*The term “engineering” in token engineering bears more attention.*

While the broader cryptoeconomics community generally refers to ‘engineering’ in the likeness of software engineering, the nascent token engineering community (credit to Trent McConaghy, Angela Kreitenweis, sebnem, Simon de la Rouviere, Jeff Emmett, Luke Duncan and many more) uses the term in its broader, historically-motivated social context. Engineers such as civil/mechanical/electrical/etc engineers design and validate designs for ‘systems’ based on intended properties (including human centric goals and safety constraints), functionally abstracting complexity from end users. This abstraction is a double edge sword, removing the burden of understand relieves the capacity for fully informed consent, so thus is also comes with an obligation of serving above all else the public good.

Imposing on agents an assumption that they act rationally is not an acceptable approach in ‘token engineering’, any more than it would be in transportation systems engineering; consider modeling traffic on a newly constructed highway to show how bottlenecks (and even accidents) occur as a result of rubbernecking while passing a vista despite the absence of any actual impediment. In engineering, it is more important to understand the many way people might behave and to account for the possibility space rather than attempt to extrapolate a false certainty from narrow assumptions.

One can see this difference between ‘software engineering’ and ‘engineering’ by looking at the INCOSE manual, engineering codes of ethics, licensing requirements, civil duties and ultimate liabilities of engineers encoded in regulation. I believe this is one of the few places in the public decentralized systems technical community where questions of how designs and subsequent implementations ultimately reshape or reinforce the current shape of our social systems. Governance is a maintenance process for organizations, and thus the governance process is considered a key design goal, not an after thought.

Engineering of economic systems must go beyond using economics as it has been and become the creation of new sustainable economies which are capable of encoding and reinforcing new conceptualizations of value that better meet the needs of the humans living in and amongst those economies. I am of course a great fan of the Economic Space Agency as it dares to call Economic Space as design space. I only hope we can build an engineering discipline worthy serving the public as economic architects.

❤mZ
Aspiring to be a P.E. in Economics, but stuck with an engineering PhD in dynamic decentralized resource allocation.