{ "id": "cutline-kids", "name": "Cutline · Grade 8–9 edition", "version": "1.0.0", "title": "Cutline, Grade 8–9 edition — the 16 political types", "tagline": "The axes are real. Somebody chose where to slice.", "summary": "Same four axes and the same weights as adult Cutline v1.2.0. Only the statement texts change: every statement is set in a 13–15-year-old's own world, because that is where they already hold convictions. Because the weights are identical, a score from this edition and a score from the adult edition are directly comparable.", "source": "https://theaxes.fyi/quiz/kids/", "repository": "https://github.com/flipKoin/cutline", "generated": "2026-09-30", "license": { "instrument": "CC-BY-SA-4.0", "instrument_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/", "code": "MIT", "attribution": "Cutline — theaxes.fyi", "note": "Share-alike: fork it, translate it, sell it — derivatives of the instrument must stay under the same licence. It cannot be enclosed." }, "axes": [ { "key": "own", "name": "Ownership", "negative": { "letter": "C", "label": "Collective" }, "positive": { "letter": "P", "label": "Private" } }, { "key": "ctl", "name": "Control", "negative": { "letter": "L", "label": "Decentralized" }, "positive": { "letter": "A", "label": "Centralized" } }, { "key": "hor", "name": "Horizon", "negative": { "letter": "I", "label": "Internationalist" }, "positive": { "letter": "N", "label": "National" } }, { "key": "met", "name": "Method", "negative": { "letter": "G", "label": "Gradual" }, "positive": { "letter": "R", "label": "Rupture" } } ], "scale": [ { "id": "agree", "label": "Strongly agree", "multiplier": 1 }, { "id": "agree-soft", "label": "Agree", "multiplier": 0.5 }, { "id": "neutral", "label": "Neutral / unsure", "multiplier": 0 }, { "id": "disagree-soft", "label": "Disagree", "multiplier": -0.5 }, { "id": "disagree", "label": "Strongly disagree", "multiplier": -1 } ], "statements": [ { "id": 1, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "If a group project gets one mark, everyone in the group should get the same mark.", "weights": { "own": -1.0 } }, { "id": 2, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "If you paid for the supplies, the money the stand makes is yours — even if your friends did most of the selling.", "weights": { "own": 1.0 } }, { "id": 3, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "A kid who can’t afford the trip should still get to go, paid for by everyone else.", "weights": { "own": -0.9 } }, { "id": 4, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "If your parents built something up, it’s fair that you start ahead of other kids because of it.", "weights": { "own": 0.8 } }, { "id": 5, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "The people who actually do the work should decide how it gets done — the students, not just the staff.", "weights": { "own": -0.8, "ctl": -0.3 } }, { "id": 6, "primary_axis": "own", "text": "When people trade freely — snacks, cards, whatever — things end up where they’re wanted better than when an adult hands them out.", "weights": { "own": 0.9 } }, { "id": 7, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "In a real emergency, the principal should be allowed to break the school’s own rules.", "weights": { "ctl": 1.0 } }, { "id": 8, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "Decisions should be made by the smallest group that can actually make them — the class, not the board.", "weights": { "ctl": -0.9 } }, { "id": 9, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "Checking everyone’s phones and messages is fine if it stops someone getting hurt.", "weights": { "ctl": 0.9 } }, { "id": 10, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "Kids are better at sorting out their own problems than adults are at sorting them out for them.", "weights": { "ctl": -1.0 } }, { "id": 11, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "Some things are harmful enough that the school should be able to ban anyone from saying them.", "weights": { "ctl": 0.8 } }, { "id": 12, "primary_axis": "ctl", "text": "There should be fewer people patrolling and punishing, and more people whose only job is helping sort out conflicts.", "weights": { "ctl": -0.8 } }, { "id": 13, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "You owe more to people at your own school than to kids somewhere else.", "weights": { "hor": 1.0 } }, { "id": 14, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "Which school or country you were born into is luck — it shouldn’t decide what you’re owed.", "weights": { "hor": -1.0 } }, { "id": 15, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "The school should take in fewer students from outside — it’s crowded enough and it changes the place.", "weights": { "ctl": 0.3, "hor": 0.9 } }, { "id": 16, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "If kids at another school are being treated badly, that’s my problem too.", "weights": { "hor": -0.9 } }, { "id": 17, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "Someone from outside — the school board, a court — should be able to overrule your school when it gets something wrong.", "weights": { "ctl": 0.4, "hor": -0.8 } }, { "id": 18, "primary_axis": "hor", "text": "Your school’s or your community’s traditions are worth protecting from outside influence.", "weights": { "hor": 0.8 } }, { "id": 19, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "The things that are wrong here can be fixed through the proper channels — student council, meetings, asking.", "weights": { "met": -1.0 } }, { "id": 20, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "Some rules can’t be fixed. They should just be scrapped.", "weights": { "met": 1.0 } }, { "id": 21, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "Changing everything at once usually wrecks more than it fixes.", "weights": { "met": -0.9 } }, { "id": 22, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "“Be patient, we’re working on it” is how adults get you to stop asking.", "weights": { "met": 0.9 } }, { "id": 23, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "Nothing should change unless most people clearly want it to.", "weights": { "met": -0.8 } }, { "id": 24, "primary_axis": "met", "text": "Sometimes breaking a rule is the only honest thing to do.", "weights": { "ctl": -0.4, "met": 0.8 } } ], "scoring": { "procedure": [ "For each statement, take the multiplier of the chosen scale option.", "For each axis the statement carries a weight on, add multiplier × weight to that axis's running total.", "Divide each axis total by the sum of the absolute values of every weight on that axis. The result is in [-1, 1].", "A negative score takes the axis's negative letter, otherwise the positive letter. Concatenate in axis order for the four-letter code." ], "letter_rule": "score < 0 → negative letter; score >= 0 → positive letter", "balance": "Every axis is signed-balanced: its weights sum to zero. Agreeing with every statement therefore scores zero on all four axes, as does disagreeing with every statement.", "no_reading": { "threshold": 0.05, "rule": "If |score| < threshold on every axis, emit no type at all.", "why": "Four sign tests on four scores of roughly zero still produce a confident four-letter type manufactured entirely out of rounding. Reporting that as a result is the failure mode this instrument exists to demonstrate. Implementations that add a tie-break here have reimplemented the thing being criticised." }, "conviction": { "name": "Cutline Score", "definition": "The smallest of the four axis margins, expressed 0-100: round(min(|score|) * 100).", "range": [ 0, 100 ], "rule": "A type is only as firm as its weakest letter, so the score is the weakest letter.", "why": "Every sixteen-type system reports which box you are in. None report how nearly you were put in a different one. The score is that number, and it is deliberately unflattering: a respondent one answer away from another type scores near zero no matter how emphatic the other three axes were.", "bands": [ { "max": 9, "label": "Coin toss", "note": "One answer from being a different type." }, { "max": 29, "label": "A lean", "note": "A tendency, not a conviction." }, { "max": 59, "label": "Settled", "note": "Comfortably inside the box." }, { "max": 100, "label": "Emphatic", "note": "Deep in it. The box fits." } ] }, "thin_margin": { "threshold": 0.12, "rule": "If |score| < threshold on an axis, report that letter as a coin toss and name the type the respondent would have received had it fallen the other way.", "why": "The code keeps the sign and discards the magnitude. A letter assigned by four points out of a hundred is presented in the same type as one assigned by ninety. Reporting the margin is the whole point of the instrument." } }, "quadrants": { "CA": { "name": "Authoritarian communism", "letters": "CA", "color": "#bf392f", "note": "The first two letters of any code. The sixteen types are this 2×2 cut into four." }, "PA": { "name": "Authoritarian fascism", "letters": "PA", "color": "#3c4046", "note": "The first two letters of any code. The sixteen types are this 2×2 cut into four." }, "CL": { "name": "Libertarian