Comment author: SilentCal 21 April 2015 04:11:20PM 0 points [-]

I don't think your model gets to the important differences between hyper and normal capitalism. In normal capitalism, people buy from the company that offers them the best deal on the present transaction, whereas in hypercapitalism they're going to buy based on both the present deal and the value of prefs. As I understand it, your model has no concept of present deal, as all rent (in your terms) is captured by the producer.

You could patch this by e.g. splitting the rent between consumer and producer to simulate the producer lowering prices to attract business. But since rent rates are static, the producers offering the best deals will be the same as those with the highest future value. So hypercapitalism wouldn't change the incentives, and even redistribution with reason would be plausible.

tl;dr I'm skeptical that consumers buying based on future value is desirable, and this model doesn't address that.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 05:27:46PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Slider 21 April 2015 03:47:51PM 0 points [-]

You could offer the Tesla at a high price or a lower price. If the price is higher individual sells will move the company quicker to ground floor. That is Tesla + 1 stock will probably cost less than Tesla + 10 stock. But what is that prevents from offering the option of Tesla + 0 stock or the minimum amount of stock allowed?

There is also the issue that if you think you can afford Tesla + 5 stock but could not afford Tesla + 0 stock you might end up with Tesla that bombs harder than just taking a unpaybackable loan for Tesla + 0 stock. That is when the future component factors in to everyday products future speculation will impact the price of milk. People might have a bigger resistance to buy into things because it doesn't need to only work in the moment but it needs to work for the future as well. You can't look at your accout balance and know how well of you are as you are expecting uncertain returns, returns you might need to stay on the positives.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 05:17:28PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not quite sure I understand your concerns. Are you concerned that people will offer different levels of stock to different people? That is not exactly how I imagined things working. $1 spent = 1 unit of stock(point/air line mile/smoods/call them what you will it is a unit of account).

In general I think we should be more forward looking. I don't see much of a negative in causing people to consider the future implication of their actions. We are limiting anyone's freedom. You can still buy from the less attractive vendor if you want.

Comment author: Slider 20 April 2015 07:24:41PM 1 point [-]

I had serious trouble distinguishing where the presentation of the idea starts and background introduction ends.

It all kinda had a vibe "ideas that I think are cool and solve things" rather than being a solution candidate to a problem.

It also seemed that people that get the most ripped off receive the biggest bonuses, which kinda makes sense as those are preciously the victims of vacous money generation. But I am suspecting that the argument how transaction volume somehow correlates with most potential to make value isn't as waterproof as it should. Wouldn't all things bubble all the time? That is if you could afford your spending pattern only because of the bonuses if you fail to repeatedly buy a product you usually buy you also indirectly cause that provider to be less worth making you get even less bonuses.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 02:35:30PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2015 09:12:23AM *  4 points [-]

Care to find a different name for it?

"Capitalism" is a term often incisive and having mind-killer effects for everybody who dislikes it, plus everybody who dislikes it will instantly misunderstand your idea just based on the title, as its critics to understand capitalism as something based on extracting rents from the the monopolization of the usage of a resource (i.e. own more land you can personally till, that kind of private property) instead of the exchange and transaction based ideas you have here.

Hayes used the word catallaxy for "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market" and thus I would recommend hypercatallaxy as a term, probably much clearer and leading to fewer problems than the term hypercapitalism.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 01:24:33PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: g_pepper 21 April 2015 05:32:25AM 1 point [-]

Thanks for the response and clarification. These are interesting ideas and a radical departure from the current economic situation. If I have time, I would like to read more of Silvio Gesell's theories. And, I'm glad to hear that you've considered the potential for (hyper)inflation resulting from the increased velocity of money that will result from its increased availability and the fact that consumers will be eager to spend it quickly before it decays.

I am still unclear on what (if anything) is wrong with a modest positive interest rate along the lines of pre-2008 downturn levels. You said:

If you've ever felt that you didn't make something because money was too expensive then...money was too damn expensive.

