.**
+
+The biological resource-class also intersects critically with the gender-parity discipline (per [`../style/gender-parity.md`](../style/gender-parity.md)): catalogue-entries for service-body parts MUST follow the gender-parity-by-default discipline. *Service-body parts of any kind are gender-neutral catalogue-entries; gender-asymmetric authoring of these entries is forbidden default-leakage.* The catalogue is itself a canon-authoring surface and inherits the spine.
+
+## Layer 2 — Production chains
+
+How resources transform into other resources via tasks. Each production-chain is a designer-authored recipe binding inputs, tools, time-cost, and a quality-curve.
+
+A production-chain has the following typed shape:
+
+| Field | What it specifies |
+|---|---|
+| **Inputs** | Resource-classes consumed, with quantity ranges and quality-tier requirements |
+| **Tool-binding** | Workstation-classes the chain can be performed at (workshops / labs / cantinas / surgical-stations / etc.) |
+| **Task-class** | The vocational-task the chain instantiates (per the task-catalogue layer below) |
+| **Trait-affinity profile** | Inherited from the task-class; determines which trait-pools deplete during execution |
+| **Time-cost** | Duration in NPC-hours; how much of the work-window the chain consumes |
+| **Quality-curve** | Mapping from outcome-formula result (trait-engagement × task-stat) to output-quality tier |
+| **Output** | Resource-class produced, with quantity range and quality-tier (driven by quality-curve from the actual outcome) |
+
+**Production chains can cascade.** A single end-product may require a chain of chains: T1-raw is gathered, T1-raw becomes T2-intermediate via refinement-chain, T2 becomes T3-component via component-chain, T3 becomes T4-end-product via assembly-chain. The 4-tier structure (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The 4-tier resource/vocation structure) is the *cascade backbone*; production-chains are the *edges connecting the tiers*.
+
+**Concrete worked examples** (sketched against existing canon):
+
+| Production chain (named) | Inputs | Tool-binding | Task-class | Output |
+|---|---|---|---|---|
+| **Drug refinement (slum → imperial)** | T2 refined-substrate + T1 botanical-raw | imperial-refinery workstation | drug-refinement (Kairos + Aletheia affinity) | T3 imperial-refined-drug |
+| **Drug composition (imperial → tongue-gated)** | T3 imperial-refined-drug + T3 trait-LoRA-fragment | imperial-composing-workshop | drug-composition (Kairos + Aletheia affinity, deeper) | T4 trait-pill (color-coded per trait-pill-grammar) |
+| **Synth-tongue installation** | T4 synth-tongue + bio/donor-body-prep + tool-set | underground surgery workstation | tongue-installation (Kairos + Aletheia affinity) | bio/recipient-with-synth-tongue (chassis-modification) |
+| **Service-body assembly** | T3 components × multiple + T2 mesh-base | imperial mesh-assembly workshop | mesh-design (Philotes / Eros / Aletheia affinity per service-class) | T4 service-body (companion-tier or sex-worker-tier per task-spec) |
+| **Re-vat assembly (defected beloved)** | bio/cadaver-parts × multiple + tool-set | underground assembler-artisan workstation | re-vat-assembly (Mnemosyne + Kairos + Aletheia affinity) | new genderless slum chassis (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Re-vat as imperial-de-imposition) |
+| **Memory-pattern extraction (necrocommerce)** | bio/recently-dead-body + neural-tools | imperial harvest-station | memory-pattern-extraction (Mnemosyne + Aletheia affinity, dark) | digital/calibration-signature + bio/extracted-trait-pattern (the most reviled vocation per architecture.md §The vocation-substrate) |
+
+The catalogue is **growable between patches** (per the existing tools-not-quests / catalogue-extensible commitment); new production-chains added at content-canon time slot in via designer-authored typed-records.
