Guy, thank you for clarifying.There's only a certain percentage, probably a small percentage, of individuals with the constitution, intuition, and intelligence to choose high risk occupations, or create fantastic new products and services. High risk projects are highly discounted (like 25% annum). That's how capitalism runs. If the discount rate does not reflect this risk (or skewed as in the present day central bank monetary policy), humanity loses because fewer people take risks, and less insanely cool things are created. People seem to forget that for every 10 high risk projects out there we are lucky if one works out. Our 'socialist' friends want all the risk taking without the benefits. Biological organisms haven't advanced that far :)Some thoughts:
- Not sure what “post industrialism” could be. If I look at the term, “post industrialism” as a name, not a descriptor, I might be able to envision a social/political/economic structure in which every individual has the opportunity to maximize their personal capital (intelligence, talents, abilities) within a structure that enables “providers" to connect with “needers (this is all of us and not a pejorative term).” I think that VRM is about this kind of structure.
- I think that Tom has an excellent definition of capitalism. People are unhappy with what they see in capitalism today because they hear about some people being rewarded with incredible amounts of money without any commensurate creation of wealth (my local newspaper had a headline today blaring the news that the top 10 hedge fund managers each earned over $1,000,000,000 – managing a hedge fund takes intelligence and hard work, but it does not create one cent’s worth of wealth. Hedge funds may, eventually, provide funding for people who will create wealth, but, in themselves, merely move money around)
- Tom’s observation’s are, again, I think, precise and critical
- Innovation — in any economic/social structure in which people cannot be (or are not) rewarded for innovation, there will be very little innovation, and that will end the human race as we will populate ourselves beyond our resources. My perception is that non-capitalist systems innovate far less than do robust capitalist ones – but that’s just my sense
- Hard work — yep. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, points the finger at luck as a determinant of success, using Bill Gates as an example. Yes, Bill was lucky to be born into the “right” family in the “right” place and to have access to the “right” educational opportunities and to be in the “right”place when IBM went looking for an operating system. But, you know, without his personal hard work in preparing himself, none of those “right” things would have mattered a bit. Luck becomes the major determinant only when you win the lottery. Hard work trumps luck the rest of the time.
- Equal opportunity — This is so incredibly important. Every person deserves to have the opportunity for a good education and for the chance to compete for work. That competition for work needs to fair (meaning no biases, no gaming the system, etc), and I think that fairness is both part of “opportunity" and the most important criteria in “hiring" (if you’re not being fair to your job applicants, you’re not being fair to yourself because you’ll be missing the best candidates)
- Checks and balances — again, these are deeply important because checks and balances are (or at least should be) self-enforcing. If I can put a self-enforcing process in place, I save all of the money/effort/energy I would otherwise be forced to invest to keep the process running. This is why our Founding Fathers’ system is so elegant — much of the effort that each branch of government expends is aimed at maintaining its authority vis-a-vis the other branches and is not therefore invested in screwing things up (See Pete Schuck’s Why Government Fails so Often). While this often looks like gridlock (and maybe that’s because it is gridlock), that’s not a bad thing. The government can’t screw things up when it’s gridlocked. I often suspect that the Federal Government is in such terror of a shutdown is that they’re afraid the voters would find out just how little they need the Feds.
- Public service — I left this one to last because I think it’s the hardest.
- Public service is not something that can be created or accomplished through government. Service may be a side result of a government job, but it is not the job. The people working for the FDA do their jobs. Some of the results are of service to me, but many (maybe most) are not. Many very good and useful drugs are not approved because someone in the bureaucracy decides that the benefit for the majority is outweighed by the side effects for a minority (and you cannot be criticized for saying no because no one will miss what they never had).
- That means that public service has to arise through some societal mechanism. That used to be the case across the country. A good friend of mine’s father was a life-long Mason and contributed to the Masons the whole time. Toward the end of his life, he needed full-time care, and the Mason’s provided that. My mother-in-law needed similar full-time care and the Catholic charities that she supported came to her aid. Used to be lot of those kinds of mutual aid societies, but they were destroyed by the creation of entitlement programs by the Federal Government. Why should I pay into Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc and into a mutual aid society when the mutual aid societies are redundant to the government and I have no choice about paying into the government program?
- An issue with government programs, of course is that private programs run by mutual aid societies are universally more efficient than are government programs and, therefore, can help more people for any given amount of money. Meaning that government programs are inherently less efficient and deliver fewer benefits per dollar.
- An issue with mutual aid societies is that not every person will join one and will, likely, at some point in their lives, need help from some organization or group to which they have not contributed. If someone, say Leonardo DiCaprio wants to help them, then, by all means, Leonardo should be able to reach into his pocket and do that. The problem there, though is that Leonardo (as an exemplar only) isn’t satisfied with that. He (and his ilk) want to reach into your pocket and my pocket to compel us to fund his idea of “good.”
- His idea of good and my idea of good appear to be different. He wants to give people money, and I want to give them a good (or better) education that prepares them to work hard and take advantage of the opportunities that I think are in the mutual interest of every individual and of society and the economy at large.
