# The Five Joints

Each chapter has closed with its own argument: the reason for its rule, the
strongest alternative, who bears the cost, and what would change my mind. This
Part asks what those arguments leave open when read one at a time. How do the
choices fit together? Where does one choice cost another? What commitments sit
beneath them all? A consistent arrangement can still be oppressive,
impractical or beside the point, and a passing check chooses nobody whose
losses matter.

Imagine your household receiving the food it is owed, living in the shelter
it is owed, and obtaining the care an ill family member is owed. Someone
provides that care, whether through paid employment or an unpaid care role.
Then an allegation is made against someone in the household. Whether the
allegation is substantiated or defeated, those entitlements remain. This is a
hypothetical fulfilment of the promise. It reports no service operating and
no food, shelter or care reaching anyone in the world. The formal cases can
show an entitlement surviving a finding; they cannot stock this kitchen.

That distinction is the standard for the argument. If the design gives someone
a right and no lawful way to seek its fulfilment, it needs correction. If the
way exists in law and nobody operates it, the right remains unfulfilled. An
accurate description of either failure is still a failure.

The commitments and their instruments need different reasons. Equal standing
does not by itself choose two legislative chambers, a collective executive or a
particular appointment procedure. Those arrangements need an argument about how
they protect people, what they obstruct and whether another arrangement would
do the work with fewer burdens, and the chapters give it. Their constitutional
status makes alteration deliberate; only the core in *Changing the Rules*
(Chapter 22) lies beyond amendment.

## The commitments beneath the choices

Five commitments carry the rest.

**What is owed waits on nothing the person must earn.** Standing follows a
birth or an encounter, before anyone has matched a name to a registry. The
floor is a debt to each person, owed on personhood alone. Need decides a real
shortage, and productivity, contribution and usefulness are forbidden keys.
Work, its refusal and its pay sit above the floor, and a prisoner remains among
the persons it is owed to. The lineage runs through Henry Shue's basic rights,
the levels of duty the United Nations committee adopted and Amartya Sen's
entitlements, and *What You Are Owed* (Chapter 3) marks where the design parts
from them: the committee's duty to provide waits on a finding that a person
cannot provide for themselves, and this floor asks nothing of the person owed.

**A fact reaches a person only by a route written for it.** The record admits
only declared kinds of entry. The conclusions that confine, restrict or
discredit someone must follow from recorded premises by a named finder. A use
of a record is bound to one reviewed holding, a credibility finding restricts
the one act it concerns, severity permits a harsher place and never chooses
it, and what a person tells a clinic travels to no enforcement office. Philip
Pettit calls a person unfree to the extent that another can interfere in their
choices at will, even if the other never does.[^pettit] These routes withdraw
the capacity rather than trusting it to stay idle.

**No party certifies its own case.** Delivery is attested from the recipient's
side by a witness other than the provider. A breach of custody conditions is
found by people who neither hold the person nor are held. The shield's
unrelated-prosecution finding comes from reviewers outside the case, whose
eligibility two further offices must show. Appointments come from divided
sources, and a scarcity allocation's attesters stand apart from the claimants
it compares.

**Power is current; answerability lasts.** Authority needs a positive record
tied to its source and end, and ends when that record does. Answerability
survives recall, so the person who exposed an official keeps the protection
the exposure earned.

**Silence decides nothing.** An absent entry is silence rather than a finding.
Silence extends no power: custody authority nobody renews lapses, and a
declaration's powers end with it. Silence closes no claim: when a responding
office stays silent, its duty moves to a separate alternate. Silence approves
nothing: an amendment is certified only on positive readings, and a missing
review holds a Guardian's pause for no longer than its own record allows. And
silence becomes no finding about a person: the freedom that remains is written
as duties on a named body rather than read from what is missing.

Elizabeth Anderson asks what people need to function as equal citizens, and
allows functionings that need an income to be conditioned on work, which this
design refuses.[^anderson] The five commitments are my answer to her question
under that refusal: a person who loses every political contest must remain a
member who can live, dissent and seek correction.

## What the design adds

None of these ideas is new on its own, and the chapters credit their sources.
The book's contribution is carrying four of them through a whole constitution
and testing each against the rules as written.

