4 ms·

For #2, what is the actual technical hurdle to more widespread distribution? I saw an idea that every citizen should just automatically have a checking account

For #2, what is the actual technical hurdle to more widespread distribution? I saw an idea that every citizen should just automatically have a checking account at their regional Fed. Why not that? It does not seem technically infeasible, and the fed could then do distribution by debiting their own accounts.

javajosh 6y ago
It is fun to speculate about this, because money is fundamentally information - imagine that a dollar is a "like". The most fundamental hurtle to distribution is that people don't wanna! When you have a bunch of likes, giving them away sounds like a good idea, but in reality it means a) reducing your own value (unfairly), and b) increasing someone else's value (unfairly). I personally have another solution, that I've never heard articulated, which I call "The Enough Number". It's a number you individually decide is enough for you, after which you will choose not to work any further (at least, not for money). This achieves a kind of de facto redistribution since, theoretically, someone else will step in to make the money the retiree is no longer making. Another way to put it is that it creates an artificial scarcity of competence, or it means that competence-for-hire decays over time in a way that is beneficial to society. The only way for this to work, IMHO, is if you get some social status at Davos (free VIP entry for life? A medal?) for having a achieved Enough. Or maybe a publisher can arise, called "Enough Press" where such people can get a book deal. FWIW my own Enough Number is $10M. This is still quite high but it reflects my upper-middle class sensibilities. This would be enough for a beautiful 1500 ft^2 house in Laguna Beach, a 30' wooden sailboat I partner on with a couple of neighbors, and I'd probably spend my time teaching neighborhood kids how to program and make things in a beautiful, sunny space filled with all kinds of very cool and dangerous components. Politically, this helps focus me on the desired outcome, where the Earth is populated by people who routinely achieve Enough at 30, and spend most of their lives raising their kids, traveling, telling stories, eating good food, reading and writing. The really duty driven folk would find longer-term work at the EPA or the Justice Department or on space projects, etc. I would expect intellectuals to have the easiest time of it, because they could become adjunct professors. Celebrities and business people would struggle, I think, because the attention is the juice, and you can't every really have Enough!
- sunshinerag 6y ago
  My Enough Number is 10% + (the highest enough number of everyone else). Just so I can keep enough for me and my generations.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Does it really serve your future generations to give them enough so they never have to work? From what little I've seen it can just as often amplify their own destruction or bad habits.
    - sunshinerag 6y ago
      (or) protect them under maybe a calamitous future.
      - javajosh 6y ago
        Sure but what if your actions to protect them from a calamitous future actively result in that future happening? The number of disasters that are a) small enough not to wipe us all out, b) large enough that it would wipe out a large fraction of us, and c) a large amount of money would have any influence being in one group or another, is very small, and they would be mostly political (possibly biological) disasters. I mean, I could think of stranger stories than a humanity that was saved from total destruction by the actions of a few "crazy" billionaires that got together to make a livable moon base "just in case" in 2021, just before The Real Plague, a virulent strain of Covid-19, created a zombie apocolypse that almost wiped us out - except for the intrepid crew of Atlas-1 Moonbase, populated by the best of humanity: Bezos, Gates, Musk, Myrhvold, Trump, and a good chunk of the Saudi royal family. Or that was the plan, anyway, before the Chinese finally activated their APT and, at the last minute, replaced the passengers with CCP leaders and their families. (Satire aside, if humanity could "come back" from this unlikely scenario, then I'd say the excesses of the 20th and 21st century might even have been worth it. But really, the odds of any of this happening seem vanishingly small.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
jcfrei 6y ago
Regarding technical feasibility: I don't think the Fed has a system ready that could handle the amount of transactions and record keeping necessary for a system which is accessible to the public. They would need to buy such a system. But more importantly so called narrow banks are not in the interest of regulators and the current financial system. If customers could directly deposit at the Fed they would likely disintermediate regular banks (which leads to a bank run) and prevent them from doing their central function in the financial system (issuing credit). You would have to rethink the financial system and regulators are wary of such big changes. Matt Levine has a great article about it: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fed-versus-the-narrow-bank https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...
- sanderjd 6y ago
  Ah right, ha, that Matt Levine article is where I first saw this idea. My point actually wasn't that this is a good idea, but that it's a superior idea to doing the same thing with a blockchain based ledger. All the problems you outline are true for the blockchain solution as well.