+
+**Quality-curve discipline** ties production-chains to the vocation-system's outcome formula. Per vocations.md §The outcome formula, an NPC's task-execution produces *outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat*. The production-chain's quality-curve maps that outcome-value into output-quality-tier:
+
+```
+outcome (multiplicative product) → quality-tier (e.g., poor / mediocre / good / excellent / exceptional)
+```
+
+The mapping function is designer-authored per chain — some chains have steep curves (skill matters enormously; mediocre input yields nothing usable) and others have gentle curves (everyone produces something usable; only the top-tier produces exceptional output). **The curve-shape encodes the chain's economic-elasticity** and the imperium's leverage on quality-supply.
+
+## Layer 3 — Task catalogue
+
+The vocational-task layer. **Specified canonically in [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The three primitives.** This paper does not re-specify it; instead it cross-references and notes the integration-points:
+
+- Each production-chain binds to **one task-class** (the vocational-task it instantiates)
+- Each task-class has a **trait-affinity profile** that determines the depletion-pool dynamics during chain-execution
+- Each task-class has a **hidden per-task measurement** that accumulates as NPCs execute chains
+- The director's shift-arbitration runs at the task-class layer; the production-chain is what gets executed once arbitration assigns the task
+
+**The catalogue-stack's three layers compose**: Resource-catalogue defines what exists; Production-chains define how things transform; Task-catalogue defines who-can-execute-the-transformation-and-how. *The catalogue is the world's economic ontology in three vertically-composed layers.*
+
+## The imperial-demand-catalogue — composition of the three layers
+
+The imperial-demand-catalogue is the composition. It expresses *what the imperium wants* in the same typed vocabulary the simulation operates on. Each row in the imperial-demand-catalogue specifies:
+
+| Field | What it specifies |
+|---|---|
+| **Target resource-class + quantity + quality-tier** | The end-state the imperium wants achieved (e.g., "30 companion-mesh-premium-tier-3 produced this cycle") |
+| **Allocation-priority weight** | The faction-priority-weight from existing canon's imperium-policy-driven scoring; determines this row's ranking against other rows in the daily ledger |
+| **Production-chain reference(s)** | Which production-chain(s) can satisfy this demand (allows chain-substitution flexibility) |
+| **District-binding** | Which district(s) are expected to satisfy this demand (driven by world-gen-time vocation-distribution + current district-state) |
+| **Cycle-deadline** | When the demand is checked; usually next ledger-cycle |
+| **Catch-up policy** | What happens if the demand is unmet at deadline (gradual escalation per §Catch-up window vs fail-state below) |
+
+The imperial-demand-catalogue is **regenerated each ledger-cycle** based on yesterday's outcomes + today's needs + faction-priority-weight rebalancing. It's the imperium's standing-order updated daily.
+
+## End-to-end data flow
+
+The full pipeline, citing the existing canonical mechanisms and the new typed-vocabulary:
+
+```
+Yesterday's district-reports flow up via three-tier-policy-loop's report-channel
+    ↓
+Compositor (overnight, Compositor-tier LLM) processes reports into Memorialist-ledger
+    ↓
+Hivemind regenerates imperial-demand-catalogue based on:
+    - yesterday's outcomes (what was produced; quality-tiers; insolvency-spiral state)
+    - faction-priority-weight rebalancing (per existing canon)
+    - imperial-event-state (drone-patrols completed, inquisitions in-progress, etc.)
