12 ms·

The Ideal Economy

44 points by master255 5y ago

thriftwy 5y ago
The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. When combined with helping the poor it would encourage parasitism. Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I wonder if previous eras (before the massive space taken by economic principles) had a different view on incentives and performance. The current system doesn't reward performance in general, just a few instances here and there, the rest is actually backward (good employees are ignored, sometimes hated, sometimes fired even).
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet. The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix. That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > The current system doesn't reward performance in general The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors. Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.
        agumonkey 5y ago
        I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.
        Jensson 5y ago
        Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying. "But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!" No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.
- imtringued 5y ago
  I don't get it. If you cap income then some people stop working and other people start working. There is no need for parasites. The idea of an income cap is wrong because absolute income does not determine willingness to spend. It is unspent money that should be capped via taxes.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    It would be very cool if money would need to be invested in the real sector at the end. we would be sending people to Mars already. Right now they just fuel blowing bubbles.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It he only incentive to do stuff money? Asking because I find myself building a lot of stuff despite not really making money off it.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Are you building hobby things for your entertainment (which I do as well) or building things which make society advance and which others benefit from? It’s the loss of incentives for the latter that concern me.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Well, both. I'm building and running this: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ Paid the server out of pocket, built the code all by myself. I do take donations that currently just about cover the running costs, but at this surplus it will take me something like 30 years to get back the hardware investment (assuming no hardware fails in the interim and running costs don't increase). Don't take this as complaining, it's just a statement of facts. I'm incredibly grateful that so many people are supporting it.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    building what ? I'm curious
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I've built and operate a search engine.
  - tibbetts 5y ago
    The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to. 100% agree, look no further than current communist, and ex-communist countries. Even ones which succesfully "decommunized" still have that ex-party member class which still lives off fraud, and economic crimes 30 years after.
  - bserge 5y ago
    You actually think the political class is not full of thieves anywhere else? It's a career path that attracts this kind of people, like flies to shit.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      I am calling countries in which communists are no longer the political class, but even when turned into a social underlayer class, these fellows, and their offspring, or even their grandchildren cannot vean themselves off economic parasitism, and economic crime. They are becoming a multigenerational class living off economic crime.
      - bserge 5y ago
        Yeah, I often hate doctors myself. Doesn't mean the majority are bad.
      - kelseyfrog 5y ago
        I can't help but laugh because your last line perfectly describes inheritance, a practice whose abolishment was demanded in The Communist Manifesto.
  - shitloadofbooks 5y ago
    I think you're forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) all the great political and economic frauds that have happened in capitalist systems too. I don't think any political/economical/social system can ever be immune to fraud and sociopaths.
- dijit 5y ago
  How does that worldview jive with the notion that I'd do my job even if I wasn't so handsomely paid? There will always be differentiators. I don't work with garbage or have to break my back, this is worth "performing" for.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    This is because you have culture which encourages performance. Once you enable parasitism other cultures also arise, which discourage performance, and the people of those cultures just don't have that notion. They may even look attractive. Think hippies. They surely look better and have greater outlook than wage slaves, housewives or salesmen. And that trend is notoriously hard to reverse. Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.
    - dijit 5y ago
