What the framework builds on, and how the research index is constructed. The intellectual lineage of the ideas, and every data source behind the collapse-risk scores.
CICRI is a snapshot tool that combines four measurable pillars of structural fragility into a single composite score. The framework calibrates against historical collapse cases. This document lists every primary data source used to construct the April 2026 scores and explains how each input is normalized.
Where data is incomplete or estimated rather than directly measured, the methodology section flags it. Transparency about uncertainty is a feature of the framework, not a limitation to hide.
The index on this page measures structural fragility. But the framework behind Project Clarity — the claim that chronic depletion drives individual and societal dysfunction, and that human connection depends on capacity, surrender, and resonance — rests on established research across several fields. The framework does not claim to have discovered the science underneath it. Its contribution is the synthesis: assembling work that has mostly lived in separate disciplines into a single causal chain, and applying it to political and personal life. What follows names the major debts plainly, so readers can trace the ideas to their sources and judge for themselves where the framework restates existing work and where it extends it.
Established how the cumulative burden of chronic stress physically wears down the body and brain over time. The foundation for treating depletion as a measurable physiological state rather than a metaphor.
Showed how stress chemistry impairs the prefrontal cortex — the seat of planning, judgment, and impulse control — while strengthening more primitive, reactive circuits. The mechanism behind "survival mode."
Decades of work on how sustained stress reshapes behavior in primates and humans, and how social position itself drives stress load. Central to the claim that conditions, not character, move behavior.
Demonstrated that the experience of not having enough — money, time, slack — itself consumes cognitive bandwidth, degrading decisions in ways that look like poor character but are products of the condition.
Mapped how nervous systems hold onto experiences that were never safely integrated, and the relational conditions under which a defended system can finally let them in. The basis for treating surrender as a physiological event, not a moral choice.
Showed that integration of experience happens through relational presence — that a regulated nervous system nearby is what allows another to come down out of defense. The mechanism behind co-regulation.
Documented how genuine growth in adulthood requires letting one's current way of organizing reality come apart so a more complex one can form — and how rarely it happens. The developmental shape of surrender.
Established that people hold multiple group identities at once, that context determines which one is active, and that the active identity shapes how others are treated. The structure behind "identity currents" and why the same person can be inclusive in one setting and hostile in another.
The moral-philosophy lineage for the idea that the boundary of who counts has widened over history. The framework's addition is that the boundary is set primarily by conditions, and contracts under depletion.
The documentary basis for the framework's hardest claim: that mass atrocity is overwhelmingly carried out by ordinary people under specific conditions, not by a special category of monster.
The closest precursor to Project Clarity's central move. Showed that more unequal societies score worse on a wide range of health and social outcomes, including trust and mental health. The framework extends their correlational case with an explicit nervous-system mechanism.
Demonstrated that health and longevity track social position along a gradient, independent of access to care — that where you stand in a hierarchy gets under the skin. Foundational to treating structural conditions as direct biological inputs.
What the framework adds to this lineage is the integration. Each of these bodies of work is well established within its own field. None of them, on its own, connects chronic stress to the failure of connection to the contraction of the moral circle to the political dysfunction of whole populations, in a single causal chain that runs in both directions. That synthesis — capacity enabling surrender enabling resonance, with conditions as the upstream variable and feedback in both directions — is what Project Clarity proposes. It has not been formally tested as an integrated claim. It is offered as a model that explains a great deal and that should be judged against ongoing evidence, not accepted on the strength of its borrowed parts. The fuller development of the claim, with a prediction that could falsify it, is in the essay What Connection Requires.
D = (0.40 × G) + (0.35 × P) + (0.25 × Q)
G = wealth Gini coefficient, normalized 0.50→0, 0.95→100. P = Palma ratio (top 10% / bottom 50%), log-scaled, 5→0, 100→100. Q = top 1% wealth share, scaled 5%→0, 50%→100.
Open-access database maintained by the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics. Combines national accounts, survey data, fiscal data, and wealth rankings to produce consistent series on income and wealth distribution. Primary source for top 1% wealth share, top 10% wealth share, and bottom 50% wealth share for all OECD countries and major non-OECD economies. Latest release: 2024 series, published December 2025.
Annual report on household wealth distribution across 200+ countries. Used as a cross-reference for wealth Gini coefficients and to fill gaps where WID data is incomplete (notably for Saudi Arabia and several authoritarian regimes).
Standardized income inequality indicators for OECD member countries. Used for cross-validation of distribution metrics in the OECD subset.
Quarterly data on household assets, debt, and net worth distribution in the United States, dating back to 1989. Used as the primary source for US wealth distribution metrics. Latest release: Q3 2025, published January 2026.
M = (0.40 × IGE) + (0.35 × E) + (0.25 × A)
IGE = intergenerational earnings elasticity. E = educational stratification by socioeconomic status. A = probability of moving from bottom to top wealth quintile within one generation.
