That person is me. Check out hypercapital.info. I’d like to think it is more than just randomness though...in this system you knowledge and group wisdom leads to who wins the lotteries.
skilesare
Question to skilesare: what is the hypercapitalist take on rising interest rates? My impression is that hypercapitalism encourages negative interest rates. Am I understanding that correctly? Or, is hypercapitalism a reaction to negative interest rates?
I think rising interest rates should be a natural phenomenon arising for money getting more expensive. I also think that there are not many good reasons for money to get expensive. Money is a tool and a score keeper. It isn’t anything real. There should always be enough money in circulation to buy all the things that can be produced. If you’ve ever felt that you didn’t make something because money was too expensive then...money was too damn expensive.
This is an issue in an agrarian economy where most of your gdp is made up of actual limited resources. As we move toward automation, maker bots, massive computing power, etc the amount of our economy that is made up of people paying for the production of ‘limited only by means and imagination’ products and services will only increase.
Interest(and note that interest is not the same thing as return on investment) should be zero or negative until every person on this planet is making a heart wrenching decision on the order magnitude of spending their time curing cancer or solving world hunger.
To make money this available you have to have a means of destroying it when you approach these situations to control inflation. That is where the decay factor comes in. You can print it when you need it and burn it when the world gets stumped for progress.
Negative interest rates that we see today are a reality to deal with. Hypercapitalism manages this by flipping bankers to a form of vc where they make their profits off of the long term success of the people they lend money too instead of the interest charged. I think this is a better way.
The map is not the territory. Money that doesn’t decay isn’t representing something real. And when this happens someone ends up holding the bag.
Positive interest is beneficial to bankers.
Give this parable a read: http://www.altruists.org/f245
I’m new here, tell me more about this thread?
This was a really helpful and encouraging read. Thanks for taking the time to post it. I’m doing some research in the are of economics and have had trouble finding people willing to discuss my ideas. I realize I’m going to have to get much more familiar with the math. This makes it seem possible.
Ahh...I see...The ‘stock’ that consumers get in hypercapitalism isn’t a stock of ownership or voting stock. It is a kind of non-voting prefered stock. Really it is more like an airline mile. It doesn’t affect what dividends are paid or the cap table.
..and I’m all for profit. I think it is a great thing....I just also think there is an advantage to it being a time bound great thing. You made a profit! Awesome! Good for you! Now use it for the greater good or give it back(slowly...but still...)
Here is a video where I present a more ‘real world’ scenario. And I mean real world in the loosest sense. In it there are 3 actors that all have their role to play and the fallout is interesting.
https://vimeo.com/user17783424/review/115279592/1bb88f885d
Ultimately It would be cool to build a super detailed economic mode. I also think it would be cool to hook it up to something like World of Warcraft.
I do need to do a better job of ‘thinking evil’ because we all know there will be people that try to break the system and use its weakness for gain. The retiring farmer issue is a real problem and I’ve tried to balance it with a loyalty that mirrors what we see in our human life cycles. It is rarely optimal for the 55 year old man to stay with the wife of his youth once she hits menopause and he is still fertile, but we see it all the time...and there is usually something awesome and beautiful about it. Someone who grew up drinking Coke II will stick with it when Coke III comes along because....well nostalgia, loyalty, familiarity. At least that is the theory to be tested.
Increase the decay rate and people move money faster and more cash comes out of the economy which keeps deflation from happening.
Things are ok if the economy recovers. In the event of a near extinction event we’ll have bigger problems.
Can you explain more? Currently I don’t care where an apple came from as long as two apples are the same to my perception. If I have a known reason why apple A is made in a more responsible way than apple B, I have no real incentive other than guilt to guy A over B. Under hypercapitalism you would favor A. Now B could lower their price...is that your concern?
I’m not sure where the assumption that rent rates are static comes from. Economic rent just is. It can vary all over the place. if someone comes up with a magic brain cancer pill that can only be used once, the rent extracted for that pill will likely be massive. In a perfect market for table salt, rents are going to be very very small.
As far as the model goes....I don’t really have a model of actual capital and commodity products. That should probably be in the next model and it should probably include some form of competition simulation.
I’m skeptical that consumers buying based on future value is desirable, and this model doesn’t address that.
Your correct...I make an assumption that if you had the chance to buy a gallon of milk and get nothing in the future vs buy a gallon of milk and get some of your money back in the future that you will almost always choose the second. A lot of people invest in Index funds even though they don’t know what is actually happening inside them. I think some people will pay more attention than others, but on net, more attention will be paid and that is the goal.
You are on to something here and I think you are tracking pretty well with what I’m putting forward. There is a tension between ‘do I keep spending money with grocery store A that I have a long history with and get significant dividends from’ or ‘do I go with the new upstart where my money is getting in earlier in the game and who probably has more long term potential’.