      >Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school. I think you're reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn't completely support here. I live in the EU and I was one of the people who didn't want to attend school, because school is glorified daycare and in impoverished areas it quite literally feels like prison. I don't really know if you're right, my mum and I grew up living on income support and while it was awful I do cherish the fact that I got to spend time with her. She now works for the government, I work in tech, we've both "done more" but the money she earns now isn't the reason for that, it's because: 1) It's BORING to sit on your arse and do nothing 2) People identify with their purpose (hippies identified with anti-war, and even hippies have had productive impacts on society with social movements, music and art) 3) When free to do anything: you do the thing you love This last point means you can't keep treating service workers like shit, which is why it's unpopular.
      - Dazdraperma 5y ago
        > When free to do anything: you do the thing you love The thing is, what you love is not what others need. Do you love tinkering with my sewage system? Clean my house? Wash my toilet?
- headsoup 5y ago
  Define 'perform.'
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    If I am to be working without monetary incentive, as many here suggest, I would still do something. But I will mostly focus on things which amuse me, and not on anything in real demand by society. Even then I will only do the most exciting part while leaving a trail of technical debt. Would you expect anything else? People fixing obscure bugs in legacy products for you instead of reinventing the wheel, poorly?
- bserge 5y ago
  Someone from 1800 or earlier would call us parasites. We work so little and own so much! Time to go back to owning nothing and working all day every day under threat of actual violence and starvation. Now that's performance! (I'm afraid some rich assholes actually believe that today, of course they'd be the leaders of such a society) There's still room for QoL improvement, and income isn't the only incentive.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. And yet there is no shortage of t-shirts, shoes and cheap clothing. And parasites do thrive off of the worker's back.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    This is because poor people have to make them or starve. If those countries had safety nets, no more t-shirts for you, since producing these, not to mention cotton farming, is not exciting at all. You just do it for money.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  No it just removes one incentive to work, enriching yourself beyond what is needed shouldnt be necessary as an "incentive"
- master255 5y ago
  Why would you think that the economy would be limited to some small value? The value of the maximum limit can be very large. Other than that, the maximum is personal to each resident. It is to reduce the size of giant enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Imagine that these companies would have competitors in the form of ordinary start-ups. The startups would have plenty of money to do that. Maximum restrictions will not reduce the incentive to work in any way. On the contrary, there will be even more incentive to work, because you can make a lot more money and buy a lot more things with that money. The maximum can be from 0 to infinity. No parasitism will occur. Businesses will plan their budgets properly. I think this article is out of your hands. You didn't even realize that the discussion should be in a Telegram group. You read and do not understand what is written. I recommend you reread the article many times before commenting.
Blackhawk117 5y ago
The article promotes totalitarian government, caps on wealth, a social credit system and completely misses the point of cryptocurrencies. The right title would be “Let’s turn every country into China”. No thanks.
- 88840-8855 5y ago
  for me it would be a "yes please". see how different people and preferences are.
  - rc2634 5y ago
    Maybe those who prefer a system like this should move to China instead of trying to bring the system to a country where most people are not in favor of such system.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    And this is why we should never forget that the brain is that organ which was developed to move (to pick your optimal direction and, directly or cunningly, go there). How very lucky that the solution spaces are sparse and different. How very unlucky that they may not be numerous and optimal enough.
  - MightyCat99 5y ago
    Xi Jinping, is that you? Seriously though, i find the comments much more interesting than the original article. Amazing breadth of thought.
  - the_70x 5y ago
    Put me in the top please
- EGreg 5y ago
  That’s why we started the project https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org The open source code is at https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Documentation at https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org Interviews with economists and regulators at https://youtube.com/c/intercoin https://youtube.com/c/intercoin Sound money, communities, similar to what this guy is talking about — but an autonomous and libertarian version of that. Because if crypto doesn’t step up and become actually adopted and useful, then we are going to live in a world where megacorps like Amazon/Facebook, as well as your friendly Federal Government, issue the currency and know everything about you and centrally plan who can pay and who can be … shall we say gently excluded from the economy due to their rating. This builds on my earlier work on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform to build an open source alternative to Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. EDIT: I am curious. For a decade, I do the work to prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome of centralized control, freely give away the code, document it publicly, make public interviews with standards bodies, regulators, economists to get it right, spend a ton of my own money and time to get it implemented (without raising any VC etc.) but then every time I would merely mention it on HN, would always get heavily downvoted by people who prefer not to say a single word as to why. I can understand if people give me feedback, but they prefer to silently downvote. OK, what's your better plan, what have you done to prevent this outcome? Why do you take actions to bury workable solutions to avert this situation?