javajosh 6y ago

It is fun to speculate about this, because money is fundamentally information - imagine that a dollar is a "like". The most fundamental hurtle to distribution is that people don't wanna! When you have a bunch of likes, giving them away sounds like a good idea, but in reality it means a) reducing your own value (unfairly), and b) increasing someone else's value (unfairly). I personally have another solution, that I've never heard articulated, which I call "The Enough Number". It's a number you individually decide is enough for you, after which you will choose not to work any further (at least, not for money). This achieves a kind of de facto redistribution since, theoretically, someone else will step in to make the money the retiree is no longer making. Another way to put it is that it creates an artificial scarcity of competence, or it means that competence-for-hire decays over time in a way that is beneficial to society. The only way for this to work, IMHO, is if you get some social status at Davos (free VIP entry for life? A medal?) for having a achieved Enough. Or maybe a publisher can arise, called "Enough Press" where such people can get a book deal. FWIW my own Enough Number is $10M. This is still quite high but it reflects my upper-middle class sensibilities. This would be enough for a beautiful 1500 ft^2 house in Laguna Beach, a 30' wooden sailboat I partner on with a couple of neighbors, and I'd probably spend my time teaching neighborhood kids how to program and make things in a beautiful, sunny space filled with all kinds of very cool and dangerous components. Politically, this helps focus me on the desired outcome, where the Earth is populated by people who routinely achieve Enough at 30, and spend most of their lives raising their kids, traveling, telling stories, eating good food, reading and writing. The really duty driven folk would find longer-term work at the EPA or the Justice Department or on space projects, etc. I would expect intellectuals to have the easiest time of it, because they could become adjunct professors. Celebrities and business people would struggle, I think, because the attention is the juice, and you can't every really have Enough!

sunshinerag 6y ago
My Enough Number is 10% + (the highest enough number of everyone else). Just so I can keep enough for me and my generations.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Does it really serve your future generations to give them enough so they never have to work? From what little I've seen it can just as often amplify their own destruction or bad habits.
  - sunshinerag 6y ago
    (or) protect them under maybe a calamitous future.
    - javajosh 6y ago
      Sure but what if your actions to protect them from a calamitous future actively result in that future happening? The number of disasters that are a) small enough not to wipe us all out, b) large enough that it would wipe out a large fraction of us, and c) a large amount of money would have any influence being in one group or another, is very small, and they would be mostly political (possibly biological) disasters. I mean, I could think of stranger stories than a humanity that was saved from total destruction by the actions of a few "crazy" billionaires that got together to make a livable moon base "just in case" in 2021, just before The Real Plague, a virulent strain of Covid-19, created a zombie apocolypse that almost wiped us out - except for the intrepid crew of Atlas-1 Moonbase, populated by the best of humanity: Bezos, Gates, Musk, Myrhvold, Trump, and a good chunk of the Saudi royal family. Or that was the plan, anyway, before the Chinese finally activated their APT and, at the last minute, replaced the passengers with CCP leaders and their families. (Satire aside, if humanity could "come back" from this unlikely scenario, then I'd say the excesses of the 20th and 21st century might even have been worth it. But really, the odds of any of this happening seem vanishingly small.
xyzzyz 6y ago

jcfrei 6y ago

Regarding technical feasibility: I don't think the Fed has a system ready that could handle the amount of transactions and record keeping necessary for a system which is accessible to the public. They would need to buy such a system. But more importantly so called narrow banks are not in the interest of regulators and the current financial system. If customers could directly deposit at the Fed they would likely disintermediate regular banks (which leads to a bank run) and prevent them from doing their central function in the financial system (issuing credit). You would have to rethink the financial system and regulators are wary of such big changes. Matt Levine has a great article about it: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fed-versus-the-narrow-bank https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...

sanderjd 6y ago
Ah right, ha, that Matt Levine article is where I first saw this idea. My point actually wasn't that this is a good idea, but that it's a superior idea to doing the same thing with a blockchain based ledger. All the problems you outline are true for the blockchain solution as well.