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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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