Labour as Adaptive Energy Allocation: The Worker as a Finite-Capacity Channel and the: Recovered Wage Structure

Labour is the only factor of production that is also a person. This paper treats the worker as an agent of limited capacity dividing effort across competing uses, and reads the wage from how the labour market moves together, not from an assumed structure. Effort follows a soft, probability-weighted rule: the textbook competitive supply is the extreme of unlimited capacity, and pure custom the opposite extreme. From how the market's parts move together, the paper firmly pins down the broad structure (overall matching strength, the ranking of sectors, and the direction and sign of shifts in the labour share), but not the fine detail (which worker meets which job, the exact labour share, or any single bargained wage). A worked example (an illustration, not a real-data test) shows how strong the signal must be for recovery. It settles what can and cannot be identified; it does not forecast.