The first is keeping entitlement, duty, evidence and delivery apart as a
principle of design. A constitution usually states the entitlement and leaves
the rest to courts and administrations. In the case that opens Part I, South
Africa's Constitutional Court declared what the state must do and ordered
housing for nobody. Here each part has its own rule: the entitlement names what
is owed, the duty names who owes it and where, the evidence names who may
attest that it reached someone, and delivery remains a fact about the world
that the rules never assume. A failure can then be located. A debt with no
bearer, a bearer with no evidence route, and evidence that attests a receipt
while the service stays unreliable are three different defects, and each has
its own remedy.

The second is a set of constraints on how facts flow into consequences. The
method names six: inputs closed by name, conclusions nobody may write directly,
records read only for their purpose, endpoints nothing reads, no confinement
for an absence, and findings bound to their subject and case. The thesis in one
line: a right is protected by stating it and also by limiting what the rest of
the law may do with facts about the person. These are checks on the written
form of rules, and a rule written another way to the same effect can pass them.

The third is testing a design with paired edge cases. The child with nobody is
the person public power has not acted upon; the prisoner is the person it has.
They fail in opposite directions, and the book runs its rules against both. The
pair shows where each depends on someone else acting: a held person is owed
humane care, voice and review of the holding by duties that custody itself
raises, while the child nobody has come for depends on somebody beginning,
which is why the rights advocate owes initiation without a request.

The fourth is a handful of mechanisms: the one thing a sentence takes, which
is movement; answerability that survives recall; severity as a ceiling on the
place of confinement rather than a selector; controls that defeat a claim of
scarcity made from price, budget or refusal; silence that never counts as
approval; and the firewall between services and enforcement. Each is argued in
its chapter, and each is small enough to adopt elsewhere without the rest.

## Designing from the extreme case

The obvious objection to building from the child with nobody and the prisoner
is that ordinary life then bears machinery meant for the worst case. *An
Ordinary Week* (Chapter 7) answers it by following one adult through work, a
rented home, a clinic, a child at school, an election, a dispute with a
landlord and a police stop. Two entries give that adult personhood, the floor
and the ballot, and most of the week touches nothing further. The rules engage
where a record would decide something about the person, and there they ask for
writing before touching: a stop that only identifies a human being restricts
nothing, and a search needs a record of its own.

The weight falls on whoever seeks to act against someone. Help takes effect on
the record of the one actor who gives it, with an independent reviewer owing
prompt review; a restriction, a finding or an appointment giving power over
another person waits for its attesters and reviewer. So a landlord seeking an
eviction and an office seeking a restriction bear procedure, and a person
asking for help mostly does not. The nearest exception is a wage the employer
alone attests: it waits for an attester authorised for the worker, who may be
the worker, to record the payer, the kind and the basis. Where procedure lands
on the person the rules serve more heavily than that, the design has failed in
one of the ways *Where This Could Fail* (Chapter 30) ranks.

Designing from the extreme case also finds defects an average case hides. A
floor tested on a registered adult with a home and a job would never have shown
that standing must come before identity, or that a request is too much to ask
of someone who cannot make one.

## Valuation

The first joint is how a society values people without ranking them. The
choices meeting here are the floor that ignores contribution, pay and
contribution above it, need as the key to a real shortage, a credibility
finding that restricts a single act, and separate claims for the environment,
the commons and animals. The commitment beneath them is that a person's worth
is never a quantity the constitution computes.

