8 ms·

So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of concentration of power and la

by hpoe 6y ago

So theres an interesting concept in the bible that I have thought about more and more that seems like it would help the problem of concentration of power and large firms. In the Old Testament God commanded the israelites that every 7th 7th year (or every 49 years basically) was to be a year of jubilee. Included among the instructions for the year of jubilee was the requirement that all debts be forgiven and all land revert to it's ancestral owners. Basically the financial system gets reset every 49 years. It seems to me that there are great things that can be done when a business has the right resources but at a certain point business stop competing and start regulating or burying their competition out of existance. Now of course we can't due it exactly how the bible outlines things but I've been increasingly interested in the idea of a regular societal reset on a half a century or so basis. This creates enough time for large firms to grow innovation to happen and wealth creation to happen. Whilst at the same time it prevents eternal dominance by a handful or large players . What would y'all think of a societal reset?

lostcolony 6y ago
So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e., millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic power sufficiently? Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?
- hpoe 6y ago
  Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would obviously be substantial differences between the implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    There's a reason this is just the kernel of an idea. It's because any possible plan you make off it will very quickly make its manifest unfairness obvious. We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve this year" anymore.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Sure, but those questions have to be answered. Is there a system that guarantees people can own something? Is there a system that prevents it from being inherited? Else you prevent wealth generation for anyone coming to the country anew. I agree that a reset on the extravagantly wealthy is needed...but that can also just take the form of, say, a wealth tax, without also raising questions on how new people enter the system fairly.
- mikem170 6y ago
  It can reset on a schedule. Everybody knows it's coming. It ensures that debt's don't grow so much that they warp other aspects of the economy. I believe it was done in the past to avoid the large scale virtual enslavement of the poor via debt. It was meant to be a relief valve of sorts.
  - hnracer 6y ago
    Interest rates would skyrocket because the default risk of lendees just went up a lot. I'm not a fan of this idea, the debt market will figure out a way to be compensated all the same (or else refuse to provision debt, which is also a bad outcome).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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giglamesh 6y ago
https://www.weforum.org/great-reset https://www.weforum.org/great-reset - not based on jubilee, but rather seeing covid-19 as an opportunity to fix some of the problems which the pandemic is bringing to (more) light.
munificent 6y ago
I don't know about a complete societal reset, but I sure would be interested in a corporate reset. Forest fires are good for forests over the long term. They remove large old trees that are full of rot, dead wood, and parasites. Those old giants aren't using the sun's light and other resources efficiently, but they block too much light for smaller trees in the understory to grow tall enough to compete. A forest fire clears those out, returns the nutrients in them to the soil, and provides a level playing field for smaller trees to grow and compete. I wouldn't go full Fight Club Project Mayhem, but I'd love something like a cleansing fire that periodically breaks up or disbands all corporations above a certain size.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  What makes you think the forest fire metaphor is applicable? Seems like a "firebombing Dresden" metaphor could just as easily apply.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  > ...corporate reset... You read my mind: this is exactly what is needed! I could not think of the right phrasing (because i, too, agree that a societal reset might not be the right thing here)...and the forest fire cleansing is an apt metaphor here. So thanks for sharing this thought!
  - seattletech 6y ago
    I am fairly certain that corporate charters were originally time-limited.
    - mxuribe 6y ago
      If you are correct - and i don't doubt that you are - then this frustrates me even more around why corporations push to extend the life of their copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc. Patents and such were supposed to be an aid to kick things off (for a nascent economy), not survive for the long-ass life of some large conglomerate corporation to squeeze every little last drop of juice from all the existing citrus fruit! (Sorry, i guess lately i've been feeling very anti-corporation...and i haven't had my coffee yet today.)
novia 6y ago
After thinking about this idea for a while, it occurred to me: couldn't the same thing be accomplished by banning inheritance? Debts are already forgiven upon death. The average human life isn't that much longer than 50 years, and the resets would be happening continuously.
- Invictus0 6y ago
  Yes, estate taxes are progressive taxes. See Bernie Sanders' proposal: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-progressive-estate-tax#:~:text=Call%20for%20a%20progressive%20estate,their%20fair%20share%20of%20taxes.&text=The%20tax%20rate%20on%20the,million%20would%20be%2055%20percent https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-pr....
- agarden 6y ago
  This is an entirely different idea. Banning inheritance makes corporations even more powerful, as they can increase their wealth from one generation to another and families cannot.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Banning inheritance makes corporations even more powerful Corporations are legal fictions through which their owners operated. If ownership of corporations can’t be inherited, it doesn’t make “corporations” more powerful, it just distributes power over corporations (presuming that the absence of inheritance means that assets escheat to the State, and that the State itself is fundamentally democratic.)
  - javierluraschi 6y ago
    How do you prevent them people from gifting their inheritance while they are alive?
- briefcomment 6y ago
  What about just limiting inheritance to, say, 500k per child?
brundolf 6y ago
I feel like the US has a similar (if incidental) cycle around antitrust. When the market is humming along regulators turn a blind eye, the public doesn't really care, etc. Over time the big companies get bigger and bigger, eating more and more smaller companies, until a breaking point is reached and suddenly everyone cares again and we have major action taken. Then the cycle starts again.
