Irreversible individual lifetime (T) constitutes the ultimate scarce resource in economic and demographic systems. Building upon the Life-Value Reflow Theory, this paper constructs a unified analytical framework centered on national-level time allocation. The individual time budget is conceptualized as sequentially allocated among four activities: survival, structural extraction, reproduction, and discretionary surplus. The structural extraction rate (eta) represents the macroeconomic appropriation of the individual time budget. When eta exceeds a critical threshold, reproductive time is mechanically compressed, triggering declining fertility rates, severe aggregate effort withdrawal, and an endogenous "demographic-extraction spiral" toward structural contraction. Within this framework, three classic macroeconomic paradoxes—the Solow productivity paradox, the Easterlin happiness paradox, and Piketty's inequality dynamics—can be uniformly interpreted as distinct manifestations of the structural extraction process under the strict constraint of finite human time. Using cross-sectional 2022 OECD data, the paper constructs computable macroeconomic indicators that provide preliminary empirical support for the theory's directional predictions. By formalizing the biological and economic constraints of the lifetime budget, this framework demonstrates that the contemporary contraction in fertility rates is not merely an exogenous cultural shift, but a deterministic structural consequence of systemic extraction compressing the intergenerational reproductive time window. Note on Falsifiability and Empirical Identification: This paper provides the theoretical and dynamical architecture of the framework. To ensure strict empirical falsifiability, the framework explicitly mandates that in all subsequent empirical tests, the structural extraction rate (eta) and aggregate effort provision (P) must be identified using strictly independent, exogenous macroeconomic datasets to prevent circular reasoning.
Guoyong chen (Tue,) studied this question.