Coercion vs Pooling Formulas

The Economics of a Civilizational Transition

Ants, Bees, Humans - When Work Becomes Captive

Across nature, we see social species organize labor with remarkable efficiency. Ant colonies marshal entire workforces for the survival of the queen. Certain species of ants even enslave other ants, forcing them to forage and tend larvae. In honeybees, strict hierarchies can lock individuals into roles that are less about flourishing and more about service to the hive.

(I hope you take 9 minutes to watch this - I share it often because it helps us understand the logic of coercion)

Humans, too, have long mirrored these patterns. From outright slavery to modern wage coercion, societies have repeatedly optimized for surplus extraction by binding people into work they cannot freely refuse. The formula behind this is simple:

The Coercion Formula:
Elites maximize their gains when the profits they extract are larger than the costs of enforcing control.

Whenever the costs of maintaining guards, laws, or surveillance are lower than the wealth squeezed from people and ecosystems, coercion becomes “rational.” But this rationality comes at a devastating cost: degraded ecologies, broken communities, and generational trauma. What is efficient in the short term corrodes the long-term capacity of societies to regenerate.

Social and Environmental Dysfunction: The Shadow of Coercion

Under coercion, surplus flows upward, while the costs (poverty, ecological loss, cultural erosion) spread outward.

• Socially, this manifests as alienation, mistrust, and cycles of domination.

• Ecologically, forests are cut, soils exhausted, waters poisoned, because ecosystems cannot resist when laborers themselves are captive.

• Spiritually, humans lose relational memory: the sense that “I am because we are” (Ubuntu).

Coercion appears efficient, but it is brittle. Like overharvested land, it collapses under its own logic.

The Pooling Alternative: A Living Economics

Grassroots Economics proposes another formula, inspired by mycorrhizal fungi, ancestral traditions, and community trust:

The Pooling Formula:
Communities maximize shared prosperity when pooled and kept promises outweigh the risk of broken promises and everyone’s ability to pull on the commons is capped.

To say this in another way … We all do well when:

1. People keep their promises more than they break them (you can count on help showing up), and

2. There are clear limits so no one promises too much or tries to control everyone else.

Think of a neighborhood resource pool where folks actually deliver the rides, meals, or repair hours they promised - and everyone has a cap on how much they can take on. Because promises are mostly kept and over-issuance is limited, the whole group prospers.

Here, the emphasis shifts from extraction to reciprocal flow. Communities issue promises into a shared pool. These promises are bounded by agreed limits, preventing domination. Trust builds as commitments are fulfilled. The pool itself becomes a living archive of who contributes, who fulfills, and how value circulates.

Where coercion enslaves, pooling frees. Where coercion extracts, pooling regenerates. Where coercion erases memory, pooling deepens it.

Mapping the Two Formulas

Imagine this as a two-axis chart (above):

• X-axis: Enforcement/Control vs. Trust/Fulfillment (Mechanisms of Coodination)

• Y-axis: Surplus Extraction vs. Shared Prosperity (Direction of Surplus)

This produces four quadrants:

1. (bottom left) High Extraction + Low Enforcement Cost (less trust) → Classic Coercion. Efficient for elites, destructive for all else.

2. (bottom right) High Extraction + High Enforcement Cost (more trust) → Fragile Tyranny. Unsustainable regimes burning resources to keep control.

3. Shared Prosperity + Low Trust (more control) → Failed or Unanchored Commons. Good intentions collapse without accountability.

4. Shared Prosperity + High Trust (less control) → Thriving Commons - Commitment Pools. Regenerative, resilient systems where cooperation simply makes sense.

This simple framing helps us see that coercion is not “natural law,” but a conditional choice. And commitment pooling is not “utopian”, but rational when relational trust reduces breach risk below the value of cooperation.

Bridging the Quadrants

Step 1 - Map what already lives (Curation): List existing offers/wants (care hours, tools, seedlings, clinic days, rituals). Make only what you can verify visible.

Step 2 - Seed tiny, testable promises (Valuation): Issue small vouchers (e.g., “2 nursery hours,” “1 roof repair hour”), index their relative values, and time-bound them.

Step 3 - Guard against capture (Limitation): Set per-person pool limits and no-interest redemption so fulfillment = service, not debt escalation.

Step 4 - Let cooperation route around chokepoints (Exchange & Federation): Start swapping inside the circle, then link to adjacent pools (food↔forest↔clinic) as trust builds.

This is not a leap; it’s a sequence: curate → value → limit → exchange, then federate.

Where do you find yourself?

Fragile Tyranny ?
Stabilize by capping issuance, publishing fulfillment rates, and routing any fees to a social fund (not private hands). If enforcement is expensive, make coercion even more uneconomic.

Some centralization can be useful for coordination. The question is whether power is bounded and accountable or unbounded and extractive.

Failed/Unanchored Commons?
Shrink scope; reduce voucher types; add time windows and mediation; require a minimum seed before access. (Right-size the commons until fulfillment outpaces breach.)

Pooling thrives not by perfection but by memory + limits: even when breaches occur, transparent records and caps keep cooperation rational.

From Captive Workforce to Cooperative Commons

We are living in the critical transition point: moving from a coercion-dominated global economy into pooling logics that are already alive in ancient traditions.

• In nature: fungal networks route nutrients where needed, preventing monopolies of growth.

• In culture: rotational labor traditions like Mweria in Kenya prove that mutual care can be more efficient than markets in times of crisis.

• In technology: digital commitment pools and polycentric governance now make it possible to connect and federate these practices without collapsing into centralization.

The economics is clear: coercion may maximize surplus for a few, but pooling maximizes resilience for the many.

We stand at a threshold. Ants, bees, and humans have all shown the capacity for both enslavement/parasitism and cooperation. The difference lies not in biology but in protocol. By choosing the Pooling Formula - promises and limits honored, trust remembered - we seed economies that serve life rather than dominate it.

This is not abstract hope. It is the mathematics of survival, the ethics of Ubuntu, and the practical science of regeneration.