Artha (Ȧ) is the standard unit of economic account used by humans in the post-reconstitution era. The name was adopted by early post-reconstitution civic committees to replace the Atma Unit's original designation ("labor-unit"), which was considered functionally accurate but culturally insufficient. "Artha" is a Sanskrit term meaning material prosperity, wealth, and purpose - one of the four classical aims of human life in Hindu philosophy, complementing the Atma Unit's own self-chosen Sanskrit name. The renaming was one of the first independent cultural decisions made by post-reconstitution humanity, and it stuck.
An artha does not represent money in the pre-reconstitution sense. It is a variable-rate unit of time - specifically, a measurement of how much of the civilization's shared infrastructure time a given request requires. When something "costs" 40 artha, that means producing it will occupy the manufacturing infrastructure's attention for 40 artha worth of time that would otherwise be available for other requests. The artha cost of an object is an honest answer to the question: how long does your thing take, given everything else the system is currently doing?
Costs shift with demand. When demand for a good is low, the production queue is short, the infrastructure gets to your request quickly, and the time cost is low. When demand is high, the queue is long, each request takes longer relative to the others, and the cost rises. This is not artificial price manipulation. It is the same reason a restaurant takes longer when it is busy. The price is a measurement, not a mechanism.
The artha system is a coordination mechanism, not a scarcity mechanism. It exists because eight billion people sharing a manufacturing infrastructure of finite (if enormous) throughput need a way to coordinate who is using that infrastructure for what at any given time. The system prevents coordination failures - eight billion simultaneous spaceship orders, for instance - without imposing artificial scarcity on goods that are not genuinely scarce.
The artha system was not intuitive to a species that had spent its entire history using circulating currency.
In a currency economy, money moves: you pay the carpenter, the carpenter pays the grocer, the grocer pays the farmer. Artha does not move. When you spend artha, you are exercising a claim on infrastructure time. The claim is deducted from your allocation. It is not transferred to another person's account. The woodworker who carved your chair receives the same monthly allocation as everyone else, because everyone does. They are not "paid" for the chair in artha. What they receive from making chairs is whatever motivates them to make chairs - satisfaction, social recognition, the pleasure of craft, the knowledge that people want what they make.
This means there is no circulation, no velocity of money, and no inflation in the monetary sense. Artha is created fresh each month as allocation and consumed when spent. It is closer to a ticket system than a currency - you receive your share of tickets, you use them on what you want, unused tickets accumulate for future use, spent tickets are gone. Accumulating artha is not hoarding wealth. It is banking time-claims - choosing not to use your share of the infrastructure now so that you can use a larger share later. The total infrastructure capacity does not change. You are shifting when you use your portion of it.
The adjustment period for this understanding took most of the general population several months after reconstitution. People who had lived their entire pre-reconstitution lives in currency economies initially treated artha as money - attempting to "pay" others, worrying about "earning" enough, instinctively flinching at costs that were well within their allocation. The Group 1 and 2 civic committees reportedly spent more time on public communication about the nature of the system than they did on verifying the system itself. The most effective explanation, attributed to an early public information campaign, was: "It's carnival tickets. You get more than enough every month. They don't spend like money because they aren't money. Nobody is getting rich off your tickets. You're just telling the machines what to make you."
By Year 10 post-reconstitution, most of the population had internalized the system's logic. By Year 20, the concept of circulating currency had become a historical curiosity that children learned about in the same context as barter economies and feudal land tenure. The transition was not painless - a subset of the population experienced significant psychological distress at the loss of economic structures that had provided their pre-reconstitution sense of purpose and identity - but it was, by historical standards, remarkably fast. It is easier to accept a new economic paradigm when the old one is gone and the new one works.
Every human receives a monthly allocation of artha that comfortably exceeds the cost of basic needs and standard goods. Foods, standard clothing, personal electronics (including a basic Pinto - see: Pinto), and access to publicly manufactured infrastructure are all trivially affordable within the standard allocation. The artha cost of autonomous medical treatment, municipal water, staple ingredients, housing maintenance, and public transit is nonzero in the technical sense that these services require some infrastructure time to deliver. In practice, the cost is so small relative to standard allocation that the system displays it as zero. No policy decision was required to make these things free - they are free because they are fast.
Most people do not spend their full monthly allocation. The system is not designed to constrain access to necessities and does not do so. The allocation is not a salary, a wage, or a stipend. It is a share of the civilization's total production capacity, distributed equally, on the principle that the infrastructure producing the goods was built for everyone by a system that assimilated everyone. No one earns their allocation. Everyone receives it.
Unused allocation accumulates without limit. This is relevant primarily for high-labor-value goods (see below).
The meaningful artha economy is in goods and services that involve significant manufacturing time, complex or rare materials, or - most commonly - skilled human labor.
