Coercion Formula

= "Elites maximize their gains when the profits they extract are larger than the costs of enforcing control".

URL =

Discussion

Will Ruddick:

Social and Environmental Dysfunction: The Shadow of Coercion

"Whenever the costs of maintaining guards, laws, or surveillance are lower than the wealth squeezed from people and ecosystems, coercion becomes “rational.” But this rationality comes at a devastating cost: degraded ecologies, broken communities, and generational trauma. What is efficient in the short term corrodes the long-term capacity of societies to regenerate.

Under coercion, surplus flows upward, while the costs (poverty, ecological loss, cultural erosion) spread outward.

Socially, this manifests as alienation, mistrust, and cycles of domination.

Ecologically, forests are cut, soils exhausted, waters poisoned, because ecosystems cannot resist when laborers themselves are captive.

Spiritually, humans lose relational memory: the sense that “I am because we are” (Ubuntu).

Coercion appears efficient, but it is brittle. Like overharvested land, it collapses under its own logic."

(https://willruddick.substack.com/p/coercion-vs-pooling-formulas)

The Alternative: The Pooling Formula

= "Communities maximize shared prosperity when pooled and kept promises outweigh the risk of broken promises and everyone’s ability to pull on the commons is capped."

Will Ruddick:

"To say this in another way … We all do well when:

People keep their promises more than they break them (you can count on help showing up), and

There are clear limits so no one promises too much or tries to control everyone else.

Think of a neighborhood resource pool where folks actually deliver the rides, meals, or repair hours they promised - and everyone has a cap on how much they can take on. Because promises are mostly kept and over-issuance is limited, the whole group prospers.

Here, the emphasis shifts from extraction to reciprocal flow. Communities issue promises into a shared pool. These promises are bounded by agreed limits, preventing domination. Trust builds as commitments are fulfilled. The pool itself becomes a living archive of who contributes, who fulfills, and how value circulates.

Where coercion enslaves, pooling frees. Where coercion extracts, pooling regenerates. Where coercion erases memory, pooling deepens it."

(https://willruddick.substack.com/p/coercion-vs-pooling-formulas)