Comment by epistasis
4 days ago
There will still be scarcity, just of different things.
Even if we vastly increase productivity beyond our current wildest dreams, the production system takes time to adjust to changes in demand, creating continuous points of scarcity.
But Georgist economics are way ahead of how to deal with this. Tax the ownership/control of things that can not be increased (e.g. land).
Sure, but that's no reason to continue using control over scarce things as a proxy for consent. It's not exactly working out.
We had to tolerate gold because it implied a game that was facilitated by the laws of physics, and we didn't have the resources to set up any other sort. But now we do, the rules can be whatever we want them to be.
Sure, let's try Georgism, but given the historical track record of that kind of reform, let's work on other things in parallel.
> continue using control over scarce things as a proxy for consent.
This is an expression for which I can imagine a multitude of specific meanings, can you clarify? I don't know of anybody who is actually using control over scarcity as a proxy for consent (consent of whom?)
Physics still puts bounds on production, and what we can have. Land is the perfect example.
Gold was only ever used as an accounting mechanism, and fiat money is definitely an improvement but accounting must still happen. We were never richer or poorer because of the amount of gold we had in our possession, it was merely used as a token of how much of others' labor we could have. As many current things that are scarce become less scarce, we'll still keep accounting for them. And as new things become scarcer, accounting will be just as necessary, by US dollar or by crypto or by handmade pieces of art that AI can't produce, or whatever.
Georgism's failures have been through landowners getting control of the taxation mechanism and taking the money back that belongs to the rest of society. Literally any other social change is going to have to confront that same question of power and allocation of resources too, it's nothing specific to Georgism.
I mean that if Alice and Bob each go to the bank with and idea and they each get a $1 business loan, now they control something scarce (a dollar).
Suppose I own a store, and they each show up and offer me $1 in exchange for my product. If I accept that dollar, I'm now participating in making their venture happen. If I refuse, I've resisted it in some way, however small. Whether I accept the dollar is a proxy for my consent re: whatever venture caused it to be issued.
A sane design for an economic system which was not strictly scarcity based would attempt create an advantage for ventures that are helpful, and a disadvantage to those that are harmful. One way to do this would be to provide enough metadata along with the money so that I can make a more informed choice about whether to create a liquidity problem for the holder of this money.
Like maybe Alice's venture is going to poison my drinking water, and Bob's venture is going to treat my dad's cancer. Then it's likely in my best interest to tell Alice to get lost but to support Bob. This would be a sort of nucleation site around which unions could form and solidarity could be built. Not trade unions, but rather a union of people with shared interest re: where they get their drinking water or somesuch.
We're allegedly into people acting in rational self interest, yet we've designed a system which limits access to the information necessary to behave rationally when deciding whether or not to engage in a transaction: "What behavior will I be enabling?" needs to be part of the equation.
I'm not an economist, maybe my idea about metadata on the money is silly. Probably there's a better way. But whatever it is it should be in some way sensitive to my values--even if they differ from the bank's values.
Our system is not. It assumes that both parties to a transaction have shared interests, which is increasingly not the case. It forgoes a bias for help over harm in favor of fungibility and liquidity instead. (I expect this property is a historical accident having to do with the unique chemical properties of gold, and not something we would have designed for, were we doing it from scratch. It succeeded because nature implemented the scarcity part for us, not because it resulted in an optimal set of economic properties.)
Re: Georgism...
> landowners getting control of the taxation mechanism and taking the money back that belongs to the rest of society
...that only works for the landowners if there is some central point in the flow of money that they can focus their corruption on: a government or a bank.
If you shift the whether-this-money-is-legitimate question to the next person to receive that money, recursively, corruption becomes much more expensive because it must be sustained for every transaction--it becomes something that they have to do continuously, rather than a battle that they need only win once and then defend for generations. The cost of doing so creates a drag which is not experienced by people pursuing pro-social goals (because holders of that money can reliably spend it widely, no need for coersion).
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agree. wealth inequality has only widened despite AI. things like healthcare insurance, tuition, rent and homes less affordable or more expensive than ever. Nothing has changed and probably ever will. Ai creates abundance in some things like knowledge but other tangible scarcities and individual differences of status remain.