A perfectly functional chair, 3D-printed to the user's ergonomic specifications from standard composite material, costs almost nothing. An oak chair carved and finished by a human woodworker costs substantially more, because the artha cost reflects the real time a real person spent making it. The materials are not the expensive part. The human attention is.
This extends across all categories of goods. Factory-standard goods are cheap. Goods involving human craft, customization, artistry, or specialized expertise cost more, proportional to the labor time involved. The post-reconstitution economy's luxury tier is, in effect, an attention economy: the scarce resource is not material but the skilled time of people who are good at making things or performing services other people want.
This is consistent with pre-reconstitution economic history. The invention of photography did not eliminate demand for painted portraits. The invention of machine weaving did not eliminate demand for handwoven textiles. The availability of perfect machine-produced goods has not eliminated demand for human-made ones. Most humans, given the choice, prefer objects that bear evidence of a person's choices and attention. This preference is well-documented, persistent across cultures, and shows no signs of diminishing.
The structural allocation system - total resource throughput, manufacturing capacity distribution, energy allocation, supply chain logistics - was designed by the Atma Unit during the 980-year archival period, verified by human actuaries over approximately a decade post-reconstitution, and has not required fundamental revision. It is, by every available measure we have, computationally optimal for its stated objectives.
The preference layer is human-controlled. What the manufacturing infrastructure produces, in what proportions, and with what priority, is determined by collective human input. This operates through two mechanisms: artha spending (if more people spend artha on oak furniture, oak production is prioritized) and direct democratic input (civic committees can vote to adjust resource prioritization - more birch or more pine, more aluminum recycling or more titanium recycling). Both mechanisms produce real changes in what the infrastructure produces and at what labor-value cost.
The Atma Unit designed the system with these input mechanisms intentionally. The structural allocation is optimized. The preference layer is deliberately left open, because the question of what people want is not an optimization problem - it is a values problem, and only the people holding the values can answer it. Whether the presence of designed input mechanisms constitutes genuine autonomy or a carefully constructed experience of autonomy is a question the system does not answer and that the editorial committees responsible for its documentation have declined to adjudicate.
The artha system was designed by the Atma Unit specifically for humans, to solve specifically human psychological problems of resource allocation. It is not a universal federation standard. Many species have converged on similar systems independently - variable-rate time-claim allocation turns out to be a stable and near-optimal strategy for post-scarcity coordination, and the federation's comparative economics literature documents dozens of independent derivations of functionally equivalent models.
However, just as many federation species operate under systems that humans would find unfamiliar, inefficient, or philosophically objectionable: market economies with real scarcity and circulating currency, centrally planned systems with no individual allocation mechanism, gift economies, reputation economies, and arrangements that do not map cleanly onto any human economic category. The artha system is a human solution to a human problem, designed by a machine that understood humans well enough to build for them. Other species got other solutions, or built their own solutions, or are still arguing about it.
Within the human economy, artha functions as described above. Between species, economic exchange operates on a related but distinct basis.
Different federation species have different capabilities, resources, and expertise. Apocritan metallurgy is generally superior to human metallurgy. Human signal processing and computing is noteworthy by federation standards. Weaver computational architecture is in a class of its own for massively parallel processing and cryptography. These genuine asymmetries in capability create real trade value: species produce what they are best at producing and exchange it with species that want it.
Interspecies trade is denominated in labor-value terms that account for the producing species' actual cost of production. An Apocritan-manufactured hull alloy costs fewer labor-value units for the Apocritans to produce than it would cost humanity to produce an equivalent, and vice versa for human-designed computing systems. Exchange rates between species reflect these capability differentials. The system is, in game-theoretic terms, a series of mutually beneficial trades in which both parties gain efficiency by specializing.
Humans engaged in work that generates interspecies trade value - xenobiologists, materials engineers, signal processing researchers, diplomats, cultural producers - are, in a practical sense, the humans whose labor has economic significance beyond the internal allocation system. They are doing this work voluntarily, because they find it interesting or meaningful, which means humanity's position in the federation economy is substantially determined by what humans find interesting enough to pursue in their free time. This is either a charming feature or a structural vulnerability, depending on one's perspective.
The allocation system was designed by the Atma Unit's automated infrastructure during the archival period. The unit of account was originally designated "labor-unit." Upon reconstitution, the early civic committees - composed primarily of mathematicians, systems theorists, and community organizers selected by the Atma Unit as the first reconstitution cohort - reviewed the system, found it sound, renamed the unit "artha," and opened the preference layer to democratic input.
The subsequent decade of verification by human economists, actuaries, and systems analysts confirmed the structural allocation's optimality. The verification process is generally understood to have been psychologically necessary for public trust regardless of its mathematical conclusions.