History warns against both halves of the problem. Owen's New Harmony community
began in 1825 and dissolved in 1827. His later labour exchanges sought a common
measure in time, but the hours on their notes incorporated market valuations of
labour and materials; calling a unit an hour removed no judgment about unlike
products and tasks.[^owen] Justin Yifu Lin argues that Chinese collectives
retained a right to withdraw until 1958, and that its removal undermined the
agreement sustaining cooperation. He presents evidence consistent with that
hypothesis rather than a settled account of the agricultural crisis. The
constitutional question he raises is whether essentials may be used to make
someone accept a judgment of their contribution.[^lin]

Pay above the floor is left to democratic law, and communities set it
differently. MONDRAGON's industrial beginning dates to 1956; its 2024 annual
report records an average workforce of about seventy thousand, and its 2021
account describes a wage scale of six to one between maximum and minimum
salaries.[^mondragon] For comparison, the Economic Policy Institute's projected
estimate for the largest 350 American firms by sales in 2025 is about 325-to-1,
measured against an industry average for production and nonsupervisory
workers. The dates, populations and pay measures differ, so the two figures
illustrate different distributions and measure no effect of cooperative
governance.[^pay]

I confer no constitutional status for contribution. People can honour care and
creation through expression and association, and a public service can account
for the acts it relies on. The strongest alternative is an acknowledgment with
no legal consequence, which lets the public see a contribution while owing
everyone the same minimum. But a badge acquires social meaning even when the
rules never spend it, its absence can stigmatise someone whose work went
unrecorded, and withdrawing it for one dishonest act would condemn unrelated
teaching or care. Where a wage or supplement rests on false evidence, that
claim has its own correction; a general register of esteem adds no remedy for
the payer, the worker or a dependant. This choice gives up a common public
acknowledgment and leaves neglected work exposed to social disregard, which
labour rights, care duties and contestable compensation meet claim by claim.
Evidence that a public acknowledgment met a concrete unmet need without
becoming a status hierarchy would reopen it.

The joint's trade-off is between separateness and judgment. Keeping claims
apart makes officials judge where a single score would calculate. A scarcity
manager compares resource-specific need, a court weighs the river's claim and
the fish's claim without letting either buy the other, and the river case holds
immediate human water and ecological repair as two duties at once. A human
floor beneath an ecological ceiling is Kate Raworth's doughnut, whose ceiling
draws on the planetary boundaries Rockström and colleagues proposed in
2009.[^doughnut] A single total of human benefit, ecological gain and animal
loss would be easier to administer, and it would hide which protection was
surrendered and who must answer for it. The cost of separateness falls on the
people given lower priority and on whoever depends on an official's judgment
being sound; reasons, challenge and an unmet claim recorded as failure bound
it. Evidence that the permitted distinctions reproduce social disadvantage
would defeat the argument, however specific to the resource they claim to be.

## Rotation

The second joint is who does necessary work and who holds necessary office when
nobody is compelled to. The choices meeting here are the freedom to refuse and
leave work without losing the floor, minimum-service duties that bind a
provider or the bargaining parties and never a named worker, authority tied to
its source and end, a government removed only by electing its successor,
caretaker limits, custody that lapses when nobody renews it, and duties that
move to an alternate when the responding office stays silent.

The kibbutzim make the first half a question to investigate rather than a
verdict. Abramitzky's account concerns roughly 270 communities and examines
shared commitments, selection, monitoring, incentives and exit, and Leviatan
reports that by 2011 roughly three in four kibbutzim had adopted differential
salaries. Their history shows durable cooperation and pressure to change its
terms. It isolates no single cause of reform, and it leaves open whether an
unconditional minimum requires equal pay.[^kibbutz] The design permits higher
pay for difficult work, training, predictable hours and collective bargaining,
and public, cooperative and private provision under common rights.

Rotation of public power answers a different problem: an officeholder who can
make their own continuation indispensable. Current power depends on its own
lawful mandate, scope and end; recall or succession ends authority without
ending answerability for its use, and a caretaker holds continuity powers
without the ordinary mandate. When an election cannot be held, the electoral
body owes it at the first lawful opportunity and the outgoing chamber sits only
within caretaker limits until its successor meets.

The two halves share a commitment: nobody acquires a person through their need,
and nobody acquires an office through the failure to replace them. They also
share a cost, and it falls on third parties. Refusing conscription can leave a
service unfilled, and the person relying on it bears the gap. Refusing
continuation lets authority lapse, and the person the authority protected bears
that: when custody lapses for want of a renewal, the injured person and the
public lose protection they were owed. I accept both because each alternative
extends a claim on a person through need or silence. Where the design can, it
answers with a duty owed before the end: review before custody authority
expires, with a predeclared alternate when the ordinary body is certified
silent. Staffing it leaves to conditions, recruitment and training, and whether
those suffice is the second book's to show. Evidence that services fail at
those transitions calls for repair of the continuity route and better
conditions; automatic extension would answer a different question.

