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 Third Circle: Hirschman, Friedman, Coase, Kydland–Prescott¶
Chapter: 06 — (completes the trilogy §036–036b) File: 06_036c · v1 · 13 August 2026 (session 37)
0. The centre of the circle — a non-Nobel: Albert Hirschman, "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" (1970)¶
One must begin with an honest paradox: the closest relative of AB-EXIT in the whole history of thought did not receive the Nobel — the non-award to Hirschman is counted among the prize's famous injustices. His triad: a participant in any organisation (a firm, a party, a state) has two answers to deterioration — Exit (leave) and Voice (the voice of protest), linked by Loyalty (loyalty restrains exit, giving voice time).
The protocol bears a Hirschmanian name not by accident — but it does not illustrate the triad; it solves its central problem. For Hirschman exit and voice are substitutes that undermine each other: easy exit bleeds voice (the most sensitive leave first; the organisation loses the signal and rots further — his classic example of the Nigerian railways); locked exit makes voice powerless (nowhere to go — the shout can be ignored). Politics is the worst case: exit from citizenship is almost impossible, so voice is ignored for decades, so citizens invented a third answer absent from the triad: silent non-participation — not exit (he stayed) and not voice (he is silent), a pure loss of signal.
AB-EXIT rebuilds the triad: (1) it turns the third answer into a formalised, paid, informative exit — the departure is for the first time visible and measured; (2) it breaks the substitution — compensated exit does not bleed voice but strengthens it (the weight of those remaining ×1/(1−exit)): the more leave, the louder those who remain — exit and voice are for the first time complementary; (3) it inverts loyalty: for Hirschman loyalty is what hinders leaving; here staying is an active costly choice (refusing money), so loyalty is for the first time measurable and paid in weight. Where Hirschman stopped: he described the triad and its tragedy — a mechanism making exit and voice allies he did not propose. AB-EXIT is "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" brought to a construction: exit paid in favour of the one leaving, voice weighted, loyalty monetised in influence.
1. Milton Friedman (1976) — money for exit from the state system¶
Two Friedmanite nodes are direct ancestors. School vouchers: do not repair the state school from inside — give the family money and the right of exit; competition for those leaving repairs the system better than reforms. AB-EXIT is a voucher applied to the last state monopoly: the electoral one. Button B is a voucher for exit from participation; politicians, like Friedman's schools, for the first time compete for the right to be chosen by those who could leave. The negative income tax: instead of an army of bureaucrats deciding who is entitled — a direct payment by formula; the NIT is the direct ancestor of "a dividend by formula without discretion" (038: no operator — nothing to capture). Where he stopped: Friedman applied "money + exit" to schools, pensions, currencies — he did not reach the ballot; probably because he considered the political market incorrigible in principle. AB-EXIT is the last chapter of "Free to Choose" that he did not write.
2. Ronald Coase (1991) — property rights in the vote¶
The Coase theorem: externalities are cured not by a regulator but by a clear definition of property rights + low transaction costs — after that the parties bargain their way to efficiency themselves. Apply it to the vote: today the property right in the vote is blurred — everyone monetises it (parties through state funding per vote, platforms through advertising, political technologists through campaign budgets) except the nominal owner; the classic Coasean tragedy of an asset without an owner. AB-EXIT is a Coasean reform: for the first time it fixes full property right in the vote to the citizen (the right to use it with amplification — or to lease it to the state for a rent) and reduces the transaction costs of disposing of it to two buttons. Further, by Coase: an efficient allocation of influence arises by itself, without a regulator. Where he stopped: Coase examined lighthouses, radio frequencies and cattle in someone else's field; the most massive asset without an owner — 8 billion votes — remained unexamined.
3. Kydland and Prescott (2004) — rules rather than discretion¶
Their Nobel work is time inconsistency: a government promising today rationally revises the promise tomorrow (circumstances!) — so promises are not believed in advance, and all equilibria spoil. Their cure — rules rather than discretion: tie the authorities' hands in advance, by a mechanism that cannot be replayed by situation. From this work grew the independence of central banks — the greatest quiet institutional reform of the late 20th century: inflation was beaten not by a wise minister but by discretion taken from the minister. AB-EXIT is built entirely to this blueprint: a formula instead of a decision (median × 1.5 %), a referendum lock instead of parliamentary amendment, an autonomous trust instead of a treasury transfer — the electoral analogue of an independent central bank. The answer to "the government will cheat" is not "let's elect the honest" but the Kydland–Prescott one: "eliminate the point at which one can cheat". Where they stopped: applied it to monetary policy; electoral policy remained in the world of discretion — where promises to the voter are revised every cycle exactly by their model.
Addition of 30.09.2026. The map onto their model — temptation, rule, observable, and two parts they lack: memory built into the number on the account and punishment built into the thermostat — is set out in 013f §4b. Their rule rests on people who remember and calculate; the protocol remembers for them.
4. In a short line — three more junctions¶
Vernon Smith (2002), experimental economics: mechanisms are tested in the laboratory before the field — AB-EXIT can be run in laboratory markets (student groups, real small money, the A/B choice) before the pilot: cheap preliminary calibration of exit rates and framings (converges with Grok's KPIs and Kahneman's caveat). Angus Deaton (2015): deaths of despair (with Case) — the empirics of the death of the "vanishing men" of §27: people the economy has written off and politics monetises as rage; Deaton's statistics are the evidence base that the price of their "free" non-participation has already been paid in lives. Diamond–Dybvig (2022): a self-fulfilling bank run = the mirror of the spiral of silence (056c): the loyalist majority is a "run in reverse", held by the belief that everyone believes; public statistics of choice B are a mechanism of honest discovery that stops the self-fulfilling equilibrium.
Summary of the third circle¶
| Thinker | Ready node | Where he stopped |
|---|---|---|
| Hirschman (non-Nobel) | The Exit–Voice–Loyalty triad | Did not build a mechanism of their alliance |
| Friedman | Money + exit as a reform of state monopolies | Did not reach the electoral monopoly |
| Coase | Property rights cure externalities | The vote remained an asset without an owner |
| Kydland–Prescott | Rules rather than discretion (the central-bank blueprint) | Electoral politics remained discretionary |
| V. Smith / Deaton / Diamond–Dybvig | Laboratory · deaths of despair · runs | Auxiliary junctions |
The trilogy §036–036b–036c is closed: 21 Nobel laureates + Hirschman — the full academic perimeter. The final outreach formula: every node of the machine is awarded; only the assembly is untested; the assembly is tested by a pilot (KPIs — §040).
Related: §036, §036b · §13 · 038 (no discretion) · 034 (locks) · §27 (Deaton) · 056c (Diamond–Dybvig) · 08_045 (laboratory calibration)