Toward Gift Economics #3

Returning to a topic of interest and sketching in some more details.

I don't like wading into the murky realm of Political Philosophy but see cross-currents of impending Closed-Loop Automation and other major technological developments as portentous, and troubling, but as an overall cause for celebration.

The long-story-short of it:

1. The economy will eventually become a fully closed-loop system: automation will eventually become total.
2. This is not business as usual. It's not an existential crisis however, it's indicative of predictable long-arc macro-historical shifts in human economic activity and consciousness (generally) lifting us from fearful cave-dwelling wretches to the stars - from nomadic tribes to settled agricultural kingdoms, through industrial republics, and then beyond. This is a predictable transition point and the existing social constructs that organize our economic activity today will become outmoded.
3. I think we will have to jettison existing legal fictions like "the job" and various reified social constructs along the way.

I start with a summary of topics I've discussed (and hopefully helpfully condensed into a couple of sections) then conclude at the bottom with a specific remedy.

Recapitulation

1. 4M's (Pillars) of the Economy - a crass but helpful condensing of all economic matters into the 4M's: Mining (extracting basic commodities like harvesting wheat or mining iron), Moving (transporting goods, services, or people), Making (manufacturing and the conversion of basic commodities into advanced consumer products), and Maintaining (keeping stuff that's been made good as new, restoration of art, renovations of houses, etc).

2. Closed Loop Automation - When robots and Artificial Intelligence manage all aspects of an economic pillar.

3. Economics as the Science of Scarcity - I criticize the singular importance that modern economics places on scarcity as the sole determinant of the pricing mechanism. Related theses have been advanced by others under the monnikers:

   • The Post-Scarcity-Economy
   • The Economy of Abundance
   • And, The Age of Abundance

   For a cursory glance into the burgeoning (academic) literature on the Economics of Abundance read:

   • Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society
   • An Introduction To The Economics Of Abundance
   • Studying Abundance: Building a New Economics of Scarcity, Sufficiency, and Abundance
   • An Introduction to the Field of Abundant Economic Thought
   • Economies of abundance
   • Digital Abundance and Scarce Genius: Implications for Wages, Interest Rates, and Growth
   • The Economy Of Abundance

4. Non-Numeric Money: I am the first (to my knowledge) to expressly formalize the concept of a pricing transaction without the use of numeric concepts like the Reals and Integers. I believe that many economic concerns don't stem from "decaying social mores", bad fiscal policy, inefficiency, and so on but rather from the incorrect use of monetary regulation - specifically the very definition of money itself (enshrined in U.S. Law under Coinage Age of 1792 the law that defines the U.S. Dollar.)

"The Job" as a Modern Legal Fiction

The concept of "labor" has changed dramatically throughout history and reflects the primary area of human activity at that time (the activity itself largely constrained by available technology and knowledge):

1. Agriculture - tends to lead to immensely cruel societies that are reliant on forced labor to build surpluses of food and basic foodstuffs (wine, pots, vases) for an exploiting few. No concept analogous to the modern notion of a "job" existed.
2. Industrial - the modern notion of a "job" came into being. Factories could run at all hours of the day (and weren't dependent on the seasons and growth schedules of particular plants, they can be run inside in well-lit areas unlike vast tracts of land). As such, labor became associated with work hours and schedules due to the nature of factory work.
3. Post-Industrial - the primary economic activity shifts away from making basic consumer products and resource extraction to services, selling advanced consumer and information products, and creating networks of value deriving from information. Digital streaming, video games, recreation, bioinformation/biotech, prediction capabilities (foresight/forecasting), literature, etc.

The concept of "work", "labor", "jobs", and "careers" (is this just a sequence of "jobs"?) have changed dramatically (and I'm not just talking about the so-called "rise of gig work" - that's a small alteration to the current concept). The idea that "work" be mandatory for social participation still lingers on from its coercive/forced moorings in the Agricultural era. But why must it? Especially if that's the historical trajectory it originates from.