nostromo 6y ago
Is it necessary though? The biggest American companies 50 years ago: 1. IBM 2. AT&T 3. Kodak 4. GM 5. Standard Oil of NJ 6. Texaco 7. Sears 8. GE 9. Polariod 10. Gulf Oil Not a single one of these companies is in the top 10 today. (Edit: correction, one is: Exxon.) Many of the current top 10 didn't exist at all 50 years ago. Thankfully our economy seems to be dynamic enough that companies must continue to compete or lose marketshare organically.
- triceratops 6y ago
  I don't know what these are "biggest" by (revenue? market cap?). If it's revenue, AT&T and Standard Oil of NJ (now ExxonMobil) are still in the top 10. Gulf Oil and Texaco (both now Chevron) are both in the top 15.[1] So 40% of that group is still around and quite successful. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Usually when people says "biggest" it's by market cap.
- mikem170 6y ago
  The idea of a debt jubilee does not wipe out corporations, it wipes out current outstanding debts only. The idea would be that nobody would loan corporations so much money that they wouldn't be able to pay it back before the debt is wiped out. Something like that could counter a lot of financial games that are played to the detriment of so many, which is why some societies had things like dept jubilees.
  - hnracer 6y ago
    Wouldn't this just translate into higher interest rates, to make the supply of debt financially worthwhile for the lender? We can see this market mechanism play out in the corporate lending market where companies with high credit risk must pay double or more interest rates. A debt jubilee would simply raise the default risk on all of society and thus increase rates to compensate.
golemiprague 6y ago
The bible was talking specifically about land because it is a limited resource, especially for Israelis who are commended to be confined to the limited area of the land of Israel. Other types of ownership are not resetting, partly because someone having a corporate doesn't prevent other from creating one and partly because it is a much more dynamic market, if you check you will see that the corporate landscape changes immensely every 50 years anyways. Another way to look at it is that land is not sold, only rented for 50 years, but this can't be done with a corporate because corporate is not rented in the first place, in many cases it is just created out of nothing.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I kind of like the idea, in principle. But in practice... Let's say you wipe out debts. And let's say that my pension was invested in those debts. That's going to be a bit problematic. Let's say you reset companies. Including, say, Intel and AMD. The CPU monopoly is wiped out. Oh, yeah, and Microsoft. But next month I want to buy a computer. Can anybody make me an x86 chip? Can I get Windows, assuming that I want it? Or do I have to run Linux on a public-domain chip? It's not going to be easy to maintain continuity of supply while shaking up firms that dominate important markets.
mikem170 6y ago
There are other and more recent precedents for this - all debt periodically being forgiven. Graeber mentions this in is book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Everybody knows it is coming, so the market works around it. I imagine it acts as a check on inflation via too many financial games.
iso1631 6y ago
> all land revert to it's ancestral owners Because those who's great great great great great grandfather did well out of knowing Henry 8th don't already get enough headstart in life? Land shouldn't be owned by the people, with rent paid yearly to the people based on its unimproved value.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
So you're born 15 years into the reset. When you're 18, you're about halfway through. If you work hard for 10 years to accumulate wealth, add value, whatever, by the time you're ~40, it's about to all get taken away. What's the point?
kansface 6y ago
I wonder what that did to financial transactions in the 48th year?
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
How about banning debt? People live according to their means? No debt. Just gifts or charity.
- satyrnein 6y ago
  No mortgages, just pay rent to the landowning class forever?
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    Of course the US is far too much of a debt-based society for things to change (well, without a lot of violence and instability) at this point, but mortgages aren't a thing everywhere. Home ownership does not automatically equal debt.
- JanisL 6y ago
  Currently we have a debt based monetary system, so banning debt means we would need an entirely different monetary system. This might be worth doing but there's a lot of challenges, specifically debt in some small amounts allows flexibility and options that don't exist otherwise. Some other mechanism to fund future work would need to be created to fill that gap.
erentz 6y ago
This would make huge waves of distortions around these events. Who is going to be able to get a 30 year mortgage to buy a house if the debt reset is in 15 years? Now only people who can afford 15 year mortgages. As you get closer it gets worse. Then it all resets after. I think the problems you’re trying to address with this need to be addressed in a more fundamental and continuous way.
- greedo 6y ago
  You would buy fractional ownership in a house.
greedo 6y ago
This would cause even more short term thinking than we currently have. We need more companies that take on long term goals and projects.
labster 6y ago
Sure, the societal reset would start with promises of local manufacturing jobs but pretty soon they’d be getting guillotines imported from Shenzhen. Ideas of large social changes always sound good in the abstract, but once you propose a real plan the devil is always in the details. In the US, we can’t even agree to let the government forgive student loan debt it already owns — but somehow completely reworking corporate debt and property will work/help/ever possibly happen?
thrower123 6y ago
You want a societal reset? WW2 was a societal reset. The Bolshevik Revolution was a societal reset. Napoleon was a societal reset. The 30 Years War was a societal reset. I hope I never see a societal reset.
- oblio 6y ago
  Agreed . Yet we all benefit from these past resets.
strictfp 6y ago
It would be great. We need a way of preventing "death by a thousand cuts" by bloated organizations and processes. I also think it would be good to upturn most processes since people learn how to exploit systems quite quickly. But maybe it would be better to reset in a cascading fashion, rather than all at once.
apsurd 6y ago
Late to the party but wanted to make sure to contribute this excellent talk by the late David Graeber about the history of debt. It includes the concept of Jubilee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs

