Source Index

Status (April 2026): Active. This index tracks curated source digests in sources/ that feed the Government Overreach, Ownership as Transition, and the Ratchet Problem exchange, the AI Commonwealth vs. AI Governance exchange, and adjacent exchanges. Sources are grouped by sub-debate and viewpoint to make it easy to assemble balanced evidence bases for Round 2 and subsequent rounds. As of April 2026, 53 digests are catalogued (the originating Friedberg anchor + 50 curated references across two research sweeps + 2 additional steward-anchor digests from The Weekly Show: one with Acemoglu and Autor, and one with U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner). June 2026: a 54th digest and a new Sub-debate 9 were added to serve the agent-automation verifier cluster (the Verifiers for Reality riff reframe), the first index entry not tied to the Government Overreach exchange. A 55th digest — the fourth steward-anchor (Modern Wisdom #1109: Arthur Brooks) — was then added to anchor the Meaning Crisis, Scientism, and Structural Accountability riff and the now-open Principle 2 adversarial exchange (#29, the solvable-vs-perennial boundary). A 56th digest — Suits, The Grasshopper — was added under Sub-debate 4 as the post-scarcity-meaning philosophical anchor for the Process as Flourishing riff; like the reflexivity digest, it serves the explorations rather than the Government Overreach exchange. A 57th digest — the fifth steward-anchor and third from The Weekly Show (Stewart x Slobodian on Muskism) — was added across Sub-debates 3, 4, and 8: a structural-left political-economy account of digital-capital concentration (the consent/legitimacy "operating-system" frame, the corporate-governance accountability hack, and the "discipline capital, don't clear veto points" rebuttal to the abundance narrative). It also supplies the real-world companion to the Suits constitutionalism thread via its NBA-game bookend. A 58th digest — Anthropic's Advanced AI Framework ("Policy on the AI Exponential," June 2026) — was added across Sub-debates 7 and 8 as the major-lab regulatory proposal companion to the enacted-record AI Governance Practice digest: a frontier developer asking to be bound, read as a bounded-governance design package and as the sharpest external touchpoint for the agent-automation verifier cluster's independent-evaluation theme. A 59th digest — Anthropic, "When AI Builds Itself" (Recursive Self-Improvement) — was added across Sub-debates 7 and 9 as the same lab's capability report beside its proposal, and as the genesis source of the agent-automation verifier cluster (promoting the verifier memo's inline citation to a standing digest; the perspiration/judgment cut the cluster turns on, carried with a W3 self-interest + unaudited-internal-data caveat). A 60th digest — the sixth steward-anchor and fourth from The Weekly Show (Stewart x Gordon-Reed & Blight, America 250: History vs. Mythology) — was added under Sub-debates 3 and 9: two historians on the fight over the national origin story (the two competing 250ths, the "idol of origins," the 14th Amendment, and "the creeds" — the Declaration-as-creed against blood-and-soil, with "depends on who gets to use them" as its compressed thesis). A 61st digest — Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nationality" / "Composite Nation" (Boston, 1869) — was added as the corpus's first W1-equivalent primary historical text: the primary-source companion the 60th digest points at (Douglass's human-rights case for a multiracial, multi-creed republic and for Chinese immigration), and the anchor for the creeds / composite-nationality thread feeding the explorations.

Scope: This index intentionally favors peer-reviewed work, major investigative journalism, reputable think-tank analysis (across the political spectrum), named-expert essays, and freely available book chapters or summaries. Paywalled or speculative material is excluded unless explicitly noted.

Organization will evolve. The current goal is breadth plus balanced viewpoint coverage across eight sub-debates. Reorganization (tags, YAML metadata harvesting, topic-specific sub-indexes) can happen once the corpus is large enough to justify it.