Concerns and Desiderata

Less a manifesto (haha - I dislike manifestos very much) than a set of guiding protocols. These are considered mandatory:

1. Transitive - a proposed system must be fully compatible with the status quo but also extend it. This applies to Private Property, Human Rights, and so on.
2. Extension of status quo Private Property and Private Property Rights
3. Compatibility with American Jurisprudence, Law, Policy, and general historical trajectory.
4. Achieving Fundamental and Universal Observation of Human Rights is Non-Negotiable.
5. Elimination of the Death Penalty (I've argued we should commute all Capital Punishment to optional Cryonic Freezing) and universal pardoning for all crimes less than major Capital Crimes to encourage cooption with the proposal.
6. Axiomatic Law (not to be confused with the original stone tablets awesomely written by the likes of Sargon, Akkad, Solomon, et al.) - the meaning here is to combine modern math with modern law so that legal systems and laws are written in crystal clear mathematical language. It can then be programmed and implemented in software more easily. And, that's just the beginning.

Not So Radical

I am not a political radical and reject violent social upheaval, Marxism, etc. I'm deeply skeptical of most philosophical political programs (including the project of the Philosopher King itself) following in a long tradition of critics like Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and luminaries like Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies). Let me make such distinctions a bit clearer here:

1. I follow in the tradition of Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. I'm skeptical about metaphysics generally but even more so politically (as the basis of political projects like Marxism and Hegelian adventurism - like Fukyama's foray into Neoconservatism and his Project for a New American Century).
2. Gift Economics is an accepted, cutting-edge, and deep topic of study now at many leading economics institutions. Essentially, there are more kinds of economic arrangements in use today (already) than market systems alone. This doesn't lead us into Socialism, on the contrary, it belies the ignorance of past economic theorists and theorizing. A lot of human economic behavior can't be cleanly modeled using market modeling alone.
3. Non-Numeric economic arrangments have previously existed: the Incan Empire and some Amazonian "anumeric" tribes don't have words for common numbers. So, to preemptively head off critics on this front, I will just direct them to those articles.
4. A democratic society should place the well-being (the classical sense of the word "welfare") of all its constituents front and center. Any system proposed should positively extend the status quo and help to more firmly meet this critical objective while preserving fundamental human rights. I reject any system that contravenes democratic principles from those basic ethical considerations but also from the well-known error and information-theoretic criticisms of centralized decision-making (The Economic Calculation Problem).
5. Violence in the modern world is thoroughly destructive of human life, wealth, knowledge accrual, and so on. It's bad for the environment and economic prosperity. It should be pursued only in specific cases of bona fide self-defense (or possibly in even fewer cases of legitimate intervention). Any system at this point such try to keep a firm course, navigating through the turbulent waters of the 21st century (beset by the crashing waves, jagged shores, and maelstrom of a multitude of existential threats). As such we should seek political and economic arrangements that are transitive (preserve what humanity has gained while enriching even more people with greater material prosperity and well-being), peaceful, and stable. The opposite is violent redistribution based on pseudo-scientific superstition which lacks any experimental credibility.
6. We recognize that archaic and poorly written, communicated, and understood philosophical manifestos, treatises, tracts, and so on written hundreds of years ago have little intelligibility or relevance in the modern era (if they ever did at all) and that the main pace of progress is set by technological development (and not "deep-tech" / engineering capabilities but in ideation, conceptualization, mathematics, etc. as well). The government's main purpose is to guide technological development (in this specific sense of "technology" which is not restricted to a certain kind of information technology used by computers on the Internet) and wisely regulate technologies that bear fruit. On such a view it is incorrect to demand of government that it be the sole cause of fundamental breakthroughs in the improvement of the human condition, but it is correct to demand that government both foster and wisely implement such technologies.
7. Since it respects the status quo existing financial instruments and systems are preserved and carried over (in some form). Systems of account, audit, and ledger become even more important and ubiquitous since the entire economic system is quantified and tracked. Today this is partial, fraud rampant, incomplete, and most economic activity is unregulated (the shadow finance and banking system).
8. The argument that most innovation is inspired by greed and profit is misguided. Most great inventors invent in spite of significant material loss, opportunity cost, or hurdles. They will leave cushy jobs in which they are guaranteed good salaries to pursue risky ideas with relatively low rewards. Most deep and breakthrough research occurs in academia, not the private sector. So, the motivation to innovate is intrinsic, not extrinsic.
9. America has experimented heavily with the nature of the U.S. Dollar over many centuries: the Gold Standard, Bimetallism, the Silver Standard, the recent rise of Cryptocurrency, etc. have been tremendously divisive (and not just among Ivory Tower elites but also at election time and among regular folks). This trend will not end. America will keep tweaking this recipe and in doing so, it appears that greater economic prosperity tends to correlate with greater refinements to the concept (this is an entrenched idea now in the analysis of the Great Depression - that America's reluctance to jettison the Gold Standard caused the Great Depression to prolong here when in other countries the Great Depression ended early due to them moving away from Gold).
10. Communism and Socialist-variants don't enjoy a monopoly on fairness. Economic fairness and prosperity are best achieved through Mixed Market policies (which is America's official economic stance - we're not solely market-oriented). That's a historical and economic fact not just a philosophical argument. Contemporary Communist and Socialist regimes are among the most unequal and least fair. They can barely function as working governments and can't meet basic human needs.