by hpoe 6y ago

lostcolony 6y ago

So there are some noted problems with doing so. Namely, reset starting -when-? At a time of large scale inequality? I.e., millionaire owners of much of NY get locked in as owners for all future generations, and are unable to sell the land, only lease it? Does that lack of salability reduce their economic power sufficiently? Likewise individuals; for anyone who doesn't own land at the start of the system, is there a path to land ownership?

hpoe 6y ago
Well to be clear I'm not saying we should just take what is directly in the bible and lift and shift it, there would obviously be substantial differences between the implementation now and then. As for the when I would say a regular calander cycle, every 50 years or so. Again this is more of the kernel of an idea than a fleshed out plan.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  There's a reason this is just the kernel of an idea. It's because any possible plan you make off it will very quickly make its manifest unfairness obvious. We aren't living in ancient times, and the distribution of wealth and debt in the world isn't what it used to be. Debt isn't "our crop failed and my family is going to starve this year" anymore.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Sure, but those questions have to be answered. Is there a system that guarantees people can own something? Is there a system that prevents it from being inherited? Else you prevent wealth generation for anyone coming to the country anew. I agree that a reset on the extravagantly wealthy is needed...but that can also just take the form of, say, a wealth tax, without also raising questions on how new people enter the system fairly.
mikem170 6y ago
It can reset on a schedule. Everybody knows it's coming. It ensures that debt's don't grow so much that they warp other aspects of the economy. I believe it was done in the past to avoid the large scale virtual enslavement of the poor via debt. It was meant to be a relief valve of sorts.
- hnracer 6y ago
  Interest rates would skyrocket because the default risk of lendees just went up a lot. I'm not a fan of this idea, the debt market will figure out a way to be compensated all the same (or else refuse to provision debt, which is also a bad outcome).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

giglamesh 6y ago

https://www.weforum.org/great-reset https://www.weforum.org/great-reset - not based on jubilee, but rather seeing covid-19 as an opportunity to fix some of the problems which the pandemic is bringing to (more) light.