socialism", "letters": "CL", "color": "#3a8a4f", "note": "The first two letters of any code. The sixteen types are this 2×2 cut into four." }, "PL": { "name": "Libertarian capitalism", "letters": "PL", "color": "#2a6cb0", "note": "The first two letters of any code. The sixteen types are this 2×2 cut into four." } }, "types": { "CANG": { "code": "CANG", "name": "The Planner", "quadrant": "CA", "axes": [ "collective", "centralized", "national", "gradual" ], "description": "Use the system you already have. Win elections, pass laws one at a time, and put the big things — hospitals, housing, transport — into everybody’s hands. No dramatic break. The government at the centre is a tool, not a target.", "examples": "Britain’s 1945 government, which built the NHS; Tommy Douglas bringing in public health care in Saskatchewan; Nordic social democracy." }, "CANR": { "code": "CANR", "name": "The Vanguard", "quadrant": "CA", "axes": [ "collective", "centralized", "national", "rupture" ], "description": "One organised party takes control of the whole country, then rebuilds who owns what from the top down. The old institutions are not repaired and handed on — they are replaced, deliberately and fast.", "examples": "The Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution; most one-party states of the twentieth century." }, "CAIG": { "code": "CAIG", "name": "The World Planner", "quadrant": "CA", "axes": [ "collective", "centralized", "internationalist", "gradual" ], "description": "Share the world’s resources — but through treaties, large international organisations and plans measured in decades. Patient, technical, and comfortable with a headquarters, as long as the headquarters is a global one.", "examples": "The UN’s development agencies; worldwide climate agreements; proposals for a global Green New Deal." }, "CAIR": { "code": "CAIR", "name": "The Permanent Revolutionary", "quadrant": "CA", "axes": [ "collective", "centralized", "internationalist", "rupture" ], "description": "A revolution in one country alone gets surrounded and squeezed until it fails or goes rotten. So the break has to spread, and the people coordinating it have to be organised across borders from the very start.", "examples": "Leon Trotsky, who argued exactly this against Stalin, was exiled for it, and was killed in Mexico in 1940." }, "CLNG": { "code": "CLNG", "name": "The Municipalist", "quadrant": "CL", "axes": [ "collective", "decentralized", "national", "gradual" ], "description": "Build it from your own town upward. Co-ops, community land, credit unions, budgets that residents vote on directly. Nobody has to capture the national government, because that is not where this gets made.", "examples": "The Mondragón worker co-ops in Spain; Porto Alegre in Brazil, where residents voted on the city budget; credit unions and housing co-ops." }, "CLNR": { "code": "CLNR", "name": "The Syndicalist", "quadrant": "CL", "axes": [ "collective", "decentralized", "national", "rupture" ], "description": "The union is the unit, not the political party. Workers take over the workplace directly instead of waiting for a law to do it for them. The government is not the prize. It is the obstacle.", "examples": "The Industrial Workers of the World — the “Wobblies”; Spain’s CNT union; the general strike, including Winnipeg in 1919." }, "CLIG": { "code": "CLIG", "name": "The Commoner", "quadrant": "CL", "axes": [ "collective", "decentralized", "internationalist", "gradual" ], "description": "Things everybody shares — water, land, knowledge, software — looked after together by the people who actually use them. Grown slowly from the ground up, and it doesn’t matter what flag is flying over it.", "examples": "Wikipedia; open-source software; the shared fisheries and irrigation systems Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing actually work." }, "CLIR": { "code": "CLIR", "name": "The Anarchist", "quadrant": "CL", "axes": [ "collective", "decentralized", "internationalist", "rupture" ], "description": "Shared ownership, nobody in charge at the top, no borders, and no waiting. All four axes point the same way: people organise themselves, and they do it now. This is the corner that was an ordinary thing to be in 1891 and has since been pushed off the map entirely.", "examples": "Peter Kropotkin; the anarchist region of Ukraine, 1918–21; Catalonia in 1936, where workers ran the factories and the buses during the Spanish Civil War." }, "PANG": { "code": "PANG", "name": "The National Conservative", "quadrant": "PA", "axes": [ "private", "centralized", "national", "gradual" ], "description": "Private