3 ms·

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

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
This wouldn’t work at all, and in fact would do opposite to what you want. You are trying to solve the problem of scarcity. This scarcity manifests in people having not enough. And I’m not taking about your Enough, I’m talking about people having to think about how much mortgage they can afford, whether to buy groceries at Whole Foods, Safeway or Walmart, or whether they can make payment on their car. All of this happens because we don’t have unlimited abundance of everything, and we need to determine how products and services that are produced get distributed. For this purpose, we use money , and the way it works is people can make money by various activities that almost always provide products and services that other people value, and they give you money in exchange. This can be entrepreneurship, but for most people it’s a job one does for wages. Some jobs pay little, some pay a lot, and it seems that your idea is that there are not enough high paying jobs around, and so you want to increase availability of these jobs by having people working these jobs give them up early. This is a well meaning, but terrible idea. The problem here is that its result is less things get produced, so in aggregate, we’re even less wealthy than before your plan. Your plan is strictly negative for the society. It might benefit some people who get to have a better job than they otherwise would, but the society is paying immense cost for this job. A better alternative than destroys less (though still significant amount) value is to just tax the high earners and use the proceeds to subsidize low earners. This way, you can have low earners earn as much as they would have after switching to higher paying job in your “retire early when you have Enough”, but you’d have both high and low earner continue working, so more total value would be produced.
- sunshinerag 6y ago
  >> A better alternative than destroys less (though still significant amount) value is to just tax the high earners and use the proceeds to subsidize low earners. This way, you can have low earners earn as much as they would have after switching to higher paying job in your “retire early when you have Enough”, but you’d have both high and low earner continue working, so more total value would be produced. In this better alternative why would high earners continue to earn high when they can just switch to become a low earner and eat the tax from the remaining high earners.
  - 6y ago
tw25550443 6y ago
> money is fundamentally information No, prices are information. Money is a unit of measure. Fucking around with money results in misinformation.

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

This wouldn’t work at all, and in fact would do opposite to what you want. You are trying to solve the problem of scarcity. This scarcity manifests in people having not enough. And I’m not taking about your Enough, I’m talking about people having to think about how much mortgage they can afford, whether to buy groceries at Whole Foods, Safeway or Walmart, or whether they can make payment on their car. All of this happens because we don’t have unlimited abundance of everything, and we need to determine how products and services that are produced get distributed. For this purpose, we use money , and the way it works is people can make money by various activities that almost always provide products and services that other people value, and they give you money in exchange. This can be entrepreneurship, but for most people it’s a job one does for wages. Some jobs pay little, some pay a lot, and it seems that your idea is that there are not enough high paying jobs around, and so you want to increase availability of these jobs by having people working these jobs give them up early. This is a well meaning, but terrible idea. The problem here is that its result is less things get produced, so in aggregate, we’re even less wealthy than before your plan. Your plan is strictly negative for the society. It might benefit some people who get to have a better job than they otherwise would, but the society is paying immense cost for this job. A better alternative than destroys less (though still significant amount) value is to just tax the high earners and use the proceeds to subsidize low earners. This way, you can have low earners earn as much as they would have after switching to higher paying job in your “retire early when you have Enough”, but you’d have both high and low earner continue working, so more total value would be produced.

sunshinerag 6y ago
>> A better alternative than destroys less (though still significant amount) value is to just tax the high earners and use the proceeds to subsidize low earners. This way, you can have low earners earn as much as they would have after switching to higher paying job in your “retire early when you have Enough”, but you’d have both high and low earner continue working, so more total value would be produced. In this better alternative why would high earners continue to earn high when they can just switch to become a low earner and eat the tax from the remaining high earners.
- 6y ago

tw25550443 6y ago

> money is fundamentally information No, prices are information. Money is a unit of measure. Fucking around with money results in misinformation.