A periodic table of the price system. Twenty-six elemental quantities of economic life — the prices, the quantities they move, the ways they fail, the institutions that hold them, the aggregates they sum to, and the human conduct beneath — arranged in descent, from the surface of exchange to its substrate. The Wage, the price of labor, is № I. The filled cell is the volume so far set in type; the lines trace the mechanisms that volumes share.
Pricesprimitives of value
Quantitieswhat is measured
Failureswhere price misfires
Institutionsthe machinery
Aggregatesthe macro emergent
Behaviorsthe agent itself
set in type — the remaining twenty-five forthcoming · the faint lines mark a mechanism two volumes share: monopsony reaching from The Wage into The Power and The Rule; the Pigovian tax binding The Externality to The Tax; the quantity theory tying The Money to The Level.