Deeper Insights
The model, taken apart one lever at a time. Each study changes a single knob, runs the engine, and reports what actually moves — and what surprisingly doesn't. Every figure is computed live in your browser by the same seeded engine that powers the simulator. Nothing here is hand-drawn.
What sets the pace
Three levers move the graduation date. Everything else is texture.
Where Does the Return Come From?
The return isn't assumed. It's an earned slice of a business's own productive profit: ROI = 12·PSP·(m·s)/C — equivalently, slice × margin × capital-turns.
A high return is reachable only when a business is member-dense relative to its capital. A live calculator finds the break-even. The recursive network compounds it further — but sustainably only near the reinvestment optimum (a U-curve, not free).
Read the study →ROI is Destiny
The return the businesses earn dominates the date — 20% → ~29 years, 100% → ~7.
Captive demand, zero marketing, and full supply-chain margin make a high blended return structural, not wishful.
Read the study →What Return Should a Business Aim For?
One lever moves the finish line more than all the others: the return. The target for every new business is to earn the highest honest one it can.
The model says it's reachable: a member-dense, high-margin business can clear ~150% on paper. With the optimal hold the whole community graduates in under 7 years. Links the best-return objective live.
Read the study →The Patience Dividend
Reinvesting more of each return — paying members a little less now — reaches independence years sooner.
An honest exchange rate between patience and speed. The community chooses where to sit.
Read the study →Solidarity Compounds
Turn off role-mixing and the finish slides from ~11 years to ~18.
Integration — sharing across cohorts, holding many roles — is a load-bearing engine, not a nicety.
Read the study →What you get to choose
These levers barely touch the date. They decide what kind of economy you become.
The Two Ginis
Income equality and ownership distribution are independent dials.
Concentrate ownership on the founders — a real reward for joining early — while everyone's income stays near-perfectly equal.
Read the study →Who Rises When
The distribution rules change the texture of the climb, not the finish.
And the tightest, fairest rule — strict lockstep — is also the fastest.
Read the study →The Seven Years of Plenty
An accumulation hold graduates everyone sooner AND builds ~double the economy. The optimum lands near seven years.
Store during the plenty. The oldest wisdom about abundance is also, quietly, the math.
Read the study →Does it hold
A model is only interesting if it survives being resized — and being made real.
Built to Scale
Graduation time is nearly flat from 250 to 2,000 families.
The mechanism is proportional by construction — a small pilot faithfully predicts a city.
Read the study →When Members Aren't Identical
Give every family its own budget and all still graduate — to their own full coverage, in the same time.
Income rises to meet need (spend↔income correlation ~0.99). Coverage stays equal while raw income differs exactly as much as needs do.
Read the study →When Businesses Fail
Let businesses fail and the finish moves out and the band widens. But no one is ever excluded.
The risk is time, not people (capital comes from spending, so the engine never starves). And the collective's scale — many small businesses — is its own insurance.
Read the study →Joining a Community Already in Flight
Let members arrive over time and latecomers still graduate — faster than the founders did.
The moving train is catchable: newcomers start furthest-behind, so they lead the queue. Founders wait longest; whether ownership repays that wait is a network-tree result (see Businesses That Spawn Businesses), not this study's. Destination invariant, journey not.
Read the study →The Network Sustains
Businesses spawn businesses. The obvious version is a bubble that collapses. The real one carries a 60,000-member network home — and holds.
Productive profit is the foundation; newcomer contribution is the accelerant. Both are needed. Founders reach coverage first (~2yr). Everyone graduates; no one is excluded. The capstone.
Read the study →Businesses That Spawn Businesses
Each business reinvests a slice to fund a child business. The result: an ownership tree many generations deep, returns flowing up the branches.
The piling made explicit: founding a root means owning the whole forest it grows. The compounding graduates the network years sooner (22yr → 13yr). Conservation-clean at every depth.
Read the study →Now put the levers together for a goal
The studies isolate one lever each. The Objective Explorer does the inverse — pick what you want to optimize for, and see the settings that get you there, run live.
Open the Objective Explorer →