Anthropy is the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it.
This working paper opens a measurement agenda: it builds social reversibility as a third dimension of inequality, alongside stocks (wealth, income) and trajectories (mobility). It is a piece of framing and agenda — a definition, a measurement architecture, refutable propositions — not an empirical result.
Social reversibility in one sentence
Social reversibility is the capacity, assessed before an attempt, to withstand its possible failure without durably closing off the set of accessible options. Neither a stock — it does not accrue on a balance sheet — nor a flow — it is not a passage between positions: a conditional profile of recoverable options. Inequality is then read no longer in what one holds or what one crosses, but in what one can afford to fail at.
Three objects the literature conflates
The apparatus separates three objects often aggregated: the institutional tariff of failure (T) — what a failure recorded somewhere costs, in law and in practice —, the individual fallback capacity (C) — holding the interval after the fall — and the access environment (A). Their combination yields effective reversibility, V = f(C, T, A). The framework’s own hypothesis is complementarity: the effect of one component depends on the level of the other. A solid fallback is worth little if the record of failure locks readmission; and open readmission protects no one who cannot hold the interval.
Institutional memory and readmission
The pivot of the framework is the record: the memory institutions keep of a failure — a payment incident, a default, a flag — and the readmission regime it governs. This is where the inequality of reversibility plays out: two people close in income can face very different futures depending on whether their mistake fades or is durably inscribed. The tariff of failure is not the same for everyone, and it is rarely read as an inequality.
Falsifiability: a framework, not a discovery
Four families of pre-specified propositions follow from the definition; the distinctive hypothesis — complementarity between fallback and record — receives a testable specification and an identification protocol on two dated terrains: the removal of indicator 040 from the FIBEN register (strict core) and France’s Lemoine Act on the insurance right to be forgotten (extended circle). The contribution is a measurable, refutable framework, not an empirical discovery.
The general concept is presented on the page What is anthropy?; the outward leg of disorder is set by AWP-01 and its loop formalised by AWP-07. AWP-08 gives its micro-institutional counterpart: the stratified tariff of failure is a mechanism for distributing social disorder.