This series re-reads the history of economic thought and economic institutions through the chisel-construct cycle — from moneyless gift economies to Satoshi Nakamoto and the scored society.

The framework's core claim: every order is a construct built in response to a chisel — the fracture of an earlier order. Constructs have what they can do and what they cannot. What they cannot do generates remainders. Remainders do not disappear; they shift, accumulate, and eventually force the next chisel.

The economy, as a construct, has wanted from its very first day to press people and things into a single settleable scale: from the weight of prestige in a Kula ring, to a temple's ledger, to a coin's purity, to the two columns of double-entry bookkeeping, to the last unit of marginal utility, to the synthetic structure of a derivative. And every time it tries to close its books, its own unabsorbable remainder pries it back open — the person who won't be converted into a number, the gift that won't wash clean, the correlation no model can quite estimate, the ordinary family that never enters the scale of systemic risk. These twenty-three essays follow that construct across several thousand years, closing its ledger again and again, and pried open again and again.

The full series is available in Chinese, English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Korean; every edition is independently written for its readers.