Mave83 5y ago
Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me? If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.
- dijit 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing? Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. > If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture! We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live. If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy. The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off. https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      That example is too simplistic. The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances). For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?
X3AY7yZfpyWCmf 5y ago
What language is that?
newsclues 5y ago
To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition. Decentralized regulators, and if things are open and transparent, people can pick what works best for them.
- delusional 5y ago
  What do you do when the choices of two people conflict? What if you want to throw me in jail for stealing your house, but in my regulatory framework houses aren't owned but merely occupied? You can't have "personal choice" as the foundation of government.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    I’m thinking more about consumers and businesses. Think about a food truck. As the owner I can pick a high standard regulator that has a higher cost of compliance but more customers are interested in the cleanest standard food service. Or I can go for low cost regulations and maybe exceed them on my own and pocket the difference in regulations. However, I think the US states originally was intended to more like what you say before the federal government overreach began.
- Dazdraperma 5y ago
  > To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition. That's called free market. And voluntary certification (by independent standards committees) for the "regulatory part".
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Independent regulators tend to grow in power become gatekeepers to the industry and harm innovation. I think having competing regulation/certifications is different than the status quo and offers benefits. As a consumer and business operator, I want to be able to choose. Yes, a free market, something that doesn’t largely exist!
hamilyon2 5y ago
The article somehow misses many different points, perhaps deliberately, as a satire of sorts. The point of money creation and subsequent inflation is funding for infrastructure, real estate and public projects. There will be outsized returns to road building, city sewers systems and such. However, good luck collecting funding for them without banks issuing money. Good luck fundung any project which has large upfront costs and time to return investment of more than a decade. The system currently exists is in place party because we historically knew how to capture positive spillover effects of such projects. Naive systems which does not even consider credit against future spillover effects will be very much like ours, but will develop slower and eventually collapse. Credit is good. Banks printing money with credit is a feature. Opaqueness of banks is a feature.
- anm89 5y ago
  This is a pretty rosy picture you are painting. So where do the tomahawk missiles and multi decamillion dollar police budgets for military gear, and the funding to run Iran Contra schemes get accounted for? We put a VERY small percentage of government spending into infrastructure so making that out to be the entire point of the system is just misleading IMO
  - evancox100 5y ago
    New slogan: "Missile Systems are Infrastructure"?
  - hamilyon2 5y ago
    Well-funded military is remarkably similar to well-maintainad roads if we look at consequences. Putting questions about what is the optimum amount to spend to each. Both promote trade and large-scale division of labour. Both directly (road-pavers specialize at that, infantry specialize at application of force) and indirectly, by promoting people and goods movement. Trade creates wealthy merchants, banks, and eventually further division of labour, manufacturing, large-scale specialized manufacturing and agriculture. In a sence, it is military who we should thank for silicon integrated circuits. We could agree or disagree about certain parts of military spending, but current global world would be unthinkable if huge armed forces didn't ensure peace for everyone.
imtringued 5y ago
