Value flows toward what strengthens the whole. The coherent economy. Coherence economics redesigns value flow so that currency, exchange, surplus, technology, governance, and enterprise reward what strengthens the whole: human well-being, community trust, ecological regeneration, institutional legitimacy, and future possibility. This paper develops a Wholonomic framework for coherence economics and governance. It extends the prior inquiry into the history and future of value creation by asking how economic systems might be redesigned if value were measured not only by price, profit, scarcity, or growth, but by contribution to systemic coherence. In this framework, coherence refers to the alignment of human well-being, ecological regeneration, social trust, technological intelligence, institutional legitimacy, and future possibility. Conventional economics has created extraordinary productive capacity, but it has also normalized extraction, speculative abstraction, ecological externalization, inequality, and short-term optimization. Coherence economics proposes a different organizing principle: economic activity should be evaluated by whether it increases or decreases the coherence of the whole system that sustains it. Value is therefore not merely accumulated; it is generated, circulated, regenerated, and reinvested into the living conditions of future value. The paper introduces economic coherence fields, negentropic value creation, multi-spectral value, dynamic exchange networks, coherence-backed currencies, fractal value distribution, XAT as a giving-back mechanism, and coherence governance. These concepts are presented as a proposed design architecture rather than a completed empirical system. Their purpose is to establish a direction for economic experimentation in which currency, exchange, investment, taxation, governance, and technological infrastructure are aligned with regenerative and whole-system outcomes. The paper argues that the next economic paradigm must move beyond extractive growth and toward coherent wealth. Such wealth is not limited to money or assets. It includes health, trust, learning, ecological vitality, social resilience, cultural meaning, technological wisdom, and ontological possibility. Coherence economics is therefore the institutional counterpart to ontological wealth: a framework for designing economies capable of generating worlds worth inhabiting. Most economies reward what can be priced. But many of the most important forms of value are not priced well. A forest may be worth more alive than cut down, yet markets often price the timber more clearly than the living ecosystem. A community may be rich in trust, cooperation, and belonging, yet conventional metrics may ignore those forms of wealth. A parent, teacher, healer, artist, farmer, caregiver, inventor, or local organizer may create enormous value without that value being properly recognized by financial systems. Modern economics has become very good at measuring transactions. It is less good at measuring coherence. Coherence economics begins with a different question: does this activity strengthen or weaken the whole system? Coherence economics does not reject markets, money, business, technology, or entrepreneurship. Instead, it asks whether these systems can be redesigned so that value flows toward life-supporting, trust-building, regenerative, and future-enhancing activity. The previous paper, Creating Value Through History and Future, traced the evolution of value creation from survival labor to AI entrepreneurship and ontological wealth. This paper continues that arc. It asks how economic systems could be governed if the highest purpose of wealth were not extraction, but coherence. In simple terms: coherence economics is the design of economic systems that reward what strengthens life. This paper should be read as a design disclosure. It is not a conventional economics paper in the narrow academic sense. It does not merely analyze markets, prices, labor, capital, or monetary policy using standard assumptions. Nor does it claim that a fully validated technical system already exists. Instead, it proposes a new organizing framework for economic thought and institutional design. The central idea is that economies are not merely machines of production and exchange. They are living coordination systems. They coordinate energy, matter, labor, trust, knowledge, technology, law, attention, imagination, and future expectation. When these flows are aligned, an economy becomes coherent. When they are misaligned, an economy may still grow financially while becoming socially, ecologically, psychologically, or institutionally unstable. A system can be profitable and incoherent. A system can be efficient and extractive. A system can be innovative and destabilizing. A system can be wealthy in money and poor in meaning. Coherence economics asks how this can be corrected. The paper introduces economic coherence, negentropic value creation, multi-spectral value, coherence-backed currency, dynamic exchange networks, XAT, and coherence governance. Its purpose is not to finalize every mechanism. Its purpose is to establish a direction: economics must evolve from extraction to regeneration; currency from abstract claim to coherence signal; governance from control to alignment; markets from price-only coordination to multi-spectral value flow; technology from acceleration alone to coherence amplification; and wealth from possession to ontological flourishing. The deepest claim is this: a future economy should not merely produce more. It should make reality more livable, meaningful, resilient, beautiful, intelligent, and coherent. Keywords Coherence economics; Wholonomics; Wholectics; coherence governance; coherence-backed currency; negentropic value creation; multi-spectral value; dynamic exchange networks; XAT; regenerative economics; fractal value distribution; economic coherence fields; ontological wealth; decentralized governance; coherent wealth.
Philip Lilien (Mon,) studied this question.