property, a strong government to protect it, your own country as the frame, and change by small steps. Order comes first because nothing else works without it — and what already works is worth keeping.", "examples": "Bismarck’s Germany; one-nation Toryism in Britain; most mainstream conservative parties today." }, "PANR": { "code": "PANR", "name": "The Strongman", "quadrant": "PA", "axes": [ "private", "centralized", "national", "rupture" ], "description": "Property stays in private hands, all the power moves to one leader or party, the nation gets redefined by who is thrown out of it, and it happens fast. This is the corner fascism sits in. We are not going to call it something gentler.", "examples": "Mussolini’s Italy; Nazi Germany; military coups that replace a government overnight." }, "PAIG": { "code": "PAIG", "name": "The Technocrat", "quadrant": "PA", "axes": [ "private", "centralized", "internationalist", "gradual" ], "description": "Let markets run things, but have expert international institutions manage them by rulebook and treaty. Not a defence of any one country, and not a revolution — an administration, run by people who believe the big arguments are basically over.", "examples": "The World Trade Organization and the IMF; the EU’s single market; central banks deliberately kept out of politics." }, "PAIR": { "code": "PAIR", "name": "The Shock Therapist", "quadrant": "PA", "axes": [ "private", "centralized", "internationalist", "rupture" ], "description": "Use the crisis. A market system can be imposed much faster than it can be argued for, and the moment when everyone is too disorganised to push back is exactly the moment to move.", "examples": "Chile under Pinochet, where economists rebuilt the economy under a dictatorship; Russia in 1992." }, "PLNG": { "code": "PLNG", "name": "The Classical Liberal", "quadrant": "PL", "axes": [ "private", "decentralized", "national", "gradual" ], "description": "A small government, private property protected by law, your own country as the working frame, and change that comes slowly and legally. Suspicious of anyone gathering too much power, but in no hurry to tear anything down.", "examples": "Nineteenth-century British liberalism; Friedrich Hayek; most small-government conservatives today." }, "PLNR": { "code": "PLNR", "name": "The Secessionist", "quadrant": "PL", "axes": [ "private", "decentralized", "national", "rupture" ], "description": "Get out from under the government completely — on this ground, with these neighbours, and by force if it comes to collect. You defend your own property, because no distant authority has the standing to do it for you.", "examples": "Armed militia movements in the United States; “sovereign citizen” groups; movements that want to break away and become their own country." }, "PLIG": { "code": "PLIG", "name": "The Free Trader", "quadrant": "PL", "axes": [ "private", "decentralized", "internationalist", "gradual" ], "description": "Open the borders to goods, money and people, keep the government small, and win the argument by trade and persuasion rather than by force. A country is a place with rules, not something you owe loyalty to.", "examples": "Richard Cobden, who campaigned to scrap Britain’s tariffs on imported grain; open-borders libertarians today." }, "PLIR": { "code": "PLIR", "name": "The Exit Capitalist", "quadrant": "PL", "axes": [ "private", "decentralized", "internationalist", "rupture" ], "description": "Private property, no government at all, no borders — and no interest in fixing anything. Build the replacement somewhere else, make the old country irrelevant, and walk out of it.", "examples": "Anarcho-capitalism; seasteading — floating cities built outside any country’s laws; crypto and “network state” projects." } }, "grid": { "note": "A 4×4 presentation in which the outer 2×2 is still the ownership × control map.", "columns": [ { "ownership": "C", "horizon": "I" }, { "ownership": "C", "horizon": "N" }, { "ownership": "P", "horizon": "I" }, { "ownership": "P", "horizon": "N" } ], "rows": [ { "control": "A", "method": "R" }, { "control": "A", "method": "G" }, { "control": "L", "method": "R" }, { "control": "L", "method": "G" } ] }, "derived_from": { "instrument": "https://theaxes.fyi/quiz/types/", "version": "1.2.0", "relation": "Identical axes, weights and scoring. Statement texts replaced; results directly comparable." }, "audience": { "grades": "8–9", "ages": "13–15", "setting": "Statements are set in school, home and friendship contexts, where this age group already holds convictions." } }