---

Introducing 顧生經濟學 (Gu-sheng Economics): An Applied Structural Framework

Faye Ku

This paper introduces 顧生經濟學 (Gu-sheng Economics), a framework for understanding money as a technology of status and debt settlement, and for diagnosing the structural flaw in contemporary monetary systems: the absence of a self-correcting distribution rule.

Building on the descriptive insights of Modern Monetary Theory, the institutionalist legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist economic critiques of Marilyn Waring, the anthropological re-framing of debt by David Graeber, and the gift economy reflections of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gu-sheng Economics proposes a residency-based planetary Universal Basic Income as a structural stent for the monetary circulatory system.

The framework argues that we live in abundance, not scarcity; that digital fiat can be issued at zero marginal cost; and that the only remaining constraint is moral: encoding correct values into the monetary operating system. Success is measured not by gross domestic product (GDP) but by health, happiness, and systemic stability without intervention.

1. Introduction

Economists have a professional interest in making the simple obscure. This is not a conspiracy. It is a guild function. Complexity is job security. The result, however, is that the general public has been systematically excluded from understanding the monetary system that governs their lives.

This paper takes the opposite approach. It proceeds from the premise that money is a human technology, designed by humans, and therefore redesignable by humans. It further proceeds from the observation that the current system contains a structural flaw: it has no automated, self-correcting mechanism for distributing the abundance that modern productive capacity makes possible. Universal Basic Income, issued to every resident of a given jurisdiction without citizenship qualification, is proposed as the correction.

The framework advanced here is not a theory. It is a description, of how money actually operates, and of how it could operate if its designers prioritized systemic health over institutional preservation.

2. Literature and Intellectual Lineage

Gu-sheng Economics does not emerge from a vacuum. It stands in a lineage of heterodox and feminist economic thought that has long challenged the mainstream narrative.

2.1 The Descriptive Foundation: Modern Monetary Theory

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as articulated by Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, and Stephanie Kelton, is not properly understood as a theory. It is a descriptive accounting framework that specifies how government spending and taxation actually function in a fiat currency system.

MMT demonstrates that a currency-issuing government faces no inherent financial constraint on its spending. The constraint is real resources, not revenue. Gu-sheng Economics accepts this descriptive foundation and extends it: if the state can issue currency without financial constraint, then the distribution of that currency is a design choice, not an economic necessity. The question becomes moral and structural, not fiscal.

2.2 The Anthropological Turn: David Graeber

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) fundamentally challenged the conventional origin story of money. As Graeber demonstrated, the standard economics textbook narrative, that barter preceded money, which preceded credit, is historically false.

Before there was money, there was debt. Money emerged not as a solution to the "double coincidence of wants" but as a technology of accounting within systems of credit and obligation, often enforced by state violence.

Graeber's work supports the Gu-sheng position that money is fundamentally a technology of status and social relationship, not a neutral medium of exchange.

2.3 The Institutionalist Legacy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898) is increasingly recognized as a pioneering work of American institutionalist economics.

Gilman argued that the economic dependence of women on men was not natural but cultivated, a "sexuo-economic" relation that could be transformed through the socialization of domestic work and the full participation of women in the public economy.

Gilman applied Darwinian evolutionary science to critique the economic structures of marriage and family, establishing a precedent for using biological and evolutionary frameworks to analyze economic institutions, a method Gu-sheng Economics extends to the monetary system itself.

2.4 Feminist Economics: Marilyn Waring and the Visibility of Care

Marilyn Waring's If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (1988) is regarded as the founding document of feminist economics.

Waring exposed how the System of National Accounts systematically excludes women's unpaid care work, housework, childcare, care for the sick and elderly, from economic value.

She famously criticized a system that "counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth, while child-rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless."

Waring's work establishes that the "economy" as conventionally measured is not a neutral description but a gendered construction that renders invisible the foundational labor upon which all other economic activity depends.

2.5 The Monetary Reform Tradition: Margrit Kennedy

Margrit Kennedy's Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995) argued that it is "virtually impossible to carry out sound ecological concepts without fundamentally altering the present monetary system based on interest."

Kennedy identified interest as the "invisible wrecking ball" in the economy and proposed systemic monetary reform as a precondition for ecological and social sustainability.

While Kennedy did not address UBI directly, her insistence that monetary structure determines ecological and social outcomes is a direct intellectual precursor to the Gu-sheng position.

2.6 Joan Robinson and Endogenous Money

Joan Robinson, the founder of post-Keynesian economics, was one of the original contributors to the theory of endogenous money.

She and Richard Kahn offered insights into the workings of a credit economy that have been largely ignored by mainstream economists.

