Fragility as a Memory-Dependent System: Structural Overload and the Architecture of Threshold Regime Shift

This paper presents the conceptual architecture of a memory-dependent threshold framework for macroeconomic instability. Rather than treating crises as equilibrium deviations triggered by exogenous shocks, the framework proposes that macroeconomic regime shifts occur when accumulated coordination strain exceeds structural capacity. Instability is modeled as a first-passage threshold event within a minimal dynamical system, integrating structural fragility, a measurable collapse functional, and bounded release mechanisms. The objective is not crisis prediction but the formulation of a falsifiable structural instability law. The theoretical foundations of this framework are developed in the author’s monographs Almost Successful: Macroeconomics at a Threshold, Fragile by Design: Why Modern Economies Remember, Break, and Refuse to Reset, and Before the Choice: Microeconomics in a World That Remembers, which examine policy space compression, structural overload, and memory accumulation in modern economic systems. This paper serves as the architectural foundation for a staged empirical validation program.