4 ms·

The way I think about this, is that currency is a form of information. If we want an optimal economy, we want everyone to have table stakes at least, so we can

by jchrisa 11y ago

The way I think about this, is that currency is a form of information. If we want an optimal economy, we want everyone to have table stakes at least, so we can get more information. I don't see how to get universal participation in the information flows without something like basic income. I like your concave / convex image, thanks for that.

Retra 11y ago
Another way to think if it is that money is a measure of the ability to overcome barriers to cooperation. (That is, you don't need money at all if everyone were already cooperating with each other.) This would imply that our economic measurements are inaccurate if they don't account for the situations where people cooperate without exchanging money (for instance, raising a child.) Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) You can end up paying people to fight each other, while failing to pay them to help each other.
- finance-geek 11y ago
  Very true, but how else would you do it? How would you pay them to help each other?
  - Retra 11y ago
    I don't know if there is a good way to deal with this directly, but there are a couple ways to deal with it indirectly. Basic income is one such method, though you could also pay people for performing civic responsibilities or charitable work. (Some of this already exists, of course.)
- jchrisa 11y ago
  Great way to sum up the problem with market-for-everything ideology. The valuable things that people do often aren't transactionalized but sometimes they are commemorated. I'm slowly working on an idea for an alternate cryptocurrency based on commemorating ordinary human moments (instead of CPU time as the source of scarcity). A couple of articles on the project: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cryptocurrency-world/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...
- clavalle 11y ago
  I guess I'm not understanding...at what point would we be penalizing already-cooperative behavior? I can't think of many instances where someone would be paid enough to not raise their child, for example. And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?
  - Retra 11y ago
    What I mean is that you can't be paid to raise a child, but you can be paid to manipulate them through marketing. You won't get paid to pick of trash off the street, but you can get paid to produce things that produce street-prone trash. "And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?" It doesn't matter. They might be actively against it, but if you pay them enough, they'll still do it. We -- as a society -- pay people to do things that nobody really wants to have happen except those who happen get paid to do it (like market cigarettes.) And there are things that everybody wants to have happen that almost nobody gets paid to do (like care for your family.) We're potentially using our economy to create problems rather than solve them.
- bsder 11y ago
  > Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) I need to think about this VERY HARD. I've never seen it put that way before.
clavalle 11y ago
Thank von Neumann...it's his. He did a lot of work about what it means for a market to be efficient. People forget the axioms that lead to market efficiency -- convexity being one of them.
laotzu 11y ago
Alan Watts did a great bit back in the day about money as an information network and how basic income is necessary for automation: >And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It's an information network and it's called money, about which we have the most unbelievable superstitions and psychological blocks... >Now what happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but at the same time you put people out of work. You can say, "Oh but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs." Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do. But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary. And if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration. >So then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to operate on a very much diminished income, (say some sort of dole), the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products. And therefore he has invested in this expensive automative machinery to no purpose. And therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. >People say, "That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?" The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community. This is not saying you see that a...this is not the statist or communist idea that you expropriate the manufacture and say you can't own and run this factory anymore, it is owned by the government. It is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product. That means that taxation is obsolete - completely obsolete. It ought to go the other way. >Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now you see that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they're really lazy see... ah giving them money?” Yeah, because otherwise the machines can't work. They come to a blockage. >This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor - starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem. >So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further more to the nature of work. -Alan Watts, Money Guilt and the Machine http://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-and-the-Machine#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-a...

by jchrisa 11y ago

Retra 11y ago

Another way to think if it is that money is a measure of the ability to overcome barriers to cooperation. (That is, you don't need money at all if everyone were already cooperating with each other.) This would imply that our economic measurements are inaccurate if they don't account for the situations where people cooperate without exchanging money (for instance, raising a child.) Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) You can end up paying people to fight each other, while failing to pay them to help each other.

finance-geek 11y ago
Very true, but how else would you do it? How would you pay them to help each other?
- Retra 11y ago
  I don't know if there is a good way to deal with this directly, but there are a couple ways to deal with it indirectly. Basic income is one such method, though you could also pay people for performing civic responsibilities or charitable work. (Some of this already exists, of course.)
jchrisa 11y ago
Great way to sum up the problem with market-for-everything ideology. The valuable things that people do often aren't transactionalized but sometimes they are commemorated. I'm slowly working on an idea for an alternate cryptocurrency based on commemorating ordinary human moments (instead of CPU time as the source of scarcity). A couple of articles on the project: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cryptocurrency-world/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...
clavalle 11y ago
I guess I'm not understanding...at what point would we be penalizing already-cooperative behavior? I can't think of many instances where someone would be paid enough to not raise their child, for example. And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?
- Retra 11y ago
  What I mean is that you can't be paid to raise a child, but you can be paid to manipulate them through marketing. You won't get paid to pick of trash off the street, but you can get paid to produce things that produce street-prone trash. "And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?" It doesn't matter. They might be actively against it, but if you pay them enough, they'll still do it. We -- as a society -- pay people to do things that nobody really wants to have happen except those who happen get paid to do it (like market cigarettes.) And there are things that everybody wants to have happen that almost nobody gets paid to do (like care for your family.) We're potentially using our economy to create problems rather than solve them.
bsder 11y ago
> Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) I need to think about this VERY HARD. I've never seen it put that way before.

clavalle 11y ago

Thank von Neumann...it's his. He did a lot of work about what it means for a market to be efficient. People forget the axioms that lead to market efficiency -- convexity being one of them.

laotzu 11y ago

Alan Watts did a great bit back in the day about money as an information network and how basic income is necessary for automation: >And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It's an information network and it's called money, about which we have the most unbelievable superstitions and psychological blocks... >Now what happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods but at the same time you put people out of work. You can say, "Oh but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs." Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do. But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary. And if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration. >So then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force and they have to operate on a very much diminished income, (say some sort of dole), the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products. And therefore he has invested in this expensive automative machinery to no purpose. And therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. >People say, "That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?" The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community. This is not saying you see that a...this is not the statist or communist idea that you expropriate the manufacture and say you can't own and run this factory anymore, it is owned by the government. It is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product. That means that taxation is obsolete - completely obsolete. It ought to go the other way. >Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now you see that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they're really lazy see... ah giving them money?” Yeah, because otherwise the machines can't work. They come to a blockage. >This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor - starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th century and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem. >So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further more to the nature of work. -Alan Watts, Money Guilt and the Machine http://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-and-the-Machine#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-a...