I think people will accept, for instance, that a person who pays more in shares should be allowed a bigger, nicer apartment, because those shares paid for the creation of that apartment, and because people can’t see how the creation of that apartment takes anything away from them (the density decreases of allowing larger apartments actually do mildly harm the city at large, density is a public good, but this is mild and easy to miss). If, however, you make it so that people with more share are more able to push and pull the rest of the city around them, I think that will make the political challenges of launching prohibitively difficult, at least for the first city. It will be hard for ordinary people to look forward to being a small fish in that sort of system. The simulated demos would have to be pretty damn good to convince them.
In most of the variants of this I can imagine easily, this would also risk re-enabling those costly economic wars that proq was designed to limit, that harm everyone subject to them. A loudness war of wills. One person might like to be able to exert more control over their neighborhood by buying extra shares, but allowing that would mean their competitors (who want their favored stores or favored people in their part of the city instead, or who want to fill the part of the city that they share with other sorts of things) could do that too, which would mean that to get what they want they would have to buy even more shares in an escalation that could cost them a lot of their wealth. It might not turn out to be desirable for anyone, that this sort of escalation be allowed.
What happens if there’s a market for “shares” and each resident’s preferences are weighted by their number of shares?
I think people will accept, for instance, that a person who pays more in shares should be allowed a bigger, nicer apartment, because those shares paid for the creation of that apartment, and because people can’t see how the creation of that apartment takes anything away from them (the density decreases of allowing larger apartments actually do mildly harm the city at large, density is a public good, but this is mild and easy to miss). If, however, you make it so that people with more share are more able to push and pull the rest of the city around them, I think that will make the political challenges of launching prohibitively difficult, at least for the first city. It will be hard for ordinary people to look forward to being a small fish in that sort of system. The simulated demos would have to be pretty damn good to convince them.
In most of the variants of this I can imagine easily, this would also risk re-enabling those costly economic wars that proq was designed to limit, that harm everyone subject to them. A loudness war of wills. One person might like to be able to exert more control over their neighborhood by buying extra shares, but allowing that would mean their competitors (who want their favored stores or favored people in their part of the city instead, or who want to fill the part of the city that they share with other sorts of things) could do that too, which would mean that to get what they want they would have to buy even more shares in an escalation that could cost them a lot of their wealth. It might not turn out to be desirable for anyone, that this sort of escalation be allowed.