munificent 6y ago

I don't know about a complete societal reset, but I sure would be interested in a corporate reset. Forest fires are good for forests over the long term. They remove large old trees that are full of rot, dead wood, and parasites. Those old giants aren't using the sun's light and other resources efficiently, but they block too much light for smaller trees in the understory to grow tall enough to compete. A forest fire clears those out, returns the nutrients in them to the soil, and provides a level playing field for smaller trees to grow and compete. I wouldn't go full Fight Club Project Mayhem, but I'd love something like a cleansing fire that periodically breaks up or disbands all corporations above a certain size.

edmundsauto 6y ago
What makes you think the forest fire metaphor is applicable? Seems like a "firebombing Dresden" metaphor could just as easily apply.
mxuribe 6y ago
> ...corporate reset... You read my mind: this is exactly what is needed! I could not think of the right phrasing (because i, too, agree that a societal reset might not be the right thing here)...and the forest fire cleansing is an apt metaphor here. So thanks for sharing this thought!
- seattletech 6y ago
  I am fairly certain that corporate charters were originally time-limited.
  - mxuribe 6y ago
    If you are correct - and i don't doubt that you are - then this frustrates me even more around why corporations push to extend the life of their copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc. Patents and such were supposed to be an aid to kick things off (for a nascent economy), not survive for the long-ass life of some large conglomerate corporation to squeeze every little last drop of juice from all the existing citrus fruit! (Sorry, i guess lately i've been feeling very anti-corporation...and i haven't had my coffee yet today.)

novia 6y ago

After thinking about this idea for a while, it occurred to me: couldn't the same thing be accomplished by banning inheritance? Debts are already forgiven upon death. The average human life isn't that much longer than 50 years, and the resets would be happening continuously.

Invictus0 6y ago
Yes, estate taxes are progressive taxes. See Bernie Sanders' proposal: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-progressive-estate-tax#:~:text=Call%20for%20a%20progressive%20estate,their%20fair%20share%20of%20taxes.&text=The%20tax%20rate%20on%20the,million%20would%20be%2055%20percent https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/a-pr....
agarden 6y ago
This is an entirely different idea. Banning inheritance makes corporations even more powerful, as they can increase their wealth from one generation to another and families cannot.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Banning inheritance makes corporations even more powerful Corporations are legal fictions through which their owners operated. If ownership of corporations can’t be inherited, it doesn’t make “corporations” more powerful, it just distributes power over corporations (presuming that the absence of inheritance means that assets escheat to the State, and that the State itself is fundamentally democratic.)
- javierluraschi 6y ago
  How do you prevent them people from gifting their inheritance while they are alive?
briefcomment 6y ago
What about just limiting inheritance to, say, 500k per child?

brundolf 6y ago

I feel like the US has a similar (if incidental) cycle around antitrust. When the market is humming along regulators turn a blind eye, the public doesn't really care, etc. Over time the big companies get bigger and bigger, eating more and more smaller companies, until a breaking point is reached and suddenly everyone cares again and we have major action taken. Then the cycle starts again.

nostromo 6y ago

Is it necessary though? The biggest American companies 50 years ago: 1. IBM 2. AT&T 3. Kodak 4. GM 5. Standard Oil of NJ 6. Texaco 7. Sears 8. GE 9. Polariod 10. Gulf Oil Not a single one of these companies is in the top 10 today. (Edit: correction, one is: Exxon.) Many of the current top 10 didn't exist at all 50 years ago. Thankfully our economy seems to be dynamic enough that companies must continue to compete or lose marketshare organically.

triceratops 6y ago
I don't know what these are "biggest" by (revenue? market cap?). If it's revenue, AT&T and Standard Oil of NJ (now ExxonMobil) are still in the top 10. Gulf Oil and Texaco (both now Chevron) are both in the top 15.[1] So 40% of that group is still around and quite successful. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Usually when people says "biggest" it's by market cap.
mikem170 6y ago
The idea of a debt jubilee does not wipe out corporations, it wipes out current outstanding debts only. The idea would be that nobody would loan corporations so much money that they wouldn't be able to pay it back before the debt is wiped out. Something like that could counter a lot of financial games that are played to the detriment of so many, which is why some societies had things like dept jubilees.
- hnracer 6y ago
  Wouldn't this just translate into higher interest rates, to make the supply of debt financially worthwhile for the lender? We can see this market mechanism play out in the corporate lending market where companies with high credit risk must pay double or more interest rates. A debt jubilee would simply raise the default risk on all of society and thus increase rates to compensate.