A converse argument is, if whatever project you are considering is not economically viable if capital costs ~ 8-12%/year, maybe it was not really such a great idea.

And, you said:

(money) isn't anything real

Well, yes and no. My understanding of capital is that it is just wealth used to generate more wealth. For example, if I am a plumber by trade and I need a backhoe to repair a sewer line, the backhoe is capital that I need to complete my project and create wealth. If I don't own a backhoe, I'll probably opt to rent one, and this would arguably be preferable to owning one as it is not every day that I need to dig up a sewer line. Obviously, if someone owns a backhoe, they will expect payment (rent) in exchange for my using the backhoe. By the same token, if I am a real estate developer and I need $100M to develop a project, I would expect to have to pay interest (rent) to use that money. I don't see the difference between paying to use someone else's backhoe and paying to use someone else's money. In both cases, I am paying for capital that I need to complete my project, and I don't really see a problem with that arrangement.

And, as Lumifer said upthread:

From a practical standpoint there is no shortage of money in the world, availability of capital is not a binding constraint.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 01:20:02PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the feed back! I'm glad to be having real conversations about this stuff instead of just letting it rattle around in my head.

A converse argument is, if whatever project you are considering is not economically viable if capital costs ~ 8-12%/year, maybe it was not really such a great idea.

Let's look at the data. TTP(Time to profitability)

Tesla - 10 years FedEx - 4 years Amazon - 9 years Turner Broadcasting - 11 years ESPN - 5 years (http://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/5-successful-companies-that-didn-8217-t-make-a-dollar-for-5-years.html)

This is another example where we ignore time. Of course we want our companies to make money. And we want people working on their best ideas. But how many other billion dollar companies failed because their owner flew to vegas to bet the last $5k on blackjack and lost? The market will eventually settle things out even over time. If no one buys what your are selling, your creditors will eventually catch on. But what if the trade off is over 3 years you learn enough to turn a profit or, if you fail, your creditors get to fold your entity and profit from all the places you spent their money?

This could be a serious problem if we are depleting massive amounts of non-replenishable resources, but in endeavors where the resources are renewable, your only limited resource is time.

You either believe we are in an upward trajectory or a downward one. The data suggests upwards and I'd suggest it is more important to learn as much as possible as fast as possible than to make sure that creditors make money at only 1 degree of separation.

Well, yes and no. My understanding of capital is that it is just wealth used to generate more wealth. For example, if I am a plumber by trade and I need a backhoe to repair a sewer line, the backhoe is capital that I need to complete my project and create wealth. If I don't own a backhoe, I'll probably opt to rent one, and this would arguably be preferable to owning one as it is not every day that I need to dig up a sewer line. Obviously, if someone owns a backhoe, they will expect payment (rent) in exchange for my using the backhoe. By the same token, if I am a real estate developer and I need $100M to develop a project, I would expect to have to pay interest (rent) to use that money. I don't see the difference between paying to use someone else's backhoe and paying to use someone else's money. In both cases, I am paying for capital that I need to complete my project, and I don't really see a problem with that arrangement.

Take a second read of Gessell's parable and try to put aside the availability bias that we all currently pay interest.

Why is it obvious that someone would demand payment for use of a backhoe? If the backhoe is in use to you and returning cash to you then of course you would not take it out of service to rent to someone else unless they offered a premium. But if it is sitting idle in a work yard rusting, all you want back when you loan it out it your resource in the same condition you lent it in. This may have the cost of maintenance, oil, grease, etc. In a perfect market this is all you would be able to get for your backhoe and you'd be glad to get it. The potential for a backhoe is how many ditches it can dig, not how much money it can make for other people digging ditches. If you charge someone two ditches for them to dig one ditch, that is 'economic rent' that we seem to have some differences on. Of course it is profit for the renter, but we still only have one ditch.

