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Well, actually, grievance plays a rather important and quantifiable role in world markets.

It's insurance (health, liability, disaster) which is a form of prepay grievance.
It's selling short and put-otions in the market -- which is grievance in its most abstract and profitable form.
It's prenuptial agreements.
It's certainly lawsuits, it's even jihad along with the martyrs reward.
Our entire crime-and-punishment legal system is based on grievance.

You're absolutely right. Most of the grievance society trades today can be measured in units of time or units of value. As we know from experience, time is relatively hard to trade, whereas currency is very easy to trade. Value is cross culturally abstracted with currency because of its obvious impact on the quality of life. Clearly, the more value we have in our lives the better… right? Grievance is more discrete. Often suppressed or stratified, grievance doesn’t flow as easily as value does. We tend to hide it or resurrect it infinitely to justify our individual or communal dysfunctions. When I wrote this piece I was considering the idea of abstracting grievance with its own currency. Maybe it’s a new idea but I doubt it. Either way it’s a science-fiction and or computer modeling train of thought for now.

Here's the idea is in its roughest form. If, hypothetically speaking, an individual’s “grievance account” was to decrease at some agreed upon rate, for example negative 7%, their balance could zero out. What’s a “grievance account”? Grievous events like historic enslavement or attempted genocide of your race, death in the family… and so on, would have an agreed upon amount. If an individual has one or more of these things in their history, each event would be credited to the individuals “grievance account”. I like the concept of unitized grievance because it would be one way to resolve conflicts and possibly prevent new ones. It might make an interesting sociology doctoral thesis in any case.

Fascinating about the “grievance account.” (I presume it leads to a remedy, collectively underwritten, of the "grief relief" variety). Lucky Paris Hilton finally earned some grievance credits on an account that was sorely negative.

According to Taoist philosophy -- society always tears down that which is too high and props up that which is too low. A functioning civilization can only exist harmoniously within an acceptable "mean." Have you noticed that the outer limits of both sides of our political spectrum operate on the fringes of that "mean"?

It might make an interesting sociology doctoral thesis in any case.

Certainly "risk analysis" and "game theory" incorporate grievance as a given social construct. In any event, developing a "sim" game and answering the questions the game would naturally beg in its evolution might be a great deal more rewarding that an academic approach.

And speaking of rewards, isn't that the ultimate question? What is the final reward for the group/person with the greatest grievance credits at the end of the game/life?

I hope it doesn't take place in the hereafter -- if you know what I mean.