>For the convenience of calculating, the sum of money was made not 100 rubles, but 0 rubles. To do this, from the state of the account of all participants was subtracted, half of all money. Instead of 0 rubles, it is now -50 (minus fifty). 0 means 50 rubles in the account, and 50 means 100 rubles in the account. With each transaction between residents, the one who paid got minus to his account, and the one who sold plus. > Thus, regardless of the amount of money, the sum did not change, and money was created at the time of the transaction and there was exactly as much as was needed. What a revolutionary idea. Why haven't governments adopted this system? Oh wait. They did. Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over. >The first thing that matters in it - is it possible to steal? is who releases the money. The government does that. >They estimate the rate of inflation and try to affect it by releasing money. No, the central bank tries to find the interest rate that balances individual demand for labor with the individual supply for labor. People borrow money themselves. Businesses who borrow to invest drive inflation just as much as consumers and governments. In fact, my opinion is that the Fed is unable to introduce additional money into the economy beyond what actors in the economy borrow. QE does absolutely nothing if people don't borrow. If anything the Fed should be thought of as a brake to the economy. If you are going downhill too fast the Fed will slam the brakes. Low interest rates don't stimulate anything, they merely stop enforcing reckless driving(=borrowing). The idea that governments "release" money through fiscal policy is actually a modern idea called MMT. >So they print a billion, but how do they pass it on to the people? They do not print a billion. They borrow a billion by creating both $1 billion as an asset and $1 billion as a liability. >it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity. Just force the store to spend all its money eventually. There is no meaningful difference between letting the store spend money itself and letting a charity spend the money. Capping income has the obvious downside that every industry needs a different cap (e.g. semiconductors need tens of billions just for a single fab). The idea of setting a maximum size to prevent monopolies does make sense but it would have to be flexible. This is probably something that could be solved with good old progressive taxation by taxing corporate income as personal income.
- hamilyon2 5y ago
  > Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over. Congratulations, you are are a part of lucky 10000 today. Please read about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
Jensson 5y ago
> In order to fight monopoly, it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity. When you can't earn more by working fairly then people start to work unfairly, meaning they start taking bribes or perform other corrupt acts. Current capitalism has problems but at least the system doesn't encourage corruption. Some people will still be corrupt, of course, and some companies will work like a communist state and limit income for its workers encouraging those workers to become corrupt, but corruption will always be way worse when you put national caps on income like this.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > at least the system doesn't encourage corruption Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists. Capitalism doesn't have to encourage corruption: it's already corrupted.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    It is less corrupted. Without capitalism personal connections is the only source of power, so the only ones with power would be politicians and their friends. With capitalism we create another bastion of power, the capital class. Communists are politicians who don't want to share power with the capital class and instead hog it all for themselves. We all know what happens when politicians has no group to oppose them, everything goes to shit. Maybe you could think of some other system where personal connections isn't the only source of power, but so far democratic capitalism is the only thing we have. Edit: As for your scenario with capital paying money to influence politicians. The alternative is that the politician already have all the power (and money), nobody has to pay them. To me it is better that there is some corruption with money going to politicians rather than politicians just having all the money from the start.
  - Dazdraperma 5y ago
    > Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists. Both elected and unelected officials are so corrupted that they take money from the corporations to choke the competition on the free market. To fix this issue, let's give them even more power. That will show them and they'll stop being corrupted.
zzzeek 5y ago
> I am not an economist, but in light of current events with cryptocurrencies and the economy in general, I would like to share my thoughts on some kind of ideal economy, around which everything is happening now. OMG sorry, i haven't read the article. i can't believe someone wrote that paragraph and pressed "publish". OK, well let's read on. cant wait!
m_ke 5y ago
An ideal economy would limit the aggregation of power, hit compounding with a logarithm to make it harder to amass more political and economic power.
- Jensson 5y ago
  How would you limit political power? Would you assign a person to ensure nobody else has too much political power? Congratulations, you just invented dictatorship!
  - m_ke 5y ago
    Term limits for all positions, ranked choice voting and more direct democracy.
crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
False premise: "In general, buying and selling services and goods is all that interests modern society." Everything that follows from this is merely a thought experiment disconnected from reality and, as such, is unsafe. https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ Any economic theory that doesn't account for gifting as the root of human behavior is going to start off skewed.

