The Economy That Keeps Becoming · Chapter One

Loops, Not Levers

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter One of The Economy That Keeps Becoming: Complexity Economics, Read as a Living System, for Leaders and Households.

Abstract

Somewhere this week a leader will sit at a desk with a decision in front of her and a plan that assumes the world will hold still while she carries it out. The plan will have a target, a budget, a timeline and a set of levers: raise this price, cut that cost, hire into this team, close that office. Each lever is expected to move one thing, by roughly the amount the spreadsheet says, and to leave the rest of the organisation where it was. Most plans are written this way because most of the economics that leaders were taught was written this way. It pictured a market as a machine that settles. Push it, and it returns to balance at a new point. Change an input, and the output moves in proportion. Find the optimum, and stay there.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989452

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). Loops, Not Levers. In The Economy That Keeps Becoming. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989452

@incollection{santaanna2026the1,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {Loops, Not Levers},
  booktitle = {The Economy That Keeps Becoming},
  chapter   = {1},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989452},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-economy-that-keeps-becoming/01-loops-not-levers/}
}

Every chapter of The Economy That Keeps Becoming

  1. Chapter OneLoops, Not Leversdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989452
  2. Chapter TwoThe Economy That Keeps Becomingdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989453
  3. Chapter ThreeWhere the Model Runs Thindoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989454
  4. Chapter FourNobody Designed the Trapdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989455
  5. Chapter FiveThe Valley and the Highwaydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989458
  6. Chapter SixThe Week After the Firedoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989459
  7. Chapter SevenA Firm Read as Weatherdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989460
  8. Chapter EightThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989463
  9. Chapter NineKnowing Whether It Workeddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989464
  10. Chapter TenThe Hard Conversationsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989465
  11. Chapter ElevenThe Household as a Living Systemdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989466
  12. Chapter TwelveThe Path Across the Lawndoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989467
  13. Chapter ThirteenWhat Grows by Itselfdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989472
  14. WorkbookEvery Tool, and a Ninety-Day Plandoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989473

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.