assembly-economics/references/LiteratureComparison.md

Literature Comparison v0.1

Status: orientation map v0.2. Bibliographic details verified by web search (§ 9). The content summaries are still the author's reading, and must be checked against the texts before they are relied on.

Purpose: place the Generative Assembly Society framework, GADM and the information-organism lens relative to existing work, so that the project (a) does not reinvent existing results, (b) borrows established methods, and (c) states clearly what is new.

Each entry gives the overlap, the difference from this project, and what to borrow.

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1. Assembly and complexity

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
Assembly Theory (A. Sharma, D. Czégel, M. Lachmann, C. P. Kempes, S. I. Walker, L. Cronin, "Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution", Nature 622: 321–328, 2023, doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9)	Objects as assemblies built from reusable components; selection as the source of complex objects	A physical and chemical theory with a measurable assembly index. INTENT.md explicitly does not require accepting it.	The idea of quantifying "assembly depth" as a reuse measure for X
The adjacent possible (S. A. Kauffman, Investigations, Oxford University Press, 2000)	Future combinations reachable from current components ≈ viable future assembly space	Biological and theoretical, not institutional	Vocabulary for reachable futures; combinatorial growth arguments
Technology as combination (W. B. Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, Free Press, 2009; UK: Allen Lane)	Technologies built from existing technologies; recursive composition	Descriptive history of technology, no institutional model	Evidence for R1 (generative reuse)
Economic complexity (C. A. Hidalgo & R. Hausmann, "The building blocks of economic complexity", PNAS 106(26): 10570–10575, 2009)	Capabilities as recombinable building blocks; diversity × ubiquity	Measures national capability structures from trade data	Empirical proxies for N and X

2. Agency, capability and freedom

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
Capability approach (A. Sen, Development as Freedom, Knopf, 1999; M. Nussbaum, no specific work cited yet)	Effective agency as reachable functionings, not formal liberty	Normative development framework, no dynamic model	Operationalization of G; lists of central capabilities
Real freedom / basic income (P. Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?, Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1995)	Existence principle; participation decoupled from labor	Focused on income; does not model domination or commons	Arguments for D_s and the Existence principle
Republican non-domination (P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1997)	Domination as capacity for arbitrary interference, separate from wealth	Political philosophy	Conceptual grounding for modeling P separately from wealth

3. Commons, institutions and power

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
Governing the commons (E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990)	Commons as institutions; polycentric governance	Natural-resource commons. Assembly commons are mostly non-rival.	Design principles for commons governance (WS-06, WS-11)
Commons-based peer production (Y. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, 2006)	Non-rival knowledge commons; open source	Network economy, pre-AI	Evidence for ρ and I_X mechanisms
Inclusive vs. extractive institutions (D. Acemoglu & J. A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown, 2012)	Institutional configurations determine whether success broadens or closes access	Historical, macro-institutional	Framing for the R3 / B1 loop (success becomes control)
Capital concentration (T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; French original Seuil, 2013)	Concentration of returns when r > g	Wealth-focused	Data and dynamics for W_c in the GADM-0.3 power extension
Entrepreneurial state (M. Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Anthem Press, 2013)	Public risk-bearing in innovation	Focused on the state	Evidence for public risk pools (F)

4. Automation and distribution

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
Task-based automation (D. Acemoglu & P. Restrepo, "Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor", Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(2): 3–30, 2019, doi:10.1257/jep.33.2.3)	Automation displaces tasks, new tasks reinstate labor	Labor-market focus, assumes wage-based participation	Labor share dynamics for w_L
AI and economic growth (P. Aghion, B. F. Jones & C. I. Jones, "Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth", NBER Working Paper 23928, 2017)	AI as the latest stage of automation, with capital taking over a growing range of tasks; growth limited by essential tasks that are hard to improve (Baumol)	Growth and factor shares; no domination, commons or attention	Bottleneck logic for which stocks constrain V and Y*
AI and income distribution (A. Korinek & J. E. Stiglitz, "Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for Income Distribution and Unemployment", NBER Working Paper 24174, 2017; chapter in Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb (eds.), The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda)	Redistribution needs when automation concentrates returns	Standard welfare economics	Distribution regimes for claims I

4.1 AI as self-improving capital (prior art for § 7, claim 2)

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
Transformative-AI growth (P. Trammell & A. Korinek, "Economic Growth under Transformative AI", CEPR Discussion Paper DP18780; SSRN 4616883)	AI lets capital "self-replicate" (raise output) and "self-improve" (raise knowledge production): close to K_Ω's learning with use	Growth-theoretic; ownership, membranes, lineage governance and agency are outside the model	Formal treatment of self-improving capital, a check on R7
Automating AI research (T. Davidson, B. Halperin, T. Houlden & A. Korinek, "When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth?", NBER Working Paper 35155)	Semi-endogenous growth with AI automation, where capital accumulation and technical progress reinforce each other	Focus on explosive growth; no distribution or power channels	Conditions under which R7 becomes explosive, relevant to the natural-monopoly question