44 points by master255 5y ago

The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. When combined with helping the poor it would encourage parasitism. Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.

agumonkey 5y ago
I wonder if previous eras (before the massive space taken by economic principles) had a different view on incentives and performance. The current system doesn't reward performance in general, just a few instances here and there, the rest is actually backward (good employees are ignored, sometimes hated, sometimes fired even).
- mdp2021 5y ago
  The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet. The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix. That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)
- Jensson 5y ago
  > The current system doesn't reward performance in general The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors. Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.
        Jensson 5y ago
        Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying. "But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!" No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.
imtringued 5y ago
I don't get it. If you cap income then some people stop working and other people start working. There is no need for parasites. The idea of an income cap is wrong because absolute income does not determine willingness to spend. It is unspent money that should be capped via taxes.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  It would be very cool if money would need to be invested in the real sector at the end. we would be sending people to Mars already. Right now they just fuel blowing bubbles.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
It he only incentive to do stuff money? Asking because I find myself building a lot of stuff despite not really making money off it.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Are you building hobby things for your entertainment (which I do as well) or building things which make society advance and which others benefit from? It’s the loss of incentives for the latter that concern me.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Well, both. I'm building and running this: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ Paid the server out of pocket, built the code all by myself. I do take donations that currently just about cover the running costs, but at this surplus it will take me something like 30 years to get back the hardware investment (assuming no hardware fails in the interim and running costs don't increase). Don't take this as complaining, it's just a statement of facts. I'm incredibly grateful that so many people are supporting it.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  building what ? I'm curious
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I've built and operate a search engine.
- tibbetts 5y ago
  The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.
baybal2 5y ago
> Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to. 100% agree, look no further than current communist, and ex-communist countries. Even ones which succesfully "decommunized" still have that ex-party member class which still lives off fraud, and economic crimes 30 years after.
- bserge 5y ago
  You actually think the political class is not full of thieves anywhere else? It's a career path that attracts this kind of people, like flies to shit.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I am calling countries in which communists are no longer the political class, but even when turned into a social underlayer class, these fellows, and their offspring, or even their grandchildren cannot vean themselves off economic parasitism, and economic crime. They are becoming a multigenerational class living off economic crime.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Yeah, I often hate doctors myself. Doesn't mean the majority are bad.
    - kelseyfrog 5y ago
      I can't help but laugh because your last line perfectly describes inheritance, a practice whose abolishment was demanded in The Communist Manifesto.
- shitloadofbooks 5y ago
  I think you're forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) all the great political and economic frauds that have happened in capitalist systems too. I don't think any political/economical/social system can ever be immune to fraud and sociopaths.
dijit 5y ago
How does that worldview jive with the notion that I'd do my job even if I wasn't so handsomely paid? There will always be differentiators. I don't work with garbage or have to break my back, this is worth "performing" for.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  This is because you have culture which encourages performance. Once you enable parasitism other cultures also arise, which discourage performance, and the people of those cultures just don't have that notion. They may even look attractive. Think hippies. They surely look better and have greater outlook than wage slaves, housewives or salesmen. And that trend is notoriously hard to reverse. Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.
  - dijit 5y ago
    >Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school. I think you're reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn't completely support here. I live in the EU and I was one of the people who didn't want to attend school, because school is glorified daycare and in impoverished areas it quite literally feels like prison. I don't really know if you're right, my mum and I grew up living on income support and while it was awful I do cherish the fact that I got to spend time with her. She now works for the government, I work in tech, we've both "done more" but the money she earns now isn't the reason for that, it's because: 1) It's BORING to sit on your arse and do nothing 2) People identify with their purpose (hippies identified with anti-war, and even hippies have had productive impacts on society with social movements, music and art) 3) When free to do anything: you do the thing you love This last point means you can't keep treating service workers like shit, which is why it's unpopular.
    - Dazdraperma 5y ago
      > When free to do anything: you do the thing you love The thing is, what you love is not what others need. Do you love tinkering with my sewage system? Clean my house? Wash my toilet?
headsoup 5y ago
Define 'perform.'
- thriftwy 5y ago
  If I am to be working without monetary incentive, as many here suggest, I would still do something. But I will mostly focus on things which amuse me, and not on anything in real demand by society. Even then I will only do the most exciting part while leaving a trail of technical debt. Would you expect anything else? People fixing obscure bugs in legacy products for you instead of reinventing the wheel, poorly?
bserge 5y ago
Someone from 1800 or earlier would call us parasites. We work so little and own so much! Time to go back to owning nothing and working all day every day under threat of actual violence and starvation. Now that's performance! (I'm afraid some rich assholes actually believe that today, of course they'd be the leaders of such a society) There's still room for QoL improvement, and income isn't the only incentive.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. And yet there is no shortage of t-shirts, shoes and cheap clothing. And parasites do thrive off of the worker's back.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  This is because poor people have to make them or starve. If those countries had safety nets, no more t-shirts for you, since producing these, not to mention cotton farming, is not exciting at all. You just do it for money.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
No it just removes one incentive to work, enriching yourself beyond what is needed shouldnt be necessary as an "incentive"
master255 5y ago
Why would you think that the economy would be limited to some small value? The value of the maximum limit can be very large. Other than that, the maximum is personal to each resident. It is to reduce the size of giant enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Imagine that these companies would have competitors in the form of ordinary start-ups. The startups would have plenty of money to do that. Maximum restrictions will not reduce the incentive to work in any way. On the contrary, there will be even more incentive to work, because you can make a lot more money and buy a lot more things with that money. The maximum can be from 0 to infinity. No parasitism will occur. Businesses will plan their budgets properly. I think this article is out of your hands. You didn't even realize that the discussion should be in a Telegram group. You read and do not understand what is written. I recommend you reread the article many times before commenting.

Blackhawk117 5y ago

The article promotes totalitarian government, caps on wealth, a social credit system and completely misses the point of cryptocurrencies. The right title would be “Let’s turn every country into China”. No thanks.

