Negentropic Value Currency: A Research Program for Re-Anchoring Monetary Value in Net Order Creation

The absence of a monetary value anchor independent of discretionary issuance remains an unresolved problem of monetary theory. This paper develops a conditional research program: granted the normative premise that civilizational survival is a lexicographically prior meta-constraint, the value anchor can migrate from scarcity to net order creation. The paper’s primary contribution is conceptual and architectural rather than mathematical. Conceptually, where the economics of entropy has treated entropy production as a cost constraint on the economy, we elevate the net increment of systemic order to the ontology of value — a normative move, stated as such, not a consequence of thermodynamics. Architecturally, we show that this ontology can be made operational as a two-layer anchor: a measurement layer of publicly recomputable order increments, and a calibration layer in which the residual conventions are democratized and audited. The value equation W_τ = k·E_τ^a·T_τ^1−a·I_τ^c is posited rather than derived from physics; its benchmark case W_τ = √(E_τ·T_τ·I_τ) combines exergy input, non-equilibrium maintenance time, and structural information gain, the last measured against a no-intervention counterfactual so that maintenance and discovery stand on one footing. Standard functional-equation arguments are used to show that the screening criteria select the power family uniquely within the twice-differentiable class — a result that organizes the choice of functional form without claiming new mathematics — and ordinal rankings are proved robust to exponent perturbations, the symmetric benchmark is shown to be the unique joint minimizer of measurement-error transmission and single-factor manipulation leverage, and the multiplicative form is defended against the incommensurate magnitudes of the physical factors. A measurement-error budget for the measurement architecture is derived. Existence and uniqueness of the incentive-compatible configuration are established under stated assumptions, including quasi-linear utility, and a second-order welfare-loss bound is derived for calibration errors in the consensus coefficients α. The incommensurability critique of ecological economics is engaged directly: the framework commensurates only the unit of account at the navigation layer, leaving plural values intact at the expression layer. Component-level cross-country evidence is consistent with the information dimension of the equation: R&D intensity alone accounts for 79% of the variance in innovation-output density in our sample, a result we report as a consistency check rather than as a test of the theory, and for which we specify a pre-registered extension protocol. A three-period overlapping-generations model, a general equilibrium with endogenous α (with scenario analysis when assumptions fail), mechanism defenses, and a four-layer measurement blueprint (the Civilization Realization Network, CRN, a forward-looking research program rather than a presently deployable system) complete the program. This paper does not address the macrostability of the anchor or the governance of its calibration layer; these are treated in the two companion papers of the series, whose results this paper flags wherever they are invoked. H1 provides executed component-level correlational evidence; H2–H5 are designed but not yet executed.