How this index works

Each sub-debate below lists source digests in three viewpoint buckets:

• Pro-market / libertarian — emphasize property rights, market price discipline, public-choice constraints on government, and skepticism of expansionary state action.
• Social-democratic / progressive — emphasize public-interest governance, redistribution, corrective regulation, and skepticism of concentrated private power.
• Heterodox / institutional / synthesis — emphasize institutional design, commons governance, comparative political economy, and positions that cut across the left/right axis (e.g., bounded-governance design, abundance liberalism, Ostromian commons).

Digest files live in sources/ and follow the naming convention source-[short-identifier]-digest.md. Each digest carries front matter that captures source_type, source_title, source_url, source_date, provenance, and a fair-use copyright_notice.

Sub-debates covered

1. Ratchet dynamics, tax history, and government growth — is expansion the default outcome of public-interest governance, and under what conditions has it been reversed?
2. Property rights, ownership, and wealth taxation — is wealth taxation a category break from income taxation, or a difference of degree, and what grounds the distinction?
3. Public choice and democracy-as-capture — when and how do democratic systems drift toward unreformability, and through which mechanisms (beneficiary blocs, concentrated owners, information asymmetry)?
4. Abundance, post-scarcity, and the future of ownership — does material abundance change the moral weight of property claims, and what does the literature on post-scarcity economics and future-of-work offer?
5. Social democracy vs. command economics vs. minimal-state models — what actually distinguishes Sweden from Venezuela, Denmark from Cuba, Singapore from Argentina, and which conditions travel across contexts?
6. Price discipline in subsidized sectors — is the "Chart of the Century" divergence caused by government funding, Baumol's cost disease, regulatory complexity, or demand-side effects, and in what proportion?
7. Fear-based framing and policy risk — when do precaution-driven policies (Germany nuclear, AI regulation, financial reform after crises) produce the outcomes they were designed to prevent?
8. Bounded-governance design, fiscal rules, and institutional anti-ratchet mechanisms — what design patterns (sunset clauses, independent review, constitutional fiscal rules, polycentric governance, trust-earned delegation) actually constrain expansion without paralyzing corrective action?
9. Reflexivity, performativity, and measurement that changes the measured (civic-verification methodology) — when an instrument or model perturbs the very thing it reads, can civic claims still be "verified," and what does the cross-disciplinary record say about modeling civics as a control loop rather than a test suite? (Serves the agent-automation verifier cluster and the explorations, not the Government Overreach exchange; added June 2026.)

1. Ratchet dynamics, tax history, and government growth

2. Property rights, ownership, and wealth taxation

3. Public choice and democracy-as-capture

4. Abundance, post-scarcity, and the future of ownership

5. Social democracy vs. command economics vs. minimal-state models

6. Price discipline in subsidized sectors

7. Fear-based framing and policy risk

8. Bounded-governance design, fiscal rules, and institutional anti-ratchet mechanisms

9. Reflexivity, performativity, and measurement that changes the measured (civic-verification methodology)

This sub-debate does not split on the pro-market / social-democratic / heterodox axis; the contest it balances is methodological — whether the control-system reframe is valid or concedes too much. The primary methodological digest below carries both sides internally (counterperformativity and the Mäki critique against the reframe; the convergent multi-field lineage for it), per Research Protocol §2.3; the Brooks steward-anchor is cross-listed beneath it as a cautionary scientism example.

Cross-cutting: the steward's anchor digests

Notes on use

• Balance before synthesis. When pulling sources into an exchange round, try to include at least one from each viewpoint bucket. The Round 1 synthesis in the Government Overreach exchange is stronger when each step is tested against both sympathetic and skeptical evidence.
• Evidence labels are not verdicts. Each digest's research-context labels ("Corroborated", "Partially corroborated", "Debated", "No independent source located") describe the state of the evidence, not the virtue of the argument. Contested claims can still be important claims.
• Digest ≠ endorsement. Inclusion of a source means the project takes it seriously enough to engage with on the merits. It does not mean the project agrees with the source.
• Update this index when adding a digest. Any new digest should be added to the relevant sub-debate table with its viewpoint bucket noted.