After napping on it, I have a theory of what ails capitalism: it is not Darwinian enough. The “selfish” motive in Adam Smith corresponds to personal fitness rather than inclusive fitness. Taxation is a crude and insufficiently precise mechanism to add inclusive fitness back in.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1188151423835365376 …
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So here’s an idea. Set aside a fixed tax fraction on my dollars. Every time I spend a dollar buying something from you, it strengthens a weight. My tax fraction is then periodically distributed among my transactional counterparties in proportion to the weights of transaction.
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So current direct spending drives future redistribution. With a shifting weight and forgetting/discounting factor. Eventually more and more of everybody’s income comes from the redistribution rather than direct. Private morphs smoothly into public utilities.
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This also sort of kills advertising. Current income sort of translates directly into brand equity that makes future income cheaper.. while moving it from private property to public commons. Lean into commoditization.
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This scheme would need a lot more computation per transaction btw, and effectively perfectly eidetic transactional memory. That alone inspires confidence it would be smarter. Price becomes a richer signal, with a past and future. Today’s economy is kinda amnesiac.
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Not just brand equity, but regular equity could get absorbed by this scheme. You wouldn’t need a stock or bond market. Every transaction would be an implicit stock/bond tx as well. No need to bolt on a bottleneck long-term memory capital market onto amnesiac transaction market.
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Flatten market governance and make it coextensive with the market itself. Kill the gods of “interest rates” and a financial market system that sits like a heaven above the earthly basic transactional goods/services system.
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Afaict even the wildest blockchain or blockchain-like schemes don’t go this far. It’s a weird design, effectively turning the economy into a Hebbian deep learning system or something.
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A lot of this is probably wildly flawed but the base insight I’m trying to work out is “not all planet scale emergent computing systems are equally powerful and expressive” Pre-modern global economy = 1 Modern = 3 Climate system = 5 Biological evolution = 6
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The modern economy hasn’t had a design refresh since approximately the 1600s. We’ve just twiddled some knots and settings.
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What do you think of this approach? Replace taxes with a “donation leaderboard”, and government spending with a basic income. Donation to the leaderboard destroy currency and thus reinforce the Gaia meme.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dvJM5dN6XwV77rDAUxYGnWYmPR8wELsiBoV4BpUxfyk …
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I’m against explicit allocation. Everything drafts off actual transactions.
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