The Symbiotic Blueprint: Economics of Three Flows

Expanding Frontiers: An Alternative Investments & Machine Learning Podcast

This episode, the second of a four-part series, discusses an extended excerpt (Chapters 9 through 15) from a book titled "THE LAST ECONOMY: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics" by Emad Mostaque, released on August 22, 2025. The author, who is the founder of Stability AI, presents a unified theory of economics that reframes the field not as a clash of ideologies but as a study of three fundamental, mathematically necessary flows of value: Gradient Flow (driven by scarcity and leading to Adam Smith’s market equilibrium), Circular Flow (driven by abundance and leading to Karl Marx’s accumulation loops), and Harmonic Flow (driven by structure and reflected in Friedrich Hayek’s spontaneous order). The text argues that historical economic thought was incomplete because it focused on only one of these flows, likening the situation to blind scholars describing an elephant by touching only one part. Furthermore, the material explores the implications of this model for the modern era, asserting that Artificial Intelligence (AI) exponentially amplifies all three flows and creates a "Second Economy" defined by network topology and the central challenge of Alignment, which demands a New Social Contract to ensure human values guide autonomous AI systems. Finally, the text introduces the Dual Engine model to explain change, noting that the fast-moving Market and the slow-evolving Institutions are in a constant co-evolutionary dance, which AI is set to disrupt permanently.

References

The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics by Emad Mostaque, pp. 62-108, available at: https://ii.inc/web/blog/post/tle

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