golemiprague 6y ago

The bible was talking specifically about land because it is a limited resource, especially for Israelis who are commended to be confined to the limited area of the land of Israel. Other types of ownership are not resetting, partly because someone having a corporate doesn't prevent other from creating one and partly because it is a much more dynamic market, if you check you will see that the corporate landscape changes immensely every 50 years anyways. Another way to look at it is that land is not sold, only rented for 50 years, but this can't be done with a corporate because corporate is not rented in the first place, in many cases it is just created out of nothing.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I kind of like the idea, in principle. But in practice... Let's say you wipe out debts. And let's say that my pension was invested in those debts. That's going to be a bit problematic. Let's say you reset companies. Including, say, Intel and AMD. The CPU monopoly is wiped out. Oh, yeah, and Microsoft. But next month I want to buy a computer. Can anybody make me an x86 chip? Can I get Windows, assuming that I want it? Or do I have to run Linux on a public-domain chip? It's not going to be easy to maintain continuity of supply while shaking up firms that dominate important markets.

mikem170 6y ago

There are other and more recent precedents for this - all debt periodically being forgiven. Graeber mentions this in is book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Everybody knows it is coming, so the market works around it. I imagine it acts as a check on inflation via too many financial games.

iso1631 6y ago

> all land revert to it's ancestral owners Because those who's great great great great great grandfather did well out of knowing Henry 8th don't already get enough headstart in life? Land shouldn't be owned by the people, with rent paid yearly to the people based on its unimproved value.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

So you're born 15 years into the reset. When you're 18, you're about halfway through. If you work hard for 10 years to accumulate wealth, add value, whatever, by the time you're ~40, it's about to all get taken away. What's the point?

kansface 6y ago

I wonder what that did to financial transactions in the 48th year?

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

How about banning debt? People live according to their means? No debt. Just gifts or charity.

satyrnein 6y ago
No mortgages, just pay rent to the landowning class forever?
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Of course the US is far too much of a debt-based society for things to change (well, without a lot of violence and instability) at this point, but mortgages aren't a thing everywhere. Home ownership does not automatically equal debt.
JanisL 6y ago
Currently we have a debt based monetary system, so banning debt means we would need an entirely different monetary system. This might be worth doing but there's a lot of challenges, specifically debt in some small amounts allows flexibility and options that don't exist otherwise. Some other mechanism to fund future work would need to be created to fill that gap.

erentz 6y ago

This would make huge waves of distortions around these events. Who is going to be able to get a 30 year mortgage to buy a house if the debt reset is in 15 years? Now only people who can afford 15 year mortgages. As you get closer it gets worse. Then it all resets after. I think the problems you’re trying to address with this need to be addressed in a more fundamental and continuous way.

greedo 6y ago
You would buy fractional ownership in a house.

greedo 6y ago

This would cause even more short term thinking than we currently have. We need more companies that take on long term goals and projects.

labster 6y ago

Sure, the societal reset would start with promises of local manufacturing jobs but pretty soon they’d be getting guillotines imported from Shenzhen. Ideas of large social changes always sound good in the abstract, but once you propose a real plan the devil is always in the details. In the US, we can’t even agree to let the government forgive student loan debt it already owns — but somehow completely reworking corporate debt and property will work/help/ever possibly happen?

thrower123 6y ago

You want a societal reset? WW2 was a societal reset. The Bolshevik Revolution was a societal reset. Napoleon was a societal reset. The 30 Years War was a societal reset. I hope I never see a societal reset.

oblio 6y ago
Agreed . Yet we all benefit from these past resets.

strictfp 6y ago

It would be great. We need a way of preventing "death by a thousand cuts" by bloated organizations and processes. I also think it would be good to upturn most processes since people learn how to exploit systems quite quickly. But maybe it would be better to reset in a cascading fashion, rather than all at once.

apsurd 6y ago

Late to the party but wanted to make sure to contribute this excellent talk by the late David Graeber about the history of debt. It includes the concept of Jubilee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs