Comment by epistasis
4 days ago
> 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).
Whether money is "legitimate" or not it will be invented by whatever system you think you are replacing it with. Prices show up in optimization whether you want them to or not.
If you replace "government" with something like anarcho-syndicalism you shift the money question to asking people to behave according to some social norms. You replace the allocation problem with a different system of social relations, that's more opaque and harder to understand, but there's still the same allocation question: who gets what? Who gets to be close to the funny people? Or the artists? Who gets the better view from their house? Who gets all these things which now become the focus of the scarcity question?
Yeah sure, the scarcity is not gone, but its also no longer the only logic that's influencing the direction of the system.
I'm not asking people to behave according to some social norms. I'm expecting them to already have such norms and to use them to decide on a direction in which to shove the market. We've got plenty of horsepower, what we're lacking is a compass. I might not agree with the choices that get made, but I'm still in favor of them being choices that had humans at the helm, rather than the whims of an irrational market.
Whereas with a strictly scarcity based system, our preferences only half matter. It has created a dangerous blindness to outcomes. As long as the number goes up, we keep our foot on the gas, never mind the cliff over there. There are a variety ways to steer an economy:
- say yes/no to a transaction...
-- based on expectations about the value of what is being bought/sold
-- based on whether the transaction will enable the buyer to help/harm the seller or visa versa
I suppose that's 8 buttons to push. But we're currently ignoring the third dimension which reduces it to just 4. We haven't provided people with an expressive enough control panel to act rationally. Not enough input to make a good decision, and outputs that don't carry enough information to be used as actionable feedback, it's just flattened to a yes or a no.
> Prices show up in optimization whether you want them to or not.
Yes but they could carry more information, such as why you're getting a good or a bad price, which might lead one to change their behavior so that more people are more willing to work with them and they therefore get a better price.
> that's more opaque and harder to understand
Well yes, a car with only an engine and no steering wheel is indeed easier to understand than one with both, but I'd still prefer the latter.
Which is why I'm saying we need to start now. We can't wait for scarcity to be gone, we need to actively make space for something else to grow. Not so the new thing can replace scarcity, but so it can find an equilibrium with it.