Two Tiered Crediting System

I think the above suggests that more of the "same-old-same-old" will not suffice. The cross-currents and inadequacy of prior political philosophies I think require more creative solutions.

With the possibility of a true Post-Scarcity, Economy of Abundance, arrived at via closed-loop automation of the 4M's we need to think about how to fairly and carefully improve the human condition for everyone. Here's a potential way to address such concerns:

1. Thermal Crediting System - a Social or Peace Dividend: borrowed from the brief "Technocracy" Movement (of the 1920s era) that grows with time and is guaranteed to be greater than or equal to the basic needs specific by Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the abstracted manifestations of envisioned work units - roughly, the cost for a completely automated chunk of the economy to meet a person's needs and wants. A common or "standard" catalog is provided that one would use such credits to purchase from. As time goes on, the amount of the relative credit allocation increases (reflecting greater overall/aggregate prosperity), and the options in the standard catalog also grow (increasing economic freedom and prosperity over time). Like some insurance plans, good behavior (say after universal pardoning starting people all off on the same footing legally speaking) might earn a small increase in one credit allocation (like a good student kicker).
2. A Social Karma System - to incentivize pro-social behavior ("doing good deeds" in a neutral, secular way) a social karma system overlays the mandatory Thermal Crediting System. Doing measurable, quantified, empirical verifiable pro-social deeds earns people positive karma (points). For example, helping an elderly person across a busy street, saving a kitten, finding a cure for cancer, or improving the Thermal Crediting System itself (efficiency, optimization, expanding the standard catalog - concrete example: suppose a group of engineers find a way to improve the standard pattern house by 18% resource cost reduction but 10% increase in living area - that's very pro-social since everyone would benefit from that improvement). These vary in terms of the magnitude of the effect and hence the reward. Positive karma gets a person a great/unique house (options that exceed the standard catalog) rather than just a good one (which is guaranteed from the standard catalog). This is not a punitive system (which I don't think would work that well) like they have in Singapore and China. Rather, this positive reward system: to incentivize by reward rather than to deincentivize through fear.

Note that the above entails that no mandatory "job" or work be required of any person. However, every good deed is rewarded and tracked. Today, it's only incidental - these lead to mismatches in valuation and untracked value in an economy presently. Ethics and money needn't align but perhaps they should a bit more.