Let’s be very honest: we won’t be around forever and we won’t be able to dictate what our children and grandchildren do with our economy. More specifically we won’t be able to dictate how they value what they value. We already know that access to relevant, timely and reliable information changes the game regardless of what the information or the game is (think Google PageRank or satnav). The logical conclusion must be that when new sorts of information become available the way we value what we value will change and that this will quite swiftly change the way we value our economy.
Today our economy is not immediately impacted when somebody is humiliated but it might be tomorrow. Today our economy is not immediately impacted when we don’t hear from somebody who might be exposed to an elevated risk of bodily harm but it might be tomorrow. Today our economy is only immediately impacted by transactions that can convert anything valuable to our form of money but tomorrow’s money might be radically different from today’s.
Yesterday I’ve included the recording of a talk by Umair Haque on 21th century capitalism. Our current form of money - our currencies - make is very easy to dominate, exploit and make war. We value economy according to what our current form of money is capable of capturing. We don’t have any meaningful way to express what the value of a human life is, or what we loose when somebody is murdered or humiliated. In order words: we don’t have any meaningful way to value a person’s potential and value other than through personal relationships.
It is very easy to realize this though - today. All we need is a stock exchange for people that tracks not the value of people but the value they provide to others. This would give us all kinds of options. We might detect people that are not valued and work to increase the way they are valued by others. We might identify unexpected losses and find ways to deal with that as a group of caring people. And we can make this system work locally where people live together or globally where people collaborate together.
Such a system can easily co-exist with our current currencies. It wouldn’t just give a whole new dimension to our economy, it would also put a cost to certain behavior and reward other behavior. It would help us to achieve outcomes and reward people for helping out. It would effectively track not income but outcomes. One way or the other we have to get rid of our current currencies and hence our national economies simply because they are not humane. They are androgen - made by man - but not made for human beings.
Our current currencies and national economies are designed with the assumption that we organize ourselves in institutions and that power should be concentrated with a few to control many. This design is the opposite of humanity and it simply has to go. We know how to subvert dominance so we can achieve this with much less effort than we might imagine. If people can trust that their efforts for others will be valued in a public way that benefits them we will be much more likely to help others. Today we value income more than anything else and this leads to selfish collaboration. We need to design our economies so that outcomes are valued which will lead to collaborative selfishness.
Selfish collaboration is working with other people not for an outcome but for an income that is obtained long before the intended outcome is secured. Collaborative selfishness puts the self in the service of collaboration with others to achieve outcomes. The value is in the outcome. Bigger outcomes can be divided into smaller outcomes. The government can than continue to tax people that value income and can depend on the services of people that value outcomes. Our national economies and nation-states value income out of proportion and they aren’t capable of valuing outcomes and the people that are responsible for achieving them. Instead they believe that people that can get outcomes will be rewarded by a reasonable income.
People should be rewarded or punished for outcomes and these can be anything. Outcomes are rewarded or punished by other people so it’s up to the crowd to value whatever it wants to value. Governments can step in and prevent punishment for certain outcomes or prevent reward for certain other outcomes. We have to start thinking about how to make such a system work. Every day we wait is a day more of violations against humanity.
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I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for the past 3 years (so a newbie I guess). However, one thing I’m pretty certain about is that if you have any central hub capable of exerting control, then that’s exactly what it will do and we’ll be right back where we started.
“Such a system can easily co-exist with our current currencies.”
No, it can’t. Because the DNA of money is not humanised. It’s an instrument of population control first and foremost. Don’t get me wrong, money and similar forms of control helped the human race evolve to where we are now - but they’ve become obsolete (a testament to their success). They’ve got us to a point in our cultural evolution where we can value outcomes, but they are not designed to value outcomes as you so rightly point out in the article.
“Governments can step in and prevent punishment for certain outcomes or prevent reward for certain other outcomes.”
No. The mob must rule., not governments. Governments, like money, are quickly becoming obsolete centralised control mechanisms. The value of outcomes must be decentralised, because any form of centralised top-down control will eventually become self-serving and we’ll be back to valuing incomes.