88840-8855 5y ago
for me it would be a "yes please". see how different people and preferences are.
- rc2634 5y ago
  Maybe those who prefer a system like this should move to China instead of trying to bring the system to a country where most people are not in favor of such system.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  And this is why we should never forget that the brain is that organ which was developed to move (to pick your optimal direction and, directly or cunningly, go there). How very lucky that the solution spaces are sparse and different. How very unlucky that they may not be numerous and optimal enough.
- MightyCat99 5y ago
  Xi Jinping, is that you? Seriously though, i find the comments much more interesting than the original article. Amazing breadth of thought.
- the_70x 5y ago
  Put me in the top please
EGreg 5y ago
That’s why we started the project https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org The open source code is at https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin Documentation at https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org Interviews with economists and regulators at https://youtube.com/c/intercoin https://youtube.com/c/intercoin Sound money, communities, similar to what this guy is talking about — but an autonomous and libertarian version of that. Because if crypto doesn’t step up and become actually adopted and useful, then we are going to live in a world where megacorps like Amazon/Facebook, as well as your friendly Federal Government, issue the currency and know everything about you and centrally plan who can pay and who can be … shall we say gently excluded from the economy due to their rating. This builds on my earlier work on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform to build an open source alternative to Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. EDIT: I am curious. For a decade, I do the work to prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome of centralized control, freely give away the code, document it publicly, make public interviews with standards bodies, regulators, economists to get it right, spend a ton of my own money and time to get it implemented (without raising any VC etc.) but then every time I would merely mention it on HN, would always get heavily downvoted by people who prefer not to say a single word as to why. I can understand if people give me feedback, but they prefer to silently downvote. OK, what's your better plan, what have you done to prevent this outcome? Why do you take actions to bury workable solutions to avert this situation?

Mave83 5y ago

Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me? If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.

dijit 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing? Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. > If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture! We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live. If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy. The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off. https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That example is too simplistic. The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances). For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?

X3AY7yZfpyWCmf 5y ago

What language is that?

newsclues 5y ago

To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition. Decentralized regulators, and if things are open and transparent, people can pick what works best for them.

delusional 5y ago
What do you do when the choices of two people conflict? What if you want to throw me in jail for stealing your house, but in my regulatory framework houses aren't owned but merely occupied? You can't have "personal choice" as the foundation of government.
- newsclues 5y ago
  I’m thinking more about consumers and businesses. Think about a food truck. As the owner I can pick a high standard regulator that has a higher cost of compliance but more customers are interested in the cleanest standard food service. Or I can go for low cost regulations and maybe exceed them on my own and pocket the difference in regulations. However, I think the US states originally was intended to more like what you say before the federal government overreach began.
Dazdraperma 5y ago
> To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition. That's called free market. And voluntary certification (by independent standards committees) for the "regulatory part".
- newsclues 5y ago
  Independent regulators tend to grow in power become gatekeepers to the industry and harm innovation. I think having competing regulation/certifications is different than the status quo and offers benefits. As a consumer and business operator, I want to be able to choose. Yes, a free market, something that doesn’t largely exist!

hamilyon2 5y ago

The article somehow misses many different points, perhaps deliberately, as a satire of sorts. The point of money creation and subsequent inflation is funding for infrastructure, real estate and public projects. There will be outsized returns to road building, city sewers systems and such. However, good luck collecting funding for them without banks issuing money. Good luck fundung any project which has large upfront costs and time to return investment of more than a decade. The system currently exists is in place party because we historically knew how to capture positive spillover effects of such projects. Naive systems which does not even consider credit against future spillover effects will be very much like ours, but will develop slower and eventually collapse. Credit is good. Banks printing money with credit is a feature. Opaqueness of banks is a feature.

anm89 5y ago
This is a pretty rosy picture you are painting. So where do the tomahawk missiles and multi decamillion dollar police budgets for military gear, and the funding to run Iran Contra schemes get accounted for? We put a VERY small percentage of government spending into infrastructure so making that out to be the entire point of the system is just misleading IMO
- evancox100 5y ago
  New slogan: "Missile Systems are Infrastructure"?
- hamilyon2 5y ago
  Well-funded military is remarkably similar to well-maintainad roads if we look at consequences. Putting questions about what is the optimum amount to spend to each. Both promote trade and large-scale division of labour. Both directly (road-pavers specialize at that, infantry specialize at application of force) and indirectly, by promoting people and goods movement. Trade creates wealthy merchants, banks, and eventually further division of labour, manufacturing, large-scale specialized manufacturing and agriculture. In a sence, it is military who we should thank for silicon integrated circuits. We could agree or disagree about certain parts of military spending, but current global world would be unthinkable if huge armed forces didn't ensure peace for everyone.

