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.
The Nobel Second Circle: Eight Laureates Who Came Right Up to It¶
Chapter: 06 — (paired with §036; theoretical junctions — with §13) File: 06_036b · v1 · 12 August 2026 (session 37)
How to read this chapter (note of 02.10.2026). The text contains wording that is easy to misread: sums and formulas with coefficients are worked examples: the size of the payment is set as a percentage of the median income approved by referendum. The exact-answers sheet 1d and the charter 048m are in force.
Purpose¶
§036 examined the laureates' reactions to AB-EXIT. This section is the reverse optics: laureates who came right up to the problem itself (aggregation of will, the quality of the electoral signal, the monetisation of choice) and each solved his own fragment — decades before the assembly. The section's pattern: each has a ready node of the mechanism, and each has a point where he stopped. AB-EXIT is not an invention from scratch but the assembly of eight ready nodes.
1. Kenneth Arrow (1972) — the impossibility theorem¶
Closest of all to the core. Arrow's theorem: there is no rule for aggregating preferences that simultaneously satisfies minimal requirements of rationality and fairness — an ideal vote cannot exist mathematically. For half a century the whole science of elections struggled inside his frame: went through counting rules (RCV, Borda, Condorcet) — and each ran into the theorem. Where he stopped: Arrow proved impossibility for a fixed electorate with equal weights. AB-EXIT leaves the frame rather than arguing with it: it changes not the counting rule but the input itself — the composition (self-selection for compensation) and the weights (endogenous, by choice). The theorem is not violated — it is bypassed through a variable Arrow held constant. Formula: for half a century they changed the algorithm — AB-EXIT changes the input data.
2. George Akerlof (2001) — the market for lemons¶
"The Market for Lemons": under information asymmetry the bad good drives out the good, and the market dies. The electoral market is a market for lemons in pure form: the voter cannot distinguish an honest candidate from a liar before the purchase (§15) → the honest are washed out (why bear the costs of honesty if the premium goes to the liar) → adverse selection of the political class. Where he stopped: Akerlof showed the disease and the standard remedies (guarantees, reputations) — for politics they are weak (there are no guarantees; reputation is drowned by propaganda). AB-EXIT adds the Akerlofian remedy from two sides: a cleansed electorate raises the price of lying (the 034 balance), and the dividend-from-the-median is a "warranty coupon" on the quality of governance, checkable personally by everyone.
3. Michael Spence (2001) — signalling theory¶
A signal works only if it is costly (education signals ability because it costs the incapable more). Button A is a Spencean costly signal in pure form: refusing £700 in order to vote is a costly action that does not pay off for the unmotivated → the A/B choice creates a separating equilibrium: motivations invisible from outside (Heckman, §036) are revealed through the price. Where he stopped: Spence built signals for labour markets; in politics the voter's signal was free (a tick costs nothing) — and so signalled nothing. AB-EXIT for the first time makes electoral participation costly — and therefore for the first time informative.
4. William Vickrey (1996) — truthful revelation and congestion pricing¶
Two nodes at once. The Vickrey auction (second price): a design under which telling the truth is the dominant strategy. The A/B choice is a Vickreyan mechanism for revealing the true price of the vote to its owner: the system for the first time learns how much the vote is worth to the voter himself — not from a poll (cheap to lie) but from a choice with money at stake. The second node — congestion pricing (a charge for entering an overloaded system, Vickrey's idea of road tolls): AB-EXIT is a mirror Vickreyan tariff, a payment for exit from an overloaded signalling system (the junction with anti-Braess, 13b.2). Where he stopped: Vickrey applied it to roads and auctions; to the electoral system as an overloaded channel — a step nobody took.
5. Alvin Roth (2012) — repugnant markets¶
The freshest junction. Roth is the theorist of "repugnant markets": transactions economically efficient but morally forbidden (the sale of organs, votes). His contribution is not an argument with morality but design around repugnance: the monetary sale of kidneys is repugnant → donor exchange chains without money are legal and save thousands. The main moral objection to AB-EXIT ("vote-buying!") is classic Rothian repugnance, and the answer is built the Roth way: repugnance is provoked by buying the direction of the vote (whom to be governed by); paying for exit (not participating) is a structurally different transaction, like a kidney exchange instead of a sale. Where he stopped: Roth catalogued repugnant markets and treated medical ones; the electoral one he did not touch. AB-EXIT is a Rothian design for the most tabooed market.
6. Friedrich Hayek (1974) — dispersed knowledge¶
"The Use of Knowledge in Society": the central problem of society is that knowledge is dispersed across millions of heads, and the only working aggregator is price: it compresses dispersed knowledge into one signal without a central collector. Elections are an attempt to aggregate dispersed knowledge by a non-price method, and are therefore Hayekianly doomed: the vote carries no information about the strength of preference, knowledge, stake. AB-EXIT for the first time introduces into politics a price mechanism of the Hayekian type: the choice "£700 or weight" is a price, and it compresses into aggregated statistics what the ballot did not compress: the intensity, trust, stake of each. And the dividend-from-the-median is the reverse price signal: the quality of governance compressed into one number, delivered to everyone. Where he stopped: Hayek opposed the market to politics; AB-EXIT builds his price aggregator inside politics.
7. Daniel McFadden (2000) — discrete choice¶
The Nobel for the econometrics of discrete choice: how people really choose among finite options (take the metro or the car) — models predicting shares of choice from the characteristics of options and people. The A/B choice is a textbook McFadden problem: the forecasts of exit structure (93–97 % of non-voters; 25–35 % of voters; a corridor of 55–65 %, 08_045 v2) are a McFadden model, and his apparatus is a ready tool for calibrating the pilot: estimate not "liked/didn't" but the parameters of the choice function by strata. Where he stopped: transport and goods; electoral choice with a price was impossible as an object — it did not exist.
8. A status update: Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson (2024)¶
Already in the project's apparatus (048c: extractive institutions) — laureates since 2024: the diagnosis "the elite rationally chooses institutions that impoverish the nation" now carries Nobel weight. Their hole (no mechanism of transition to inclusive institutions that an extractive elite would accept voluntarily) is exactly the one closed by the three-stroke scheme (056b: the middle layer buys insurance; 08_047: zugzwang).
Summary of the second circle¶
| Laureate | Ready node | Where he stopped |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow | Impossibility of ideal aggregation | Held composition and weights constant |
| Akerlof | Adverse selection of the honest | The remedies did not work in politics |
| Spence | Costly signal → separation of motivations | The voter's signal was free |
| Vickrey | Truthful revelation + congestion pricing | Did not reach the electoral system |
| Roth | Design around repugnance | Did not touch the market for votes |
| Hayek | Price as aggregator of dispersed knowledge | Opposed the market to politics |
| McFadden | Econometrics of the A/B choice | The object did not exist |
| Acemoglu et al. | The diagnosis of extractiveness | No mechanism of voluntary transition |
Conclusion for outreach: AB-EXIT is presented to academia not as an innovation but as the assembly of eight Nobel nodes into one machine — each node tested and awarded separately; only the assembly is untested, and for that there is the pilot (§040: KPIs from Grok).
Related: §13 · §036 · 13b · 048c · 08_045 · §15 · 06_040