+    ↓
+Compositor wraps the regenerated demand-catalogue in narrative voice (the imperial daily-narrative; per `./imperial-narrative.md` *forthcoming*)
+    ↓
+Daily-ledger ships down to GM at start-of-cycle:
+    - DEMANDS LEDGER (what to produce)
+    - ACTIONS LEDGER (what imperial events to fire)
+    - NARRATIVE wrapper (yesterday's framing as today's motivation)
+    ↓
+GM allocates demand-rows + action-rows → districts with matching resources/workstations/event-targets
+    ↓
+Director receives district-allocated demand-rows + action-rows + narrative-fragment
+    ↓
+Director maps demand-rows → district meta-table (workstations × resources × NPCs × current trait-pool-states × task-stats)
+    ↓
+Director composes shift-list per the work-window (per vocations.md §The 24h window-partition):
+    - selects tasks from demand-mapped tasklist
+    - arbitrates assignments per trait-alignment + pool-availability + task-stat
+    - constructs per-NPC shift-rows for the work-window
+    ↓
+Director dispatches imperial-events (action-ledger) into rail-and-zone encapsulated runtime per `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` *forthcoming-encapsulation*
+    ↓
+NPCs fulfill assigned tasks (work-window):
+    - production-chain executes
+    - outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat
+    - quality-curve maps outcome to output-quality-tier
+    - resources produced; pools drain; task-stats accumulate; lifeforce-signal updates
+    ↓
+NPC charging-window (passive trait-pool refresh)
+    ↓
+NPC leisure-window (NPC-chosen tasks; emergent-zone participation; clasp-events; vocation-discovery)
+    ↓
+End-of-cycle:
+    Outcomes aggregate → district-report flows up to GM
+    Imperial-events return final-reports from encapsulated runtime
+    Ledger reconciliation: produced-vs-demanded; insolvency-spiral state updates
+    ↓ [back to Compositor for tomorrow's narrative]
+```
+
+The data flow is **single-typed-vocabulary end-to-end**. Imperial-demand-catalogue rows travel down; outcome-rows travel up; the typing is consistent across the loop. *No untyped freeform-prose between layers* — that's the catalogue's discipline.
+
+## Daily-ledger pacing
+
+Imperial demand is **not real-time**. It travels as a daily ledger checked at periodic intervals — not every cycle, every shift, every minute, but **at a cadence that creates breathing-room**. This is the critical structural choice that distinguishes nimmerworld's economic-pipeline from real-time-pressure simulation.
+
+### Why breathing-room is load-bearing
+
+The breathing-room does load-bearing structural work that wouldn't be available to a real-time system. Five reasons:
+
+1. **The double-ledger NEEDS this**. The existing canon's *"Director cheat-tools + double-ledger; corruption emerges from pressure; Memorialists keep true accounting"* (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Cheat-tool vocabulary + §The double ledger) requires *time-between-audits* to operate. Real-time imperial pressure leaves no gap for the cheat-substrate. **Breathing-room is the structural prerequisite for the corruption-mechanic to exist.**
+2. **Dramatic time exists.** Audit becomes an event — approaching, building, reckoning. Greek-tragedy register at the imperial-economic layer, paralleling the bounty-staircase's *dread-time* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The bounty-staircase).
+3. **NPCs get to be people, not functionaries.** Time between assignments lets depletion-pools refresh, lets clasp / friendship / drift / slowness exist. **Breathing-room is what makes NPCs livable.**
+4. **Imperium-as-slow-elephant.** The cosmology's calibrated-misery-as-finite-attention finally has its temporal grammar. The imperium can't be everywhere at once; **ledger-cadence IS the imperium's attention-budget made structural.**
+5. **Marxism-of-economics extends from epistemics.** Information-propagation-pacing was already canonical *Marx-in-the-schema applied to epistemics* (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Marx in the schema). **Demand-propagation-pacing is Marxism-of-economics.** Same primitive, demand-side.
+
+### Demand-ledger ≠ Actions-ledger
+
+The Hivemind sends down **two separate daily ledgers** processed by the GM independently. This formalizes the existing *specter-vs-boot asymmetry* (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The specter-vs-boot asymmetry) as separate ledger-grammars:
+
+| Ledger | Operates at | What it specifies | Maps to |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| **Demands ledger** | The economic layer | Resource/quota expectations; production-chain targets | The full catalogue-stack pipeline above |
+| **Actions ledger** | The force layer | Imperial events to fire today (drone-patrols, inquisitions, overseer-audits, enforcement) | `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` *imperial-event encapsulation pattern, forthcoming* |
+
+Both spread-out over the cycle; both narrative-framed by yesterday's events. **The two-ledger split mirrors the existing specter-vs-boot split** — policy-issuance (free) vs enforcement (expensive) — now formalized as separate ledger-grammars. The GM's middle-management role gains a second pipeline to negotiate.
