Founding thesis
The same shock does not hit the same body.
Mathanics is a project to make economic transmission visible.
The economy is not hard because people are stupid. It is hard because every lever has a first-round effect, a delayed effect, a winner, a loser, a false winner, a distributional twist, an inflation signal, a financial-market response, and a threshold where manageable becomes crisis.
Most public debate collapses this into slogans. Mathanics opens the mechanism.
Not a calculator. A transmission atlas.
Mathanics does not claim to forecast the economy. It maps how economic decisions and shocks travel: who feels pressure first, who receives relief, who is cushioned by assets or buffers, who is exposed through debt, rent or essential spending, and when inflation or stress may appear.
Why inequality keeps reappearing.
The economy can reduce inequality, but it does not do so by default. At scale, economic transmission tends to favour those who already own assets, hold buffers, control firms, access credit cheaply, and can wait out shocks.
Lower-income households
Often meet the economy through wages, rent, bills, debt, essential spending and thin buffers.
Wealthier households
Often meet the economy through assets, collateral, diversification, optionality, tax planning and time.
The same policy can therefore transmit as relief for one group and pressure for another.
The economy does not hit everyone equally. It hits what people are standing on.
The project.
Mathanics is building a transparent, testable atlas of economic transmission. Each scenario is mapped across actors, horizons, inflation signals, cashflow channels, distributional effects, assumptions and thresholds.
The aim is not to settle every economic argument. The aim is to show what each argument depends on.
Invitation.
This project should not be built by one person alone. Mathanics is intended to become a collaborative economic literacy project for economists, academics, teachers, policy professionals, journalists and citizens who want economic decisions to be more understandable and accountable.
We invite contributions in these areas
- Reviewing scenario assumptions
- Improving actor impacts
- Adding theory lenses
- Adding source notes and reading lists
- Testing the model against historical examples
- Creating teaching packs
- Translating the transmission maps for different audiences
Principles.
01
No fake precision
Direction and pressure are the truth. Exact numbers are illustrative.
02
Show assumptions
Every scenario carries its starting conditions and caveats in the open.
03
Separate cashflow from pressure
Cash that moves and pressure that lands are not the same thing.
04
Show winners, losers and false winners
Some gains evaporate at the next horizon. Mathanics names them.
05
Track inflation without pretending certainty
Inflation is an outcome with channels and confidence, not a forecast.
06
Make distribution visible
Who is cushioned and who is exposed is part of the mechanism, not a footnote.
07
Treat theory lenses as perspectives, not dogma
Monetarist, Keynesian, post-Keynesian — each lens illuminates, none rules.
08
Keep the model testable
Every claim traces to a labelled mechanism that can be challenged.
Help make economic transmission legible.