## Coercion

The third joint is what the design does to a person it confines. The choices
meeting here are a sentence that takes movement and nothing else, the vote kept
outside the sentence, the prisoner kept among persons, severity proved in the
case as a ceiling on the place, the shield scoped to the case and dated by the
charge, credibility findings restricted to the act, custody that lapses without
current authority, and breaches found from outside the walls. The commitment
beneath them is that coercion takes one thing, on grounds proved in the case,
for as long as current authority lasts.

The chapters' evidence points in more than one direction, and together it
explains the shape. In Norway, where criminal cases are assigned to judges at
random, Bhuller, Dahl, Løken and Mogstad compared defendants whose sentences
depended on the judge they happened to draw: imprisonment reduced reoffending
for defendants who had not been working before prison, and those who had been
working lost employment.[^incarceration] John Pratt ties the Nordic combination
of low imprisonment and humane conditions to the equality of the welfare
state,[^nordic] and Gabriel Chin argues that the restrictions following
conviction elsewhere have revived civil death under another name.[^civil-death]
Read together, they suggest that confinement under humane conditions can help
some people while the losses that follow a conviction can outlast the sentence.
The design keeps a bounded power to confine and strips the collateral losses:
standing, the floor, the ballot and political voice survive the sentence, and
no further loss follows without its own grounds and authority.

The trade-offs inside this joint all fall on someone injured or at risk. The
shield and lasting answerability protect a discloser from retaliatory
confinement, and a person injured in an unrelated case waits while a finding is
sought. Lapse protects against power extended by silence, and a person
protected by the confinement loses it when nobody renews. The severity ceiling
keeps a prediction from opening the harshest place for a minor offence, and a
person exposed to repeated lesser harms gets protection, support and remedies
without secure confinement on that ground. In each case I answer the cost with
a duty and a separate route rather than with more coercion: review owed before
authority ends, protective measures on their own grounds, and compulsory
non-carceral remedies. The abolitionist case, which *The One Thing Taken*
(Chapter 27) answers, would remove the power altogether; I retain it for the
case where an adjudicator finds that nothing less restrictive can protect
another person. That is an argument for keeping the power available; whether
any particular use is necessary is for the adjudication in that case.

The pair of stress cases shows what custody adds. The prisoner and the child
are owed the same floor, and neither a sentence nor a birth record is evidence
of provision. Custody adds duties: humane care, recorded voice, review of the
holding and continuity at release. The child's protection is owed by an office
that must begin without being asked. A record that stopped changing once a
person was held would reproduce what the case opening Part IV found: people
held for years because nobody moved their case. The design's answer is
authority that must stay current. Custody under a sentence lapses unless
renewed, and detention before trial needs prompt judicial review that nobody
has to request. A lapse ends the lawful authority without releasing anyone:
release is a further act, and a person still held is owed humane care and
review of the holding until it happens.

## Capture

The fourth joint is an institution that obeys the visible procedure while
answering to someone else. It can appoint people with different titles who
answer to the same interests, accept a false attestation, or leave a person's
encounter out of the record. More signatures can make the account look stronger
while making it harder to challenge. The choices meeting here are the record
closed by name, delivery attested from the recipient's side, uses bound to
their holding, divided appointments that an independently reviewed finding of
appointment control can withhold, outside reviewers and witnesses, help that
takes effect on one actor while harm waits for review, and the firewall between
services and enforcement. The commitment beneath them is that no party
certifies itself and every adverse conclusion has a finder who can be named.

Ownership settles none of this. Cooperative, public and private providers face
the same labour rights, equality duties and scrutiny, and concentrated private
power takes duties when a finding shows a particular dependency, essential
function or gatekeeping power. Elizabeth Anderson describes most workplaces as
private governments, whose authority over workers they have no say in, and K.
Sabeel Rahman argues that firms controlling infrastructure many others depend
on should be regulated as public utilities.[^private-power] The function-
specific duties follow that line, and neither author supplies the finding a
particular case needs.

