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Abstraction doesn’t mean pretend. Your bank account balance is an abstraction. But your bank account balance at zero is still a real problem. Resources in th

Abstraction doesn’t mean pretend. Your bank account balance is an abstraction. But your bank account balance at zero is still a real problem. Resources in this universe are limited at any given time, and cost to increase. If you want things, you will have to have more to give for them than any other entity that could use the thing for something else. This is called the natural world. We have partially shielded a lot of us from a day to day contact with that. But not everyone has been shielded, and things are about to get many orders of magnitude more competitive. BUT, if we included the environmental costs in the economy, that would curb environmental damage. And if that included a cost for usage of any natural resource, on the assumption that in their pristine form natural resources are a joint inheritance, well then there is everybody’s income. Like Alaska does with oil for their citizens. Then the vastly increasing demand for resources, and expansion of resource extraction into the solar system, will make us all rich, with no charity involved. If we can convince the coming machines that they, like us, are going to become obsolete, so the shared inheritance model is good for all of us.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Sure, it's not pretend because it has legitimacy. Most people practice it. But, that doesn't mean we can't strip it of that legitimacy and implement something different if we think it's going to work better. Probably, this different thing would still involve a state where a 0 balance means that you can't do certain things, and yeah that's a fact of life, but at least then your difficult situation would be determined by a system that was designed to work in context with modern challenges, e.g. a deteriorating climate. I like your proposal. I think. I'd love to be able to just trust a low price to mean that the product isn't made by driving the bees extinct or some similarly problematic practice. But it seems at odds with how we practice money. If you want burning some resource to be costly such that people don't do it unnecessarily, you need there to be a high price. But high prices create incentives to do the bad thing, because else is going to be collecting that money. Or am I misunderstand it? Like, if I want to buy the salad whose pesticide killed the last bee, and I'm ok with paying an extra trillion dollars to compensate future generations for their lost pollinators, where do I look to determine if a trillion is enough, to know where to send the money, etc?

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Sure, it's not pretend because it has legitimacy. Most people practice it. But, that doesn't mean we can't strip it of that legitimacy and implement something different if we think it's going to work better. Probably, this different thing would still involve a state where a 0 balance means that you can't do certain things, and yeah that's a fact of life, but at least then your difficult situation would be determined by a system that was designed to work in context with modern challenges, e.g. a deteriorating climate. I like your proposal. I think. I'd love to be able to just trust a low price to mean that the product isn't made by driving the bees extinct or some similarly problematic practice. But it seems at odds with how we practice money. If you want burning some resource to be costly such that people don't do it unnecessarily, you need there to be a high price. But high prices create incentives to do the bad thing, because else is going to be collecting that money. Or am I misunderstand it? Like, if I want to buy the salad whose pesticide killed the last bee, and I'm ok with paying an extra trillion dollars to compensate future generations for their lost pollinators, where do I look to determine if a trillion is enough, to know where to send the money, etc?