Panoply
An idea for a modern economic system combining several aspects of existing ideas (just a draft in progress):
Assumptions
- Nature may be relatively scarce for all our wants, but it is certainly sufficient for our basic needs.
- Labor is relatively abundant and getting more so with automation, robotics, globalization, and the rise of public commons such as open source.
How the system works
Policy determines the amount of scarce natural wealth available for private and public expenditure. This is the amount of land, energy, and material resources we are willing to put to use in the short term, while keeping in mind long term sustainability goals. This is converted to money issued by the Government.
Heavy taxation on hoarding resources. For instance, you would not pay tax for owning a house or a small garden, but larger property is subject to Land-value tax. A simple criteria for this is the Kantian ‘imperative’: ‘if everyone owns this much, will we suffer from scarcity?’.
Money from natural resources and taxation goes mainly into an egalitarian periodically distributed basic income guarantee program, the rest may go to purely governmental operations. The basic income guarantee should be sufficient to cover shelter, food, education, computerization, healthcare, entertainment and investment in private and public projects. Since money is fed into the system by the government, we get a soft demurage effect - which discourages hoarding of money.
Large projects are driven by channeling individual resources. Lending and investment is done P2P. This may be further augmented by graph propagation of lending such as ripple to allow delegation of investment planning.
Note that because of the basic income, money is flowing both up and down in the institutional hierarchy. This modularity enables communities to subscribe to diverse economic parameters while still being part of the system. For example, a citizen in a town in Italy has a relationship to his town, to Italy, to the European Union, and to the World - any one of those levels can have its own economic systems - because each level gets money from its mother institution equaling the sum of its total members.
Advantages
- Civilized, gives people equal economic opportunity and basic income security.
- Massively parallel decision making and pricing based on a market.
- Environmentally conscious.
- Resilient to future changes in automation, robotics.
- P2P lending encourages community building, nurturing trust, and long term thinking.
- Resolves the tragedy of the commons in a mature way: P2P trust effectively limits the effects of free-loaders, instead of ruining the entire playing field.
Possible additions
May vary between economic states:
- Using behavioral economics to incentivise healthy behavior, as in the example of higher taxes on unhealthy food.
- The system can be made harsher by requiring the youth to earn their citizenship by passing certain requirement such as serving in the public good for a year, continuing education, or making a sum of money.
QA
Q: What will motivated people to work if everyone has income security?
A: Lost of research has been done about the psychology of human motivation. It is helpful to separate work into three categories:
- Work that is driven by passionate people: this includes everything from scientific research, mathematics, invention, development, art, medicine, education, public service, and so on. This category will actually benefit from detaching the monetary system. Einstein did not labor to discover relativity for money. Scientists at the Manhattan project did not build the nuclear weapon for money. Turing and Von Neumann did not invent the modern computer for money. Soldiers and firefighters do not put their life on the line for money. The best teachers are the ones doing it for passion. Pyshcological research has shown that by tieing an extrinsic reward, such as money, to these type of tasks, people in fact perform worse. Imagine what kind of world we will have when everyone is free to do what they are passionate about?
- Activities that are tied to the current system. This includes countless legal, bureaucratic, governmental, and security activities that will be much less needed when the system changes.
- Finally, there is proper labor: the type of work people generally try to avoid. This type of work is being eliminated quickly by automation, and so this segment will continue to decrease as we advance in robotics, AI, 3D printing, and a host of other technologies. However for the near future, we may assume that there will be a small amount of such labor. Here’s how Panoply addresses this need:
- DIY.
- People will work for credibility and trust, and they need that for making large projects.
- People will work for a small amount of super-relativism - which panoply allows. In fact, research in psychology shows that people only care about small local super-relativism - they want to show off to their friends.
- Although I am not sure that is strictly needed, the system may even be made harsher by requiring the youth to earn their citizenship by passing certain requirement such as **serving in the public good for a year, continuing education, or making a sum of money.
Relevant Links
http://p2pfoundation.net/Discussions_on_the_Future_of_the_Economy