5. Systems, cybernetics and viability

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
System dynamics (J. W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, MIT Press, 1961; D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers & W. W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, 1972, a Club of Rome report built on the World3 model)	Stock-and-flow modeling, feedback loops	GADM is a direct descendant in method	Method: causal-loop diagrams, stock-flow conventions, validation practice
Requisite variety (W. R. Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, 1956)	A regulator needs as much variety as what it regulates; the membrane as variety filter	Abstract cybernetics	Theoretical basis for membrane design
Viable System Model (S. Beer, Brain of the Firm, Allen Lane, 1972; 2nd ed. Wiley, 1981)	Viability, recursion, regulation of organizations	Organizational cybernetics, not learning systems	Recursion and viability vocabulary for the AIPN and the organism lens
Resilience and panarchy (L. H. Gunderson & C. S. Holling (eds.), Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, 2002)	Adaptive cycles, release and reorganization ≈ disassemble/reassemble	Ecological systems	Adaptive-cycle framing for transition dynamics (WS-12)
Planetary boundaries (J. Rockström et al., "A safe operating space for humanity", Nature 461: 472–475, 2009, doi:10.1038/461472a; full version in Ecology and Society 14(2): 32, 2009)	Non-tradeable ecological floors	Earth-system science	Grounding for the E floor
Doughnut economics (K. Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Chelsea Green, 2017; UK: Random House Business)	Social floor plus ecological ceiling as a viability corridor	No dynamic model of generativity	Corridor framing for constitutional constraints

6. Attention

Work	Overlap	Difference	Borrow
H. A. Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press, 1971	"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"	Organizational design	Founding statement of attention as the scarce resource
Attention economy (T. H. Davenport & J. C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Harvard Business School Press, 2001)	Attention as an economic resource	Managerial, treats attention as something to capture	Contrast case for x_att
Surveillance capitalism (S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs, 2019)	Extraction-funded attention, discovery concentration	Critical, not modeled	Scenario grounding for the attention-oligopoly regime
Goodhart's law / Campbell's law	Metric gaming	—	Basis for the metrics catalog's Goodhart risks

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7. What appears new in this project

To be confirmed by an actual literature search:

1. Generativity as the objective. Using viable future assembly space (rather than welfare, output or capability sets alone) as the target of institutional design.
2. Information organisms as a governed capital class. Revised after T02: self-improving AI capital is established in growth theory (§ 4.1), so learning with use is not new. What appears new is coupling it to lineage inheritance, membranes and their ownership, and feeding those into domination, agency and commons stocks rather than only into output and factor shares.
3. Membrane and lineage control as domination channels, separate from wealth.
4. Attention headroom as a stock inside a macro diagnostic, with an explicit guard against counting captured attention.

8. Next steps

• Read the § 4.1 papers in full, and check whether any of them model ownership concentration of AI capital (this would narrow claim 2 further).
• Run a topical literature search for WS-01, WS-07 and WS-14 (assembly ontology, power, attention) beyond this orientation map.
• Review system-dynamics validation practice (e.g. structure-verification and extreme-condition tests) and apply it to GADM-0.2.

9. Verification log

Verified 2026-10-12 by web search (catalogue records, publisher or journal pages). ✓ = author, title, venue and year confirmed. ◐ = partly confirmed. — = nothing specific to verify.

Entry	Status	Note
Sharma et al. 2023 (Assembly theory)	✓	Nature 622: 321–328
Kauffman 2000	✓
Arthur 2009	✓	Free Press (US), Allen Lane (UK)
Hidalgo & Hausmann 2009	✓	PNAS 106(26)
Sen 1999	✓	Knopf (US); Oxford edition also exists
Nussbaum	—	no specific work cited
Van Parijs 1995	✓
Pettit 1997	✓
Ostrom 1990	✓
Benkler 2006	✓
Acemoglu & Robinson 2012	✓
Piketty 2014	✓	English translation; French original 2013
Mazzucato 2013	✓
Acemoglu & Restrepo 2019	✓	JEP 33(2): 3–30
Korinek & Stiglitz 2017	✓	NBER WP 24174
Aghion, Jones & Jones 2017	✓	added in T02
Trammell & Korinek	✓	added in T02; CEPR DP18780
Davidson, Halperin, Houlden & Korinek	✓	added in T02; NBER WP 35155
Forrester 1961	✓	MIT Press
Meadows et al. 1972	✓
Ashby 1956	✓	Chapman & Hall
Beer 1972	◐	year and later Wiley edition confirmed; first-edition publisher from a secondary listing (Allen Lane)
Gunderson & Holling 2002	✓	Island Press; some listings date it 2001
Rockström et al. 2009	✓	Nature 461: 472–475
Raworth 2017	✓
Simon 1971	✓	in Greenberger (ed.)
Davenport & Beck 2001	✓
Zuboff 2019	✓
Goodhart / Campbell	—	cited as named laws only