C1.2b Prevention of Exploitative Accumulation
Material Security. Can the system provide material necessities reliably and universally?
Pass threshold
Gini <0.35 for wealth distribution
What it asks
The system structurally prevents wealth concentration sufficient to enable governance capture or exploitative leverage over others — independent of whether the system also enables broad-based accumulation (C1.2a's question, not this one).
How it is measured
Wealth Gini coefficient, population-wide, tracked over time. Distinct from an accumulation mechanism's mere existence (C1.2a): a system with a real, reaching wealth-building mechanism can still fail C1.2b if that mechanism's gains compound unevenly (e.g., early or high-income participants accumulate disproportionately over successive years). Scorers should weigh whether prevention is structural — a hard cap, non-transferability, credit dissolution, progressive mechanisms, cooperative or collective ownership forms that don't permit unlimited individual accumulation — versus incidental, a Gini figure that happens to be low today with no mechanism holding it there under stress or over a longer horizon.
Note on the threshold
Moved from legacy C1.5's Pass Threshold, per the boundary resolution in Paper Section 12.2 (commentary moved out of the threshold in v2.0).
How scores are anchored
1.0, pass
A structural mechanism that prevents concentration outright, not merely a favorable Gini figure. Integral's ITC design — "credits...cannot be traded, saved, speculated on, accumulated, or converted into influence... just like an energy cycle, not a currency" (Appendix E) — is close to the strongest possible C1.2b answer in the corpus, illustrating exactly the "aces (b), fails (a)" case Section 12.1 describes. CCO-PTF's own C4.4 write-up separately projects Gini <0.35 through a different mechanism — conversion limits and acre-equity distribution — and would be a second 1.0 candidate.
0.5, partial
Real, meaningful reduction in concentration relative to unregulated capitalism, without a structural mechanism confirmed to hold it below the threshold. The corpus's existing "cooperative systems: Gini 0.40-0.50" figure (Section 12.3's Current Performance) — real progress attributable to distributed ownership, but not confirmed under 0.35; see Appendix H.8a for a worked estimate along these lines.
0.0, structural failure
No structural prevention mechanism; concentration compounds without limit. Status Quo Market Capitalism's Gini 0.85 figure, alongside C4.4's own finding that "wealth concentration enables governance capture" — a direct, well-evidenced 0.0.
v2.0 (Session 45): this criterion's Pass Threshold was reworded without a change of bar (W; NEEC_Criteria_v2_s45.md); the band texts stand.
Normative roots
From N4 (Universal Wealth Access) + N7 (Governance Legitimacy and Anti-Capture) — a new derivation pairing for this sub-criterion: N4 supplies the "wealth is power" logic, N7 supplies the anti-capture framing that concentration specifically threatens..
Judgment calls on this criterion
How the systems score
0.5, partial
CCO-PTF-CIP-SZH, Nordic Social Democracy, Market Socialism, Sovereign Wealth Fund Statism, Georgism / LVT, Ostrom Commons, State Capitalism / Singapore, State Capitalism / China, State Capitalism / Qatar, Centrally Planned Socialism
0.0, structural failure
Islamic Finance, Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, MMT + Job Guarantee, Status Quo Market Capitalism, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Stakeholder Capitalism, Doughnut Economics, Libertarian Minarchism
Sources
Definition: Paper Section 12.3; restated in v2.0 (NEEC_Criteria_v2_s45.md, Appendix V). Anchors: Paper Appendix H.7v2.