Standing attaches before identity reconciliation. That matters because the
record problem reaches essentials directly. Drèze and his coauthors report mass
cancellation of ration cards in Jharkhand for want of an Aadhaar link,
following a March 2017 order, and Muralidharan, Niehaus and Sukhtankar estimate
that between one and a half and two million legitimate beneficiaries lost
access at some point during the reforms, much of the harm coming from how the
transition was managed. Cards and people are different units.[^jharkhand]
The family whose case opens this book was among those whose card was
cancelled. Under this design a failed match stops nothing that personhood alone
grounds, and a service may not turn a disputed identity into a reason to
withhold the floor.

The joint's trade-offs are between price and barrier, and between speed and
review. Separate attesters, a responding office, an alternate, public reasons
and a challenge route raise the price of a false record, since each is a named
person who can be found out; they leave its possibility, which *Where This
Could Fail* (Chapter 30) ranks among the larger risks. Help taking effect on
one actor's record reaches people before review, and help given wrongly binds a
provider or public body until review withdraws it. Adverse acts wait, because
an adverse act done wrongly is harder to undo than help given wrongly, and help
given on one record never becomes the completed record that other rules read.

The last trade-off is between privacy and coordination. A broader linked record
could reveal an unmet need without making someone repeat their account at every
door. The design binds each record to its purpose instead, and its cost falls
on people who need several services, cannot keep explaining their
circumstances, or depend on someone else to communicate. The initiation duty
and accessible assistance meet part of that cost. A broader coordination route
would deserve adoption if it reduced missed care without permitting unrelated
reuse, conditioning essentials or weakening correction.

The consequential records remain the constitutional source and the facts
given to it. The source can be inspected and its represented consequences
executed. A change still requires constitutional justification; passing a
repository check is not democratic approval. Whoever operates the system must
never turn a successful calculation into authority to enact its inputs.
Explicit grounds, separated functions and contestable records make a
consequence answerable to something more precise than an official's
discretion. They leave false evidence false and an unwilling institution
unwilling, and leaving those judgments to trusted professionals needs evidence
and challenge too. The explicit route is justified only where it makes refusal
and correction more accessible without making a complete file the price of
help.

## The State

The fifth joint is what kind of state carries the duties.
This proposal specifies a republic, not a community exempt from public law.
History offers no single answer about the state's role. Eden Medina's account
of Chile's Cybersyn describes an economic coordination project using an
existing telex network under Allende's government; the coup ended it, so its
later performance is unknown.[^cybersyn] Auroville's governance sits inside a
statutory framework: in *Auroville Foundation v. Natasha Storey* in 2025, the
Supreme Court of India held the Governing Board entitled to constitute its
development council without reserved places for the Residents' Assembly,
distinguishing consultation on the master plan from authority to implement
it.[^auroville] Switzerland's WIR, founded in 1934, is a complementary credit
arrangement inside a national legal and monetary system, and its persistence
identifies no single reason for the state's tolerance.[^wir] Kerala's People's
Plan, launched in 1996, shows a state enabling local decisions: Franke's
account describes devolution of a third or more of the development budget and
training for more than 100,000 people, evidence of an organised programme
rather than of what any one feature caused.[^kerala] Elinor Ostrom found that
long-enduring commons shared rules fitted to local conditions, collective
choice, monitoring and accessible conflict resolution, observed practices
rather than guarantees.[^commons]

The criteria for the state's institutions are equal political voice, the
ability to decide and to replace a government, protection against concentrated
power, and continuity of the rights the state owes. The chapters argue each
institution, and the pattern across them is how I resolve the conflicts between
those criteria. Where continuity of rights meets another criterion, continuity
wins: the core lies beyond amendment, a crisis suspends no right, and the floor
takes priority over any fixed limit on borrowing. Even the ability to replace a
government yields to continuity, since a government falls only when its
successor is chosen. Where protection against concentration meets identifiable
responsibility, protection wins: the executive is collective, the common
government is divided among tiers, and reviewers come from divided sources.
Equal voice gives way at one point: a territorial chamber, whose objection to
ordinary law is suspensive.

