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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.
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What’s your best 1-tweet mic-drop critique of western-style capitalism?
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If you look at history, “business” effectively evolved out of cultural kin selection. Powerful clans looking out for themselves against monarchs and peasant masses etc. Capitalism just shrank the unit from >3 generations extended family to <3 generation nuclear.
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Taxes model inclusive fitness coarsely. If I earn a dollar, pay $0.15 in federal taxes, $0.15 in state income and sales taxes, and $0.05 in local taxes, retaining $0.65 in consumed/saved value, all citizens are like ~second cousins, fellow state citizens are ~first cousins etc.
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This is very low resolution. It has little to no connection to my actual pattern of relationship behaviors. And there are mediating agents between me and tax beneficiaries who distort things further. Look at patterns of philanthropy for a sense of actual felt relationship.
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I’m not saying invent tax systems that model philanthropy. Philanthropic intentions are generally reactionary, tribal, worse than kin-selfishness. But it has the right kind of expressiveness of inclusion relationship: to people, whales, climate, space programs, whatever.
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In genetics, every individual organism’s genome is a map of relationship to the entire biosphere. If you pass on your genes directly or indirectly, you also pass on 99% genes of chimpanzee genes, 80% of lobster genes etc (look up actual numbers... they’re in the ballpark)
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You are a holographic model of Gaia effectively. Inclusive fitness - Darwinian competition between competing Gaias, not genes, individuals, groups or species. Selfish Gene = Selfish Gaia theory. A more powerfully expressive post-capitalism economics would do the same for memes.
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Let’s call the memetic equivalent of Gaia... Maia! Selfish Meme = Selfish Maia How do you translate this refactoring into an economic idea? Trick might be to map transactions to reproduction rather than feeding.
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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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I think I don't follow. You're shuffling a percentage of your purchasing income . . . back to the people you purchased from? This doesn't seem to fulfill many of the current goals of taxation. What am I missing?
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