The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
AB-EXIT through the Eyes of Ten Nobel Laureates¶
Chapter: 06 — Structural Hypocrisy and the Arsenal of the Elites File: 06_036 · v1 · 12 June 2026 (sessions 33–36)
How to read this chapter (note of 02.10.2026). The text contains wording that is easy to misread: a "reversible" choice means "at the next election": within one election exit is final. The exact-answers sheet 1d and the charter 048m are in force.
Purpose¶
A reconstruction of the reactions of ten Nobel laureates absent from the repository's theoretical foundation (§13 already uses Shapley, Nash, Hurwicz–Maskin–Myerson; §13.12 — Smith). Honesty caveats: there is no Nobel Prize in sociology (economics and the Peace Prize are taken); the reactions are reconstructed from published works; these are not documented quotations. The section's value: a map of allies for outreach + two unbroken honest challenges built into the project.
Allies¶
Elinor Ostrom (2009, governance of common resources). The electoral signal is a commons. AB-EXIT is checked against her eight principles of governing the commons (boundaries, collective choice of rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions) — and fits them better than the current system: the rules change only by referendum (collective choice), the register is public (monitoring), the choice is individual and reversible (boundaries). Probably the project's strongest academic ally.
Richard Thaler (2017, behavioural economics). AB-EXIT is a nudge at state scale: not a ban and not compulsion, but a change of choice architecture under which rational behaviour becomes the default. He would especially value reversibility (every cycle a new choice, zero lock-in). His requirement: neutrality of the default — make sure the design does not push the poor towards button B disproportionately (converges with Kahneman's residue, §035).
Herbert Simon (1978, bounded rationality). Classical democratic theory presupposes an optimising voter — a fiction. The real person satisfices, and "take the dividend and not think" is rational satisficing. AB-EXIT is the first institution that recognises bounded rationality as the norm, not a defect, and builds on it rather than against it.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2019, RCTs). Their credo: do not argue by theory — test by experiment. Coincides with the README's position ("one state, one referendum, one pilot"): intuitions about the behaviour of the poor are most often wrong — on all sides; measurement decides. The methodological justification of the pilot as arbiter.
James Heckman (2000, the econometrics of selection). AB-EXIT is self-selection as a feature: the mechanism makes an unobservable type (motivation) reveal itself through an observable action (the A/B choice) — the solution of the problem on which his career is built. Requirement: check that the selection does not correlate covertly with income to the point of distorting representation (the answer — public aggregated statistics of choice by strata).
Muhammad Yunus (Peace Prize 2006, microcredit). A living counter-example to the objection "bribing the poor": critics of microcredit for decades said "you make the poor dependent" — the empirics showed the opposite: a direct financial instrument in the poor man's hands liberates rather than corrupts. The same argument, the same fate.
Ambivalent¶
Daniel Kahneman (2002). System 1/System 2: voting under a populist trigger is affect; AB-EXIT introduces a pause and a price, switching on System 2 at least for the second of choice. But loss aversion and framing may distort the proportions — full analysis in §035.
Robert Shiller (2013, narrative economics). Populism is a viral narrative; AB-EXIT does not argue with the narrative by facts (useless) but changes the carriers: removes the susceptible from the deciding pool. A warning: AB-EXIT itself must win the war of narratives against the counter-narrative "selling democracy" — the answer is two-register communication (street + institutional languages) and the inoculation "both rights are preserved forever".
Challenges (built into the project)¶
Joseph Stiglitz (2001). "Who guarantees this is not a way for the 1 % to run politics more cheaply?" — a strengthened version of George's blow. Logical analysis (substitution of the agent + static analysis) — §035; the honest residue — transitional cycles.
Amartya Sen (1998). "A choice made from need is not freedom" — the deepest philosophical challenge after George. Analysis (nirvana fallacy) — §035; the honest residue: AB-EXIT does not replace the fight against poverty and does not claim to.
Summary table¶
| Laureate | Verdict | Contribution to the project |
|---|---|---|
| Ostrom | ⭐ for | 8 commons principles — institutional legitimacy |
| Thaler | ⭐ for | Nudge frame, the value of reversibility |
| Banerjee–Duflo | ⭐ for the method | The pilot as arbiter — coincides with the README |
| Simon | for | Bounded rationality as foundation, not defect |
| Heckman | for, with a condition | Self-selection as solution + monitoring of strata |
| Yunus | for (by empirics) | A precedent for the fate of the "bribing the poor" argument |
| Kahneman | ambivalent | System 2 + framing requirements (§035) |
| Shiller | ambivalent | Changing the narrative's carriers + the war of narratives |
| Stiglitz | sceptic | Strengthened George (§035) |
| Sen | challenge | Boundary: mechanism ≠ cure for poverty (§035) |
For outreach: the Ostrom school, Thaler and the Banerjee–Duflo tradition are three doors into academia, each with its own language (commons / choice architecture / RCT). Acknowledging the two unbroken challenges (Sen, Stiglitz) in the document itself is stronger for trust than ten victories.
Related: 033 (George) · 034 (Fraenkel) · 035 (logical analysis of the sceptics) · 037 (the seventh AI) · §13, §13.12 · §14 · README (stress-test table)