Each resolution has a cost with a name. The voter looking for whom to punish
finds a council; the person sent between tiers finds each denying
responsibility; a later majority finds the core closed to it; a region finds
its weight unequal. The duties that bound those costs, a named bearer for each
floor duty, continuity passing up a tier on a certified failure, reasons and
challenge, are argued where they apply.

Nor does the book's own democracy and wellbeing calculation settle any of this.
In the bundled data for 141 equally weighted countries, the correlation between
electoral democracy and average life evaluation falls from about 0.5 to about
0.2 after adjustment for log income per person. Income might help explain both;
democracy might affect income; other causes might affect all of them.
Adjustment cannot decide among those accounts, and controlling for something
democracy changes can remove part of the effect one hoped to
measure.[^democracy-data] The group averages of closed and electoral
autocracies are close together in that snapshot, while electoral and liberal
democracies are further apart; different countries compose each group, so the
difference estimates nothing about a country changing its government. The
exploratory dispersion calculation is narrower still. Absolute residuals mix
departures above and below a fitted line of country means, and measure neither
the worst lives within countries nor a guaranteed lower bound. The estimated
association with electoral democracy is negative after income adjustment. It is
one estimate from one snapshot: another index could return a nonsignificant
estimate, and the contrast between a significant and a nonsignificant result
would not itself show a difference between them, as Gelman and Stern
explain.[^measurement] Comparable
observations over time, defensible causal assumptions and measures of people's
worst circumstances would support a stronger investigation.

My reason for equal voice is that people subject to public power should have an
equal part in directing it. My reason for the floor is that needing essentials
should give no one a means to demand obedience, Pettit's non-domination again.
These are commitments to defend, and the country data hides no causal finding
behind them.

The proposal leaves an operating burden to meet.
No provider form, household relation, contract or delegated function removes
the public responsibility. Offer, accessible provision, receipt, challenge,
continuity and remedy remain distinct requirements. A recorded duty does not
perform the next act, and independently attested receipt does not show a
service system's capacity. The task of *What It Would Take* is to make an
operating account answer those demands with resources and evidence. It cannot
turn a constitutional defect into a staffing question or make an unmet
entitlement count as fulfilment.

## What the argument asks

These arguments support choices with specific costs, and they add up to no
empirical finding that the whole society works. The constitutional claim is
that a person does not have to earn standing or essentials and that public
power must answer for the burdens it imposes. Its means remain open to
challenge where a better arrangement can protect the same commitments.

The named people in the formal cases have no recorded inner lives. Giving
Nell fear or Hano relief would add evidence the cases do not contain. Their
limited records test consequences; they neither portray complete human lives
nor stand in for people who have lived under this proposal. The kitchen is
imagined. The historical cases are documented experiences under other
arrangements, and none offers testimony from a society operating these rules.

The [claims registry](https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/registry/claims.json) records the empirical claims,
sources, dates, units and caveats. The democracy calculation includes its
script and bundled inputs so a reader can repeat it. The registry's claims are
public domain; source publications and the data snapshot keep their own terms.
A locator makes evidence inspectable; it leaves its truth to be judged.
Different denominators and disputed findings remain part of the argument.

For the child who cannot initiate a claim, the test is help begun without a
request and provision that reaches them. For the person confined, it is a
restriction with lawful limits, retained rights, review and actual release
when authority ends. A rule can state those demands and expose a consequence
that violates them. A person still has to meet them.

The next chapter ranks the ways this design could fail, and what would show
each failure.

[^pettit]: Philip Pettit, *Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government*
    (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), chapters 1 and 2; *On the People's Terms*
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

[^anderson]: Elizabeth S. Anderson, [“What Is the Point of
    Equality?”](https://doi.org/10.1086/233897), *Ethics* 109 (1999),
    287–337, at 289, 316 and 318.

