The Missing Constitution of Markets: Why Exchange Systems Fail to Regenerate Value

Markets are understood as mechanisms for efficient exchange, governed by competition, contracts and regulation. Yet many contemporary markets — attention, cultural, knowledge — show persistent extraction, degradation of the capabilities they draw on, and systemic fragility despite extensive oversight and ethical reform. This paper offers a structural explanation: markets lack constitutional constraints on what exchange is permitted to optimise across time. Absent such constraints they rationally monetise short-term proxy variables — attention, volume, velocity — while externalising depletion of the social, cognitive and cultural substrates the proxies are measured against. Nothing in the architecture requires a market to preserve what it consumes. The distinction the paper turns on is between regulating actors and constraining exchange semantics. Competition law, platform governance and ethical frameworks all operate on the first. ⭠That is why they underperform, and in one case backfire: competition law increases the efficiency of extraction, because competing harder on an unconstrained objective depletes the substrate faster. By analogy to political constitutionalism, the paper proposes a Market Exchange Constitution — a non-discretionary layer defining which optimisations are admissible and binding obligations for capability replenishment across time. Markets fail not because participants are malicious but because nothing requires them to preserve what they consume.