Robinson's work established that money is not exogenously controlled by central banks but emerges from the lending activities of the banking system. Gu-sheng Economics extends this insight: if money is endogenous to the system, then the system's designers bear responsibility for its distributional outcomes.

2.7 Elinor Ostrom and Polycentric Governance

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics (2009), demonstrated through extensive empirical fieldwork that communities can self-govern common-pool resources without privatization or state control.

Ostrom's work on polycentric governance provides a precedent for the Gu-sheng proposition that monetary systems can be designed with automated, self-correcting rules that do not require constant discretionary intervention by central authorities.

3. The Five Foundational Questions

Every coherent economic framework must answer five foundational questions. Gu-sheng Economics answers them as follows.

3.1 What Drives Economic Value?

Human labor adds value, but value is ultimately rooted in biological vitality, which includes care for the planet and the biosphere in a way that directly benefits human flourishing.

An economy that destroys its own ecosystem is not productive; it is self-harming.

3.2 What Is Money?

Money is a tool designed to settle debts.

More fundamentally, it is a technology of human status. Human beings trade in status, respect, and the ability to secure cooperation from others.

Money is the most scalable status-token ever invented.

3.3 What Causes Economic Crises?

Systemic structural design without a UBI creates constant cyclical collapse.

We do not live in scarcity. We live in abundance. The actual problem is how to manage and distribute abundance, not how to scrape by.

Since digital fiat currency can be printed at zero marginal cost, the only constraint is moral: ensuring that the money expresses correct values, not artificial scarcity.

3.4 What Is the Proper Role of the State and Central Bank?

The central bank exists to provide services, including the issuance of money to unique individuals.

Government and money are inseparable because the state is a monopoly on legitimate violence over a territory.

If the money system were designed well, it would self-correct via automated rules that make sense to everyone, eliminating the need for economists to constantly adjust interest rates or second-guess the system.

3.5 How Do We Measure Success?

By health and happiness measures, and by the stability of the system without interventions.

A well-designed system does not require constant emergency maintenance.

GDP is not a measure of well-being; it is a measure of activity, including activity that is destructive or coercive.

4. The Structural Fix: Residency-Based Planetary UBI

The Gu-sheng framework proposes a Universal Basic Income issued to every resident of a given jurisdiction, without citizenship qualification.

This is not charity. It is a structural correction.

The logic is straightforward: if the government is a monopoly on legitimate violence over a territory, then every resident of that territory is subject to that violence, laws, policing, taxation.

Therefore, every resident, regardless of passport, deserves equal access to the system's monetary baseline.

Creating citizen versus non-citizen classes is structural oppression encoded into the money system itself.

"Universal" in this framework means planetary in scope but administratively decentralized: any defined geography can apply the rule to all bodies within its jurisdiction.

As more regions adopt the same governance structure, they can meld into one another, potentially expanding to account for the whole planet.

5. The Two Economies

Gu-sheng Economics distinguishes between two economies that coexist but are not equally recognized.

The monetary economy is the economy of men and markets, designed historically for territorial control, colonial extraction, and patriarchal hierarchy. It is the economy that is measured, theorized, and debated in economics departments and central banks.

The gift/love economy is the original economy, the economy of care, reciprocity, and "pay it forward" that existed long before money was invented.

It continues today as the fundamental bedrock of all human life. Without it, no child could survive to the age of using money. It underlies the entire monetary economy.

Universal Basic Income bridges these two economies.

It recognizes one universal moral value: the sanctity of human life.

In a society of abundance, no one should die of artificial lack.

6. Conclusion: Against Obscurantism

Gu-sheng Economics is offered not as a theory but as a description, of how money actually works, of the structural flaw in the current system, and of the concrete fix that would correct it.

It builds on the descriptive insights of MMT, the anthropological re-framing of Graeber, the institutionalist legacy of Gilman, the feminist critiques of Waring, the monetary reform proposals of Kennedy, the endogenous money theory of Robinson, and the polycentric governance insights of Ostrom.

It departs from these predecessors in its insistence on a residency-based planetary UBI as a structural, automated, self-correcting distribution mechanism, a stent for the monetary circulatory system.

If a system requires a priesthood of central bankers constantly adjusting rates to prevent collapse, that system is broken.

A well-designed system self-corrects.

That is not theory.

That is engineering.

The economists who make the simple obscure have had their turn.

It is time for a framework that makes the complex clear.

References

Ferber, M. A., & Nelson, J. A. (Eds.). (1993). Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. University of Chicago Press.

Gilman, C. P. (1898). Women and Economics. Small, Maynard & Company.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Kennedy, M. (1995). Interest and Inflation Free Money: Creating an Exchange Medium That Works for Everybody and Protects the Earth. Seva International.

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Robinson, J. (1956). The Accumulation of Capital. Macmillan.

Waring, M. (1988). If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. Harper & Row.