[^owen]: The Indiana Archives' [New Harmony history](https://www.in.gov/iara/services-for-public/search-archives-holdings/court-records/introduction-to-posey-county/new-harmony-indiana/)
    dates the community. Frank Podmore, [*Robert Owen: A Biography*, vol. II](https://www.st-helens-spiritualist-church.co.uk/books/Frank%20Podmore/Robwert%20Owen%2C%20A%20Biography%20Vol%20II%20%281907%29.pdf)
    (1907), pp. 406–407 and 410–411, describes the exchanges' valuation,
    citing *The Crisis*. For the wider history, J. F. C. Harrison,
    [*Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and
    America*](https://archive.org/details/robertowenowenit0000harr) (1969;
    linked reprint 1994).

[^lin]: Justin Yifu Lin, [*Collectivization and China's Agricultural Crisis
    in 1959–1961*](https://doi.org/10.1086/261732), *Journal of Political
    Economy* 98(6), pp. 1228–1252 (1990), abstract. The exit-rights explanation
    is Lin's hypothesis, not a settled account of every cause.

[^mondragon]: MONDRAGON's [1956 institutional history](https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/timeline/1956/),
    [2024 annual report](https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/people/site/assets/files/103207/annual-report-2024.pdf), p. 13,
    and [2021 extended report](https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/people/site/assets/files/103207/annual-report-2020-ext.pdf),
    pp. 6–7. The last document's printed title is 2021 despite its filename.
    Workforce is not a count of cooperative members; the stated salary
    scale is not a census of every subsidiary's pay.

[^pay]: Economic Policy Institute, [*CEO Pay*](https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay/)
    (15 September 2026), Figure A, Table 1 and their notes: projected 2025
    realised compensation, with a mean of firm-specific ratios. Different
    periods, populations and measures prevent a direct governance-effect
    comparison with MONDRAGON.

[^doughnut]: Kate Raworth, [*Doughnut Economics*](https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/)
    (2017); Johan Rockström et al., [“A safe operating space for
    humanity”](https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a), *Nature* 461 (2009),
    472–475. The boundaries and their transgression are 2009 estimates.

[^kibbutz]: Ran Abramitzky, [*Lessons from the Kibbutz on the
    Equality–Incentives Trade-Off*](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.1.185),
    *Journal of Economic Perspectives* 25(1), pp. 185–208 (2011),
    especially p. 186 for the 268 communities and pp. 192–200 for incentives,
    selection and exit; [author copy](https://ranabr.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26066/files/media/file/abramitzky_jep.pdf).
    The salary-reform share comes from Uriel Leviatan,
    [*Lessons from the Kibbutz as a Real Utopia*](https://www.sscc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/pages/wright/ASA/Leviatan%20--%20lessons%20from%20the%20kibbutz%20as%20real%20utopia.pdf),
    p. 12: his series reports 76% in 2011. The community count and reform share
    describe their respective study periods, not a current census.

[^incarceration]: Manudeep Bhuller, Gordon B. Dahl, Katrine V. Løken and Magne
    Mogstad, [“Incarceration, Recidivism, and
    Employment”](https://doi.org/10.1086/705330), *Journal of Political
    Economy* 128(4) (2020), 1269–1324. The subgroup effects are reported in the
    authors' manuscript and may differ slightly from the printed article.

[^nordic]: John Pratt, “Scandinavian Exceptionalism in an Era of Penal Excess”,
    [Part I](https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azm072) and
    [Part II](https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azm073), *British Journal of
    Criminology* 48 (2008). The papers concern Finland, Norway and Sweden, and
    the thesis has been contested.

[^civil-death]: Gabriel J. Chin, [“The New Civil Death: Rethinking Punishment
    in the Era of Mass Conviction”](https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol160/iss6/6),
    *University of Pennsylvania Law Review* 160 (2012), 1789–1833.

[^private-power]: Elizabeth Anderson, [*Private Government*](https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400887781)
    (2017), lecture 2; K. Sabeel Rahman, [“The New
    Utilities”](https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol39/iss5/3/), *Cardozo Law
    Review* 39 (2018), 1621–1689.

