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 …
-
Show this thread
-
Definitions in case you’re unfamiliar with them. Personal and inclusive are ways of coupling relational identity and behavior. Inclusive fitness (selfish gene) is more accurate than personal fitness (selfish person or kinship group) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness …pic.twitter.com/OvkAcpEsMs
1 reply 1 retweet 8 likesShow this thread -
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.
1 reply 1 retweet 11 likesShow this thread -
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 12 likesShow this thread -
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.
2 replies 0 retweets 8 likesShow this thread -
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.
2 replies 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread -
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)
1 reply 0 retweets 10 likesShow this thread -
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.
1 reply 2 retweets 16 likesShow this thread -
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
This Tweet is unavailable.
I’m against explicit allocation. Everything drafts off actual transactions.
-
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
- Show replies
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.