imtringued 5y ago

>For the convenience of calculating, the sum of money was made not 100 rubles, but 0 rubles. To do this, from the state of the account of all participants was subtracted, half of all money. Instead of 0 rubles, it is now -50 (minus fifty). 0 means 50 rubles in the account, and 50 means 100 rubles in the account. With each transaction between residents, the one who paid got minus to his account, and the one who sold plus. > Thus, regardless of the amount of money, the sum did not change, and money was created at the time of the transaction and there was exactly as much as was needed. What a revolutionary idea. Why haven't governments adopted this system? Oh wait. They did. Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over. >The first thing that matters in it - is it possible to steal? is who releases the money. The government does that. >They estimate the rate of inflation and try to affect it by releasing money. No, the central bank tries to find the interest rate that balances individual demand for labor with the individual supply for labor. People borrow money themselves. Businesses who borrow to invest drive inflation just as much as consumers and governments. In fact, my opinion is that the Fed is unable to introduce additional money into the economy beyond what actors in the economy borrow. QE does absolutely nothing if people don't borrow. If anything the Fed should be thought of as a brake to the economy. If you are going downhill too fast the Fed will slam the brakes. Low interest rates don't stimulate anything, they merely stop enforcing reckless driving(=borrowing). The idea that governments "release" money through fiscal policy is actually a modern idea called MMT. >So they print a billion, but how do they pass it on to the people? They do not print a billion. They borrow a billion by creating both $1 billion as an asset and $1 billion as a liability. >it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity. Just force the store to spend all its money eventually. There is no meaningful difference between letting the store spend money itself and letting a charity spend the money. Capping income has the obvious downside that every industry needs a different cap (e.g. semiconductors need tens of billions just for a single fab). The idea of setting a maximum size to prevent monopolies does make sense but it would have to be flexible. This is probably something that could be solved with good old progressive taxation by taxing corporate income as personal income.

hamilyon2 5y ago
> Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over. Congratulations, you are are a part of lucky 10000 today. Please read about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Jensson 5y ago

> In order to fight monopoly, it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity. When you can't earn more by working fairly then people start to work unfairly, meaning they start taking bribes or perform other corrupt acts. Current capitalism has problems but at least the system doesn't encourage corruption. Some people will still be corrupt, of course, and some companies will work like a communist state and limit income for its workers encouraging those workers to become corrupt, but corruption will always be way worse when you put national caps on income like this.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> at least the system doesn't encourage corruption Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists. Capitalism doesn't have to encourage corruption: it's already corrupted.
- Jensson 5y ago
  It is less corrupted. Without capitalism personal connections is the only source of power, so the only ones with power would be politicians and their friends. With capitalism we create another bastion of power, the capital class. Communists are politicians who don't want to share power with the capital class and instead hog it all for themselves. We all know what happens when politicians has no group to oppose them, everything goes to shit. Maybe you could think of some other system where personal connections isn't the only source of power, but so far democratic capitalism is the only thing we have. Edit: As for your scenario with capital paying money to influence politicians. The alternative is that the politician already have all the power (and money), nobody has to pay them. To me it is better that there is some corruption with money going to politicians rather than politicians just having all the money from the start.
- Dazdraperma 5y ago
  > Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists. Both elected and unelected officials are so corrupted that they take money from the corporations to choke the competition on the free market. To fix this issue, let's give them even more power. That will show them and they'll stop being corrupted.

zzzeek 5y ago

> I am not an economist, but in light of current events with cryptocurrencies and the economy in general, I would like to share my thoughts on some kind of ideal economy, around which everything is happening now. OMG sorry, i haven't read the article. i can't believe someone wrote that paragraph and pressed "publish". OK, well let's read on. cant wait!

m_ke 5y ago

An ideal economy would limit the aggregation of power, hit compounding with a logarithm to make it harder to amass more political and economic power.

Jensson 5y ago
How would you limit political power? Would you assign a person to ensure nobody else has too much political power? Congratulations, you just invented dictatorship!
- m_ke 5y ago
  Term limits for all positions, ranked choice voting and more direct democracy.

crawfordcomeaux 5y ago

False premise: "In general, buying and selling services and goods is all that interests modern society." Everything that follows from this is merely a thought experiment disconnected from reality and, as such, is unsafe. https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ Any economic theory that doesn't account for gifting as the root of human behavior is going to start off skewed.