[^jharkhand]: Drèze, Khalid, Khera and Somanchi,
    [*Aadhaar and Food Security in Jharkhand: Pain without Gain?*](https://www.epw.in/journal/2017/50/special-articles/aadhaar-and-food-security-jharkhand.html)
    *Economic and Political Weekly* 52(50), pp. 50–60 (16 December 2017),
    p. 58, “Postscript”; [coauthor-hosted copy](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazar-Khalid-3/publication/322151401_Aadhaar_and_food_security_in_Jharkhand_Pain_without_gain/links/5be662a74585150b2bab8a2f/Aadhaar-and-food-security-in-Jharkhand-Pain-without-gain.pdf).
    Muralidharan, Niehaus and Sukhtankar,
    [*Identity Verification Standards in Welfare Programs: Experimental
    Evidence from India*](https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01296),
    *Review of Economics and Statistics* 107(2), pp. 372–392 (2025),
    abstract, also [distributed by the publisher through RePEc](https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v107y2025i2p372-392.html).

[^cybersyn]: Eden Medina, [*Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and
    Politics in Allende's Chile*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolutionaries/)
    (2011); her [*Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation*](https://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Lehre/ss11/SE_Kybernetik/reader/edenmedina_cinco.pdf),
    *Journal of Latin American Studies* 38(3), pp. 571–606 (2006),
    pp. 587, 592 and 606 for the existing telex network, its use and the ending.

[^auroville]: Supreme Court of India,
    [*Auroville Foundation v. Natasha Storey*](https://api.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2024/13723/13723_2024_9_1502_60151_Judgement_17-Mar-2025.pdf),
    Civil Appeal 13651 of 2024, judgment of 17 March 2025, especially
    paragraphs 12–17, pp. 23–29: consultation on the master plan and the
    Board's authority over implementation committees are distinct.

[^wir]: Bank WIR's [institutional history](https://www.wir.ch/fr/banque-wir/a-propos-de-nous/histoire/);
    James Stodder, [*Complementary Credit Networks and Macroeconomic
    Stability: Switzerland's Wirtschaftsring*](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2009.06.002)
    *Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization* 72(1), pp. 79–95 (2009),
    abstract, also [distributed through RePEc](https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v72y2009i1p79-95.html).

[^kerala]: Richard W. Franke,
    [*Local Planning: The Kerala Experiment*](https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~franker/KeralaExperiment.pdf)
    (2008), author-copy p. 1 for the 35% development-budget share and
    pp. 3–4 for training. The training count concerns people trained, not
    total participants or a verified count of unpaid volunteers alone.

[^commons]: Elinor Ostrom, [*Governing the Commons*](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763)
    (1990), chapter 3.

[^democracy-data]: V-Dem's [electoral-democracy index](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electoral-democracy-index)
    and [Regimes of the World](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime),
    the World Happiness Report's [Cantril ladder](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder),
    and World Bank [income per person](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank),
    distributed by Our World in Data. The [bundled snapshot](https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/registry/data/vdem-happiness-2026-08-03.csv)
    and [reproduction instructions](https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/registry/data/README.md) retain the
    inputs. The 2025 life-evaluation label averages 2023–2025 surveys on a
    0–10 scale; GDP per person is in purchasing-power-adjusted 2021 international
    dollars. Three GDP observations are from 2024; the remaining year labels
    are 2025. On adjustment, see Cinelli, Forney and Pearl,
    [*A Crash Course in Good and Bad Controls*](https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241221099552)
    (2024; first published online 2022), Models 11–12 and the distinction
    between total and direct effects.

[^measurement]: Gelman and Stern,
    [*The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” Is Not
    Itself Statistically Significant*](https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/surveys.course/GelmanStern2006.pdf)
    (2006), pp. 328–329; the American Statistical Association's
    [statement on significance and p-values](https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/p-valuestatement.pdf)
    (7 March 2016), p. 2, principles 3 and 5. The exploratory regression takes
    absolute residuals from life evaluation on electoral democracy, then fits
    them on electoral democracy and log GDP per person, using conventional
    standard errors. These are methodological references, not studies of this
    constitution.

---

By dhilipsiva. Prose: CC BY 4.0.

Canonical: https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/read/29-the-five-joints/

Source: https://github.com/dhilipsiva/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/blob/main/book-1/29-the-five-joints.md