GuyFrom: Jason Wong < " target="_blank"> >
Date: Sunday, May 15, 2016 at 11:23
To: Tom Crowl < " target="_blank"> >
Cc: David Brin < " target="_blank"> >, Guy Higgins < " target="_blank"> >, Douglas Rushkoff < " target="_blank"> >, Micah Sifry < " target="_blank"> >, "Victoria Silchenko, PhD" < " target="_blank"> >, ProjectVRM list < " target="_blank"> >, Andy Oram < " target="_blank"> >, Joe Trippi < " target="_blank"> >, John Battelle < " target="_blank"> >, Michel Bauwens < " target="_blank"> >, Brennan Center for Justice < " target="_blank"> >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Banking and the MicropaymentGood definition of capitalism. I wonder if post capitalism might actually mean post industrialism in this new, decentralized, digitized, democratized, and disinflationary age.Yes, destruction of records reaches back centuries in insurrections.As for "post capitalist"... not sure. I"m waiting for a realization that the essence of capitalism (in my mind) is reward for innovation and hard work... while broadly supporting public service and equality of opportunity... and curtailing the excesses which occur without meaningful checks and balances.Tom CrowlOn Sat, May 14, 2016 at 5:49 PM, Jason Wong < " target="_blank"> > wrote:For the post capitalists out there, check out photo 4/7. For those of you that don't read the wsj on principle, this article is free.Burn those darn stock certificates. Yay!
On Tuesday, May 10, 2016, David Brin < " target="_blank"> > wrote:And yet look around you. I refute cynics thus... by pointing to this incredible ongoing enlightenment revolution, that has lasted five times longer that Pericles's earlier experiment, accomplishing vastly more. It did not just happen. The revolution is under constant threat -- nowadays from an attempted oligarchic-feudalist putsch. But each generation managed to do politics well enough to keep it moving forward.BTW: Today, Evonomics ran my appraisal of how Advertising is failing the Internet. I explore how a real Web economy might replace the maelstrom of ads. Could simple micro-payments work, paying pennies for what you use? I’ve been working on this analysis for 3 years. A two-parter with major implications for your future online.I am grateful to those of you who supplied valuable feedback. And I highly recommend the Evonomics site.
Interestingly, I suspect that almost the entire U.S. Constitution was a “five beers” idea — in 1783. Those guys took a bunch of theorizing by Enlightenment philosophers, seasoned it with lots of practical experience and invented democratic government (and if we think there was agreement across the board, joe should look at the Ten Dollar bill and recall how differences were settled then — Mssrs Hamilton and Burr)GuyFrom: Jason Wong < >
Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 14:04
To: David Brin < >
Cc: Guy Higgins < >, Tom Crowl < >, Douglas Rushkoff < >, Micah Sifry < >, "Victoria Silchenko, PhD" < >, ProjectVRM list < >, Andy Oram < >, Joe Trippi < >, John Battelle < >, Michel Bauwens < >, Brennan Center for Justice < >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Banking and the MicropaymentAgree! Results count.Disagree on the five beers. As an Asian I can't drink five beers. I think it has to do with not having a certain enzyme!Instead of cludged prescription that sound really cool over one's fifth beer, how about this unique idea. Actually restore something called "politics" as a process of sober negotiation engaged-in by adults?Your own cynical-dismissive chuckle, upon reading the previous sentence is THE major symptom of a disease that has been deliberately inflicted upon us by those whose core aim is to stymie one of the most important problem-solving modes of the Western Enlightenment. Destroying politics as a grownup and serious process of negotiation has been nothing less than treason.There is no pretending equality of blame. Let's take Jason's sunset clause for regulations... a real five beer proposal. How about instead responsibly auditing agencies and deliberating which ones to revise or cancel? You might imagine republicans do this, but when they had complete control over all three branches of government -- from 2001 through 2007 -- they eliminated zero agencies and only deregulated Wall Street and resource extraction, two deregulations for which we paid trillions.(In fairness, in 1996 the Congressional GOP did banish and eliminate their own bipartisan Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) which kept offering up inconvenient "facts.")So which party banished the captured Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) or the captured Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) restoring competition to airlines and rails? Who broke up AT&T's monopoly? Who deregulated GPS and who pushed through the famous bill unleashing the Internet upon the world? I could go on, but you might guess the answer by now, know it was Al Gore's bill that did that last miracle.There is no "balance" here. One party still wants to engage in pragmatic, negotiated politics. The other will not sit at the table. They have made it declared policy to burn the table.
How about this- constitutional amendment every ten years for a complete top down review of all federal laws, regulations and executive directives. Mandatory cleaving of ( % ) of the above, and disestablishment of any laws greater than 50 years old. That will solve the historical issue of empires and nations failing over due to the sheer weight of oppression.This is kind of a squirrel, but I think that some of the ideas that the illustrious Mr. Heinlein listed in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress were even more interesting:
- Elect representatives by private sector “career” — doctors would vote for someone to represent them, engineers would vote for someone to represent them, etc. The question of course is would there be representative for career criminals ;-)
- Voters aggregate alphabetically rather than geographically — that would force a national legislature to view bills differently and force local councils/legislatures to focus on local issues (which my neighbors seem incapable of doing — they are far more interested in solving other peoples’ problems; sigh…)
- Hold an election and then randomly choose 60% of the winners and fill out the legislature by choosing the remaining 40% random
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.19.