{"id":193,"date":"2020-12-30T23:08:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T23:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/?p=193"},"modified":"2020-12-30T23:13:37","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T23:13:37","slug":"post-capitalist-political-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/2020\/12\/post-capitalist-political-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-Capitalist Political Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

With regards to distributed ledgers and alternative credit\/IOU systems, Mixmix<\/a> wrote:<\/p>\n

Might be interesting to look into mana – in te ao M\u0101ori (the M\u0101ori world) one aspect of mana is like respect \/ honour, and decisions are made based on whether it increases the mana of all involved. Really interested because it\u2019s not zero-sum at all. The best path is the one where everyone leaves \u201cricher\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mana might work when communities are small, e.g.<\/em> smaller than the Dunbar number<\/a>\u00a0(about 200 people). After that, you have to distinguish social policy from monetary policy, and realize that politics plays a fundamental, key role.<\/p>\n

Consider the problem of \u201ctaking care of grandma\u201d (or raising children, or looking after anyone who is sick \u2026 the traditional feminine roles — I have a terrible urge to talk about why these roles are filled by women, not men, but I think you probably already know why\u2026) In a community of 200 people or smaller, everyone can agree that \u201ctaking care of grandma\u201d is a worthy activity. The \u201ccost\u201d of taking care of grandma is 100% negative on a ledger system: everyone else must provide food, shelter to her. There is only one positive externality: grandma is alive, and you can visit her. But how are you going to put \u201cgrandma is still alive\u201d on your distributed ledger? How do you say \u201cone living grandma is worth 10,000 IOU\u2019s\u201d?<\/p>\n

This is where social policy comes in: the village communally decides that taking care of grandma is worthy (unless everyone hates her\u2026) If you have more than 200 people in the village, say you have 20K people, then how do you allocate \u201cmoney\u201d (IOU\u2019s, whatever) to \u201ctaking care of grandma\u201d? The usual process is to propose a \u201csocial safety net\u201d, have everyone vote on it, and then levy a tax on all transactions, and earmark that tax-money for taking care of grandma. Walk down this path for a while, and you end up with capitalism-more-or-less-as-we-know-it.<\/p>\n

Distributed ledgers are technologically interesting, but are useless\/unfair, unless you couple them to a social policy<\/strong><\/em> which kind-of means you have to couple them to a voting system<\/em>. This is how you solve @Dominic\u2019s bootstrap problem.<\/p>\n

We need a distributed ledger with an integrated social policy platform.<\/strong><\/em> So that we can allocate funds to taking care of someone-else’s grandma, while also giving the boot to free-riders and general assholes. (Until such a day when the free-riders and assholes become homeless w\/mental stability issues camping in the neighborhood park. Then things are hard, again.) So what we\u2019re really looking to do is to erect an alternative, parallel political economy<\/a> that can compete with capitalism.<\/p>\n

Coupling a distributed ledger to a liquid-democracy voting system seems like the way to go. Maybe something with smart contracts ala ERC20 to store the social policy.<\/p>\n

Wow. for the first time, ever, it seems like maybe there is a path forwards. Thank you @MixMix; I\u2019ve been stumped by this problem for a long long time.<\/p>\n

(To be clear: I’m proposing a technology infrastructure that can issue not only altcoins, but can also determine social policy. It is up to individual communities to determine what their social policy is, and to federate as they desire.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With regards to distributed ledgers and alternative credit\/IOU systems, Mixmix wrote: Might be interesting to look into mana – in te ao M\u0101ori (the M\u0101ori world) one aspect of mana is like respect \/ honour, and decisions are made based on whether it increases the mana of all involved. Really interested because it\u2019s not zero-sum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}