Comprehensive OECD report on social mobility across member countries. Source for intergenerational earnings elasticity (IGE) for OECD entities.
Research collaborative led by Raj Chetty providing the cleanest available data on geographic mobility and intergenerational outcomes in the United States. The Opportunity Atlas provides quintile-to-quintile movement probabilities by birth cohort and location.
Triennial international assessment of 15-year-old students' performance. Includes detailed analysis of how socioeconomic status correlates with academic outcomes — the primary input for the educational stratification component.
Used to fill educational stratification data for non-PISA countries.
Cross-country comparative research on intergenerational mobility, used to validate IGE estimates.
I = (0.35 × T) + (0.25 × C) + (0.40 × P)
T = tax progressivity erosion (current top-1% effective rate as % of historical maximum). C = offshore wealth leakage as % of GDP. P = political capture index, blended from V-Dem corruption, inverted CPI, and inverted V-Dem Egalitarian Component.
University of Gothenburg dataset measuring multiple dimensions of democracy across 200+ countries. Source for the corruption index and the Egalitarian Component, both inputs into the political capture metric. Latest release: V-Dem v15 Democracy Report, March 2025.
Annual ranking of 180 countries by perceived levels of public sector corruption. Inverted (higher value = more corruption) and blended into the political capture metric. Latest release: CPI 2025, published February 2026.
Independent research lab producing the Global Tax Evasion Report. Source for offshore wealth estimates by country, building on Gabriel Zucman's earlier work.
Foundational research methodology for estimating offshore wealth holdings, used to validate EU Tax Observatory estimates.
Effective and statutory tax rates by country, including historical series. Source for the tax progressivity erosion metric.
Foundational study showing that US policy outcomes correlate with elite preferences far more than median voter preferences. Used as a methodological reference for what political capture means in measurable terms.
B = (0.40 × H) + (0.30 × M) + (0.30 × F)
H = housing burden (share of population spending more than 30% of income on housing). M = life expectancy gap between top and bottom wealth quintiles. F = food insecurity per FAO Food Insecurity Experience Scale.
UN Food and Agriculture Organization annual report. Source for Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) prevalence data by country.
Cross-country housing burden statistics, including share of population spending over 30% or 40% of disposable income on housing. Primary source for OECD entities.
Source for US-specific housing burden metrics, including detailed metropolitan-level data.
Cross-country life expectancy data with breakdown by income/wealth quintile where available. Used for the life expectancy gap metric.
Foundational US study quantifying the life expectancy gap between top and bottom income percentiles. Methodological reference for the M sub-metric.
Six historical entities anchor the framework against documented collapse: Rome at peak (~100 AD), Rome at collapse (~430 AD), Soviet Union 1970, Soviet Union 1989, Weimar Germany 1932, and Argentina 2001. Pillar inputs for these cases are constructed from historical economic and institutional research.
Quantitative analysis of inequality in pre-modern societies, including Rome. Source for distributional estimates used in Roman calibration.
Long-run inequality data including pre-modern and historical comparison cases.
Reference for Weimar-era economic and institutional analysis.
Source for late-Soviet economic indicators and institutional decay metrics.
Reference for Argentina 2001 and Venezuela calibration cases.
For OECD countries with full statistical coverage, every sub-metric is directly measurable. For authoritarian regimes and historical cases, several inputs are reasoned estimates inferred from related data. Specifically flagged in the source data:
These are noted in the methodology and contribute to greater uncertainty in the scores for those entities.
V-Dem and the Corruption Perceptions Index are released annually but reflect prior-year conditions. For countries in active institutional decline, the framework systematically understates current fragility. The April 2026 US score of 61.1 almost certainly underweights conditions that have continued to deteriorate since the data collection cutoff. Adding a velocity component — a metric tracking score change over a rolling 3-to-5-year window — is planned for future versions.
Countries that maintain distinct legal systems for different populations within the same de facto territory (Israel and the West Bank, China and its hukou system, the Roman citizenship gradations, the United States during Jim Crow) currently require dual-frame analysis. Future versions of CICRI will incorporate an explicit Legal Pluralism component.
The historical anchors used are famous because they collapsed. Equivalent treatment of cases that scored similarly but did not collapse — Spain in the 1970s, South Korea in the 1980s, Greece during 2010-2015 — should be incorporated as negative controls in future versions.
CICRI publishes dated snapshots rather than continuously updated scores. This is consistent with how comparable frameworks operate — the Human Development Index, Press Freedom Index, and Corruption Perceptions Index all publish point-in-time assessments.
Current version: 1.1 (April 2026)
Next planned update: when major source releases warrant — typically annually following V-Dem and CPI publications
Planned methodological additions: velocity component, legal pluralism component, negative-control calibration cases
For corrections, methodological feedback, or data contributions, the framework is open to scrutiny. This is a working document, not a final answer.