Does anyone here have kids in school and if so how did you go about picking their school? Where is the best place to get a scientifically based 'rational' education.

I'm in Houston and the public schools are a non-starter. We could move to a better area with better schools but my mortgage would increase 4x. Instead we send our kids to private school and most in the area are Christian schools. In a recent visit with my schools principal we were told in glowing terms about how all their activities this year would be tied back to Egypt and the stories of Egypt in the old testament. I thought to my self that I didn't even think that Moses was a real person so this is going to get very interesting.

I wish they'd spend half as much time on studying science and psychological concepts that they do studying the bible...but what are you going to do?

Any ideas?

I should add that I did graduate from this same school although I did not go through grades 1-9 there...only high school, and that education was really top notch...but still an hour a day of bible class.

This seems to me that it significantly raises transaction costs without significantly creating benefits. The value paid in cash in our real economy today will be equal to the sum of the cash payment plus the net present value of risk-discounted future payments in your model. That means that there is zero benefit to the parties involved, but introduces a transfer of risk, and increases the complexity of the transaction.

The place the rubber hits the road on this problem is that companies who would receive payment under this approach will not sign up to a system that causes their holdings of cash in the system to decay, if there are other alternatives. You can compare this to inflation in, say, US dollar holdings. The difference is that the US dollar is already widely accepted. It does not have a problem convincing people to accept it. Your system will.

Historically, one of the features that made any commodity more likely to become a currency was that it would not decay. For example, precious metals typically won out over comparably divisible commodities like grain because metals don't rot after a year or so. A currency that rots doesn't seem like a winner.

Even if the amount of "stock" is the same constant for everybody there is still a decision how big a portion it should represent. In the extreme the only stocks are from the $1 in 1 stock out principle. But in a way the enterpreneur should also have stock in it. If the enterpreneur reserves 1000 stocks for himself that would be the equivalent of a 100 stock person giving out 10 stocks per $. If the starter doesn't have any stock he doesn't own it he just operates it for the customer-owners.

When you talk about perfectly competitive markets having no profit, you're probably thinking of the term "economic profit". The sort of profit everyone usually thinks of is revenue minus cost, which is called accounting profit by economists so as to distinguish it from economic profit. Also economists are really bad at naming things. Economic profit is revenue-costs-opportunity costs.

In perfect competition, firms do make accounting profit, but they don't make economic profit.

Thanks for posting your model here and getting involved in the discussion. It's always good to be able to discuss these things publicly because I'm sure many people are learning a lot from it.

But you can also write the opposite parable:

Crusoe has finished planting his most fertile fields and is preparing to plant his remaining seed in the less fertile adjoining land when the stranger arrives.

S: I have found some excellent fields, too far from your home here to be of any use to you, but which will serve me well; and I need only some seed. I see you have some excess, which will be much more productive in my fields than in yours; might I borrow it, and easily repay after harvest?

RC: How much seed will you repay me, for each I lend you now?

S: One seed for each; my religion would forbid any other arrangement.

RC: The land I intend to plant them in is not so lush, but even so I expect to reap many times the seed I plant. Where is my self-interest in placing it where it will yield less?

Moral: some goods decay, but others can compound themselves--or, more often, create other goods that can create other goods in a long chain that ends with more of the first good.

The role of money is to make such long chains implicit; a positive real interest rate reflects that such chains are possible for most goods, and any exceptions will increase in price faster than interest accumulates.

As an aside: the local prefix for quoting is ">" at the start of the line, not the pipe character.

I think you do, you just don't know it yet :) Your choice would be between more than what you get now or way more than you get now.

I think you're mistaken about my preferences.

You point out yourself that money is (in this context) is just a measure, an medium of exchange. It is NOT the same thing as the underlying value. Now, to "get more" I would want to get more value and you're promising me just more money. The point is that an economy produces some amount of value and that's all you have to redistribute. You can make money spin faster, but that will not increase the value produced -- all you'll do is increase inflation.

Essentially, if I buy a loaf of bread from a baker and the baker knows he'll have to pay me "dividends" in the future, the baker will raise the price of bread to compensate for these future dividends. Your hopes remind me of "free energy" mechanisms in physics -- if only we could set up sufficiently clever loops we can get more energy that we put in! Um...

My current understanding of your idea is that you basically want a tax on wealth (or, specifically, on money wealth) with a very complicated scheme to distribute its proceeds directly to the population bypassing the government. Is that a reasonable approach?

I would also like to point out that I think your fears of wealth accumulation are overblown. Look at empirical data. Is there, in reality, old old money dominating everything? Does the Medici family rule Europe? What happened to the Vanderbilts? The oldest rich family I can recall offhand is the Rothschilds and while they are not poor by any means, how do they do compared to Gates or Brin or Musk?

All those things are subject to entropy and have a natural carrying cost.

What about the traditionally most valuable kind of capital -- land, also known as real estate? What about technology? or non-agricultural commodities like oil, coal, copper, etc?

controlled inflation(demurrage) is better than the random inflation we deal with now.

The current inflation is controlled to best of central banks' abilities. You are not controlling it any better, you're just setting a floor as to how low can it go.

As good a value as a $1 shirt made by a robot down the block?

I'll take the standard capitalist approach -- if the robot down the block can sell me the same shirt cheaper, I'll buy it from the robot. If it can't, I'll buy it from the Vietnamese. I am not willing to pay extra for feel-good fluff.

Yes, I mean that B could charge a lower price, and 'capitalist reason' would dictate buying the apple from B. I'd urge you not to conflate externalities with future value; there are many reasons one producer could have a higher future value than another, and they aren't all socially beneficial. For instance, farmer B might be an excellent and responsible farmer who's about to retire. Or maybe farmer A uses slave labor and is smart enough to never get caught.

Re: static rent, I meant in your code, not in the idea of hypercapitalism; each node is given pER at the beginning and it doesn't change. Having some kind of time-varying pER that buyers can predict, together with having higher pER nodes charge lower prices, would start to get at the difference between capitalist and hypercapitalist reason, but that starts to get complicated, and I'd have to think a while longer to conclude that it doesn't need even more complexity to make sense. (I've had other thoughts on how to improve your code, but they keep exploding into endless chains of 'but if you add this, then you have to add that')

And when I questioned if future-value-based buying was 'desirable', I meant for society. Take the example of the retiring farmer; 'capitalist reason' would say to buy from them iff they sell the best-priced apple, whereas hypercapitalist reason would penalize them for their lack of future value.

Also, random thought: it'd be cool to add utility measures. I'd suggest utility per node per month as log(spending/necessities).

What happens in a steady-state or shrinking economy as opposed to an expanding one?

But you can also write the opposite parable:

Crusoe has finished planting his most fertile fields and is preparing to plant his remaining seed in the less fertile adjoining land when the stranger arrives.

S: I have found some excellent fields, too far from your home here to be of any use to you, but which will serve me well; and I need only some seed. I see you have some excess, which will be much more productive in my fields than in yours; might I borrow it, and easily repay after harvest?

RC: How much seed will you repay me, for each I lend you now?

S: One seed for each; my religion would forbid any other arrangement.

RC: The land I intend to plant them in is not so lush, but even so I expect to reap many times the seed I plant. Where is my self-interest in placing it where it will yield less?

Moral: some goods decay, but others can compound themselves--or, more often, create other goods that can create other goods in a long chain that ends with more of the first good.

The role of money is to make such long chains implicit; a positive real interest rate reflects that such chains are possible for most goods, and any exceptions will increase in price faster than interest accumulates.