Toward a Pathology of Value Circulation: A Typed Lifecycle Diagnostic

Abstract

One recurrent inferential risk in arguments about value circulation is movement from an observed stock, flow, blockage, or return to a judgment about the condition of a social system. This paper proposes a more restrained diagnostic architecture. Within this architecture, a complete circulation report requires double localization: first in a typed lifecycle of conditions, generation, value, recognition, transmission, allocation, feedback, and later conditions; then in an evaluative layer that separates functional pathology, capability effect, harm, injustice, exploitation, responsibility, and legal wrong. The proposal preserves a researcher-origin seven-type taxonomy while identifying the lifecycle graph, formalization, countermodels, and manuscript architecture as later reconstructions. Formally, a fixed-environment deletion of a component weakly contracts the supported path set and does so strictly whenever a supported path uses that component. Material loss at the declared target additionally requires the absence of an adequate substitute. A consequence for later conditions requires an identified return coordinate and a coordinate-specific monotone update relation. Two countermodels separate throughput from regenerative reach: arbitrarily high activity can coexist with absent return to later generative conditions, while zero current outward flow can preserve an enforceable future-use route. Four further constructed configurations involving adequate substitution, privacy- or ecology-preserving restriction, constitutive recognition, and cross-carrier burden show how the diagnostic can return negative, mixed, and unresolved results. The paper remains an analytic and formal proposal. Empirical prevalence, a scalar measure of circulation health, and a theory of injustice remain open research tasks. Its contribution is an analytic instrument and a set of stopping rules whose empirical usefulness, normative significance, and originality remain open to testing.