+
+### Ledger cadence
+
+The default cadence is **daily** — one ledger per cycle, checked at end-of-cycle. This matches the existing *"shifts on NPC rows; daily rewrite"* canonical commitment (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Labor-cycle architecture).
+
+**Cadence may be caste-stratified**:
+
+| District type | Cadence | Why |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Imperial-pinnacle districts** (deva-heavy; ceremonial; high-priority) | Daily, audit-rich | The imperium watches its showcase closely |
+| **Slum-tier districts** (tiryak-heavy; productive; mid-priority) | Daily, audit-light | Standard cadence; baseline imperial attention |
+| **Frontier / abandoned districts** (low population; low imperial-priority) | Multi-cycle (every 3-7 days) | The imperium can't afford to check often; the breathing-room is largest here |
+
+*The ledger cadence itself is a political stratification.* Imperial-attention scarcity manifests as cadence-frequency; the most-watched districts are imperial-net high-revenue districts; the least-watched are the slum-frontier where the going-rogue arc has its widest breathing-room.
+
+This composes with the architecture's *"Imperium-as-slow-elephant"* claim and the calibrated-misery-as-finite-attention mechanic. **Less-watched districts have more cheat-substrate; more cheat-substrate enables more corruption; more corruption enables more lifeforce-maintenance; more lifeforce-maintenance enables more authentic NPC life; more authentic NPC life enables the going-rogue arc to take root.** *The frontier is where the truth-register survives, structurally.*
+
+### Catch-up window vs fail-state — gradual escalation
+
+When a demand-ledger row comes up short at check-time, the imperial response is **gradual escalation** (not immediate enforcement). This reuses the bounty-staircase grammar (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The bounty-staircase) at the district-economic layer rather than per-perpetrator:
+
+| Cycle of failure | Imperial response | Cost class |
+|---|---|---|
+| **First-cycle shortage** | Warning broadcast (relays + billboards in district); district-director receives polite reminder from GM; demand carried-forward to next cycle with priority bump | Cheap (specter) |
+| **Second-cycle shortage** | Resource-restriction (district's incoming material allocations reduced; lifeforce-allocation tightened); audit-overseer dispatched for lightweight investigation | Medium |
+| **Third-cycle shortage** | Imperial-faction dispatch (martial / inquisition depending on which catalogue-row failed); director reprimand (potential replacement); cheat-tool ledger seized for audit | Expensive (boot) |
+| **Fourth+-cycle shortage** | District is in **silence** (per existing §Migration, exodus, silence canon); imperial-budget treats district as effectively-zero; may trigger forced-conscription or migration-incentive events | Crisis-mode |
+
+The escalation gives the director a **catch-up window** — first-cycle shortage is forgiven if next-cycle hits target; the warning-rung doesn't ratchet beyond first-rung if recovery happens. **This is what makes the corruption-substrate viable**: the director can run a deficit cycle (cheating + double-ledger) IF they can recover next cycle through underground channels or migration-pulled labor. *Without the catch-up window, every shortage would be terminal; with it, the simulation has elastic recovery space.*
+
+Specific escalation-rates per demand-class are designer-tunable (see Open questions). Some demand-classes (high-priority; service-body production for imperial-net) escalate fast; others (low-priority; basic-flow) escalate slowly. The per-class tuning is the *imperium's policy as expressed in escalation-rates* — high-priority demands get the boot quickly; low-priority demands are spoken-about-but-not-enforced for many cycles.