Hypercapitalism put forward the idea of limited corporate lifespans where the law of diminishing returns eventually catches up with the growth potential of an existing corporation. I’ve run these models too but don’t have them out in public yet.
The theory is that this increases the turnover of corporations and allows for more ‘fresh starts’. In a sense it is like natural selection for ideas and commerce, but hopefully we do a better job of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next than nature did for billions of years.
Bubbles are an interesting thing to think about. They mostly happen because of the complexity that arises in the market. When the housing bubble burst, it was such a big deal because the people that had made the profits on the way up had taken the money and run. There wasn’t a systematic way to smooth the risk. We have the computing power to day to track all of that so that when a bubble happens we can smooth risk and fallout and ask, ‘Ok, now what did we learn.’
Think about the late ’90s tech bubble. How much did we learn? A ton! Billion dollar companies are ridding the wave that started back then. But what about the people that were hurt in the process of generating the wave? Today it is tough luck. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I am not tied to the name. The public facing name I’ve proposed for this kind of money is ‘Art’, but I’m hoping to engage some actual PR and Marketing people to help come up with some thing better.
I love it. Can I steal it? :)
It is still a little obtuse for the man on the street, so I’m looking for even better ways to make it understandable.
Yes, exactly. Most economic theory assumes ‘in the moment’ and a bit of God like reach. In the real world we have to deal with time and space.
For most of us working stiffs, when we go to the store to buy milk we are charged an large amount of economic rent to buy it cold, in a container, near our home. Despite the fact that you really need to drive an hour or more to find a cow. Given infinite time and teleportation, we’d hit the farm and get it for much, much less. You only have to look to digital assets to see how this plays out. This isn’t a bad thing. We want the farmer, the pasteurizer, the delivery man and the grocery store to stay in business, but we also want them to do it better, faster, cheaper next time. General market dynamics cause this to happen a rate. I want it to happen at a faster rate.
See my answer below:
I mean that some of us are better at generating some kinds value than others. (Division of Labor)
A wine maker who has been in the business for 25 years can make a better bottle of wine than I can. If he wanted to make the same bottle of wine that I can, he could do it more easily.
This is a great question. Privacy is important. How important is it? I’m not sure.
For example, I have some Apple stock. I don’t hold it anonymously because I want to them to know where to send the dividends. People tend to quickly lose interest in privacy when they have something to gain from not being private.
On the other hand there are certainly some times where you want privacy. The system allows for this by having privacy pools that you can pay through that preserve privacy. It isn’t as optimal as knowing exactly where the money came from, but if we can optimize 80% of transactions and 20% still need to be private, we can gain a lot of ground.
There are also some cryptographic solutions to the privacy issues that could solve the issue of privacy.
Hmm...I’ll have to look into this more. There certainly is a difference between ‘rent’ and ‘economic rent’. I’m really don’t think I’m misusing economic rent.
You can call it profit if you want. In the model, some nodes have a better ability to extract profit than others. Or we can call it ‘make moneyness’.
The economic rent is in the fact that there wasn’t an apple tree on your the walk to the store.
Economic rent isn’t always bad. Otherwise we’d have an apple tree infestation problem.
Maybe a better question is what do I know and how do I know it? :)
Money was different than it is now 40 years ago. It was different 30 years before that. I know this because wikipedia tells me that Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early 70s and that standard was established at Bretton Woods in the 40s. Because of this I apply a very high probability to the likelihood that our money will operate differently in the future then it does now.
I guess the problem I’m trying to solve is, if we are likely going to be using a new kind of money in the future, do I want that to be a good kind of money or a bad kind of money. I want it to be a good, human centered kind of money that help us solve hard problem and makes the world a better place.
I think I know that our money is ‘bad’ (sub-optimal may be a better word) because I look around our world and I see the following things:
A crappy income tax An inability to get money out of politics ultra poor people Ultra rich people Wasted human resources (see the entire finance industry) Corporations sitting on billions in cash when they could be ending cancer
I think changing our money can solve some of these issues because I’ve read the literature on what drives people to make economic decisions. If we can implement a system that rewires the drivers in a positive directions, we can solve some of these problems.
I think hypercapitalism is the answer because I’ve written some simple models that shows it is more efficient that regular capitalism. I left 10 other solutions on the cutting room floor before I put this together.
I think it is semantics that depend on your assumptions:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicrent.asp
Profits are economic rent are the same in a lot of instances. If all markets were perfect their would be neither profit nor economic rent. Can you think of a situation where profit is not economic rent?
This is a great comment and I’ve been thinking about it for most of the day. Just wanted to let you know I’m thinking on it and will respond in a bit.