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Your prior comment regarding the concept of contingent liabilities causes me to realize our labor is a contingent asset (which also maps to the bonded slave system/concept). What an Alice or Bob does with their time and effort will determine if those assets are realized.

For your RNW purposes you ignore contingencies, yet those are another (abstracted) level or layer of economics being traded and leveraged, which compounds the risk(s) of RNW depreciation (or should I say change in value) at the non-contingent layer below.

I’m sure you plan to illustrate how/when these contingencies come into play.

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Thanks for the interesting comment! I've had the vague idea of contingent debts in the back of my mind for a few years, but only found language for it in the last year or so. I think it's useful for illustrating, say, why someone would pay money for an insurance policy, but it's definitely a more advanced idea. It's a very interesting idea that, say, paying for a bonded servant or slave can be thought of as buying contingent assets, and that could be a fruitful avenue for some further research.

I'd argue that I don't ignore contingencies for RNW purposes. I just recognise them *at the point they become real* (if they ever do). Because this One Lesson approach doesn't attempt to predict what people will do, it doesn't need to attempt to assign them an accountant's fair value at a given point in time. The approach is all about understanding, rather than predicting, and especially discovering what we can know for certain irrespective of what people decide to do. I've been surprised at how much clarity this brings to some very controversial topics. Hopefully you'll see from the upcoming posts which apply the One Lesson (I've nearly finished one on Bastiat's broken window fallacy) that it can cut straight through speculation to discover the underlying reality.

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Looking forward to reading more. Mark to market is fraught with problems, so your approach to wait for real makes sense to me.

A note regarding "paying for a bonded slave as buying contingent assets" is effectively the birth certificate system. It's a rabbit hole, yet forms the basis for our governmental (originally religious) economic (tax and spend) and legal situation/system.

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Yes, any model of the economy which includes mark to market has to model people's decision-making process, so I don't see how it can be the basis of a "hard" science.

Interesting point about birth certificates - I've heard the theory but I have no legal background, so I don't have a strong opinion either way. From my perspective, the contingency which allows the government to treat us as a source of revenue (i.e. ongoing transfers of RNW) is simply us consenting to be taxed by them, whether voluntarily or under threat.

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