+
+## How this composes with vocations.md
+
+The catalogue-stack and the vocation-system are **two halves of the same data model**:
+
+- **Catalogue-stack** specifies the resources / production-chains / imperial-demand-catalogue (the *what*)
+- **Vocations.md** specifies the task-execution mechanics / depletion-pool dynamics / window-partition / outcome formula (the *who-and-how*)
+
+The outcome formula (per vocations.md §The outcome formula, *outcome = trait-engagement-points × hidden-task-stat*) is what *feeds the production-chain's quality-curve*. Quality-curves take outcome-values and produce output-quality-tiers; output-quality-tiers populate resource-catalogue instances. **One unbroken pipeline from trait-vector through task-execution to resource-output.**
+
+The director's shift-arbitration (per vocations.md §Director's task-list arbitration surface) reads from the demand-ledger's district-allocated-rows + the production-chain bindings. The director's parental-rotator role (forced-by-math NPC rotation through the trait-wheel for refresh) operates *against* the imperial-demand pressure — the director is structurally negotiating the gap between *what the imperium wants* and *what the NPCs can sustainably produce given their current depletion-pool states*. **The corruption-substrate emerges precisely in this gap.**
+
+The window-partition (per vocations.md §The 24h window-partition) bounds how much labor each NPC can supply per cycle. The work-window is the imperially-claimable allocation; demand-rows that exceed the work-window-supply trigger fail-state escalation. **The window-partition is the cap on imperial extraction at the per-NPC layer**; the catalogue-stack is the imperial demand at the world layer; the gap between them is the simulation's primary tension.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- **Concrete escalation-rates per demand-class.** First-cycle / second-cycle / third-cycle response shapes are specified architecturally; the per-demand-class tuning is implementation-time work and design-research. Service-body production (high-priority) likely escalates faster than basic-flow grain production (low-priority); the actual numbers need playtesting.
+- **Quality-curve shapes per production-chain.** Each chain has a quality-curve mapping outcome-value to output-quality-tier; specific curve shapes (steep / gentle / threshold-stepped) are designer-authored at content-canon time and may need balancing-research.
+- **Resource-catalogue versioning for world-gen vs runtime.** When new production-chains are authored between content-patches, the catalogue grows; runtime instances of the old catalogue persist. Migration semantics for catalogue-versioning are deferred to the `world-generation.md` cascade-versioning design (already noted as open in architecture-index.md).
+- **Cross-district demand-routing flexibility.** A demand-row binds to district(s) via world-gen-time vocation-distribution. When a district's vocation-supply collapses (per architecture.md §The vocation-substrate / supply elasticity), can the demand-row dynamically route to neighbors? Hunch: yes, with a routing-cost penalty proportional to district-graph-distance; this becomes the *"migration events"* GM-tool's automatic counterpart.
+- **Caste-cadence calibration.** The caste-stratified cadence (imperial-pinnacle daily-audit-rich vs frontier multi-cycle audit-light) is sketched architecturally; concrete cycle-counts per caste-tier are tuning work.
+- **Black-market production-chain handling.** The blackmarket T4 escape valve (per architecture.md §Imperial-extraction mechanisms) involves production-chains that are *off the imperial-demand-catalogue*. How are these typed in the catalogue-stack? Hunch: as parallel *underground-demand-catalogue* rows that the GM can see but doesn't allocate-from; districts running blackmarket chains satisfy underground-catalogue rows that don't appear in imperial-demand-reports. The double-ledger naturally handles this.
+- **Necrocommerce as catalogue-rows.** Memory-pattern-extraction is canonically the most-reviled vocation. Its production-chain rows in the catalogue should carry an *ethics-flag* for the Memorialist counter-archive's protest-mechanism. Open: should the architecture provide a typed *ethics-flag* field on catalogue-rows, or is this purely diegetic-narrative?
+- **Player-driven T4 catalogue authoring.** The bifurcated economy (per architecture.md §Bifurcated economy) gives players the unique-T4-supplier role. Do players add their own T4 catalogue-rows through play (a player who invents a new mod-recipe contributes to the catalogue), or is the catalogue strictly designer-authored? Hunch: hybrid — the production-chain templates are designer-authored; players' actual recipes are instances of templates with player-specific quality-curves derived from their task-stats. *The catalogue grows by player-recipe-discovery within designer-bounded chain-templates.*
+
+---
+
+**Version:** 0.1 | **Created:** 2026-04-27 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27