The use of money only demands interest because it doesn't have a carrying cost. The banker doesn't need to part with it because $1 dollar will still be $1 tomorrow. If $1 were worth $0.80 tomorrow, some banker somewhere would be more than happy to give it to you today in exchange for you repaying $1 tomorrow. He might even be willing to give you $1.10 that he has no use for today in exchange for $1 tomorrow.

I don't know so much if there is a 'problem' with the arrangement we have now(look how far it has brought us), but I also don't think it is 'the best' way.

From a practical standpoint there is no shortage of money in the world, availability of capital is not a binding constraint.

If money is so available, maybe the issue is that people don't know how to ask for the money because they didn't have the money to pay for the education where they teach you how to ask. :)

Comment author: Lumifer 21 April 2015 03:37:56AM 0 points [-]

Think for a bit on if she was.

If she were rewarded for buying from someone who'd get better tomorrow, she will also get punished for buying from someone who'd get worse. In other words, you are asking the buyer to assume some risk associated with the future prospects of the seller. I don't see why this is a good thing, given that the ability of the buyers to influence these prospects is very limited.

As a buyer I don't want to have a little bit of risky investment forced into every purchase I make.

my reason tells me that if it is flowing faster, 'I' have a better chance at having some flow to me.

Err.. would you mind unrolling this reasoning? This sounds to me like a claim that if the lottery revenues are increasing you stand a better chance of getting a winning ticket.

a form of non artificial capital that is a cash equivalent?

What's "non-artificial capital"? Money itself is "artificial" to start with, the current fiat currencies for certain.

"Cash" is, generally speaking, some store-of-value with the following characteristics: constant nominal value, bearer form, fully liquid.

You can think of inflation as "entropy" for cash.

I bet if you don't know what good value is that you at least know bad value when you see it.

Not in your sense, I don't. I think a $1 t-shirt from a sweatshop in Vietnam is good value, for example.

If agi emerges into a world where economic nodes are dependent upon each other and it has more to gain from cooperation than dominating

Why? In the locally standard expectations a UFAI will have zero interest in human economics and the particulars of their arrangement. All it wants is atoms and energy.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 04:27:19AM *  0 points [-]

If she were rewarded for buying from someone who'd get better tomorrow, she will also get punished for buying from someone who'd get worse. In other words, you are asking the buyer to assume some risk associated with the future prospects of the seller. I don't see why this is a good thing, given that the ability of the buyers to influence these prospects is very limited.

Some risk, yes. But in the models I've run, the risk is fairly small and is mitigated by the fact that shitty wine maker spends some of your cash with awesome barrel maker and awesome seed provider. The recursiveness of the system time shifts out some of your risk.

If shitty wine maker goes out of business, because we have a public ledger we can 'fold the blockchain' and connect where the money went to where the money came from and fill in a void that, in the current economy, causes all kinds of volatility.

As a buyer I don't want to have a little bit of risky investment forced into every purchase I make.

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. If I told you that your risk was between getting back 3% or 300% of what you spent over the next 50 years, even in the worst case you've gained 3%. You could of course choose to keep using your old money.

Err.. would you mind unrolling this reasoning? This sounds to me like a claim that if the lottery revenues are increasing you stand a better chance of getting a winning ticket.

If you buy a lottery ticket that is good for all future drawings, and they double the number of drawings, you do have a better chance of winning. Your economic potential isn't a lottery ticket that expires. If people have more to gain by holding their cash than spending/investing it, the chance that they will invest/spend with you goes down. If they there is a cost for holding cash they will seek ways to at least break even. Maybe you break even today, but with your experience, you turn a profit tomorrow.

What's "non-artificial capital"? Money itself is "artificial" to start with, the current fiat currencies for certain.

A bulldozer is natural capital(non-artificial). A tree is natural. You are natural. A computer is natural. All those things are subject to entropy and have a natural carrying cost. Items whose value derive from law, psychology, math, or ideas are artificial. Money is artificial, but if you don't make the map the territory something is going to go wonky and you're going to have a 'correction'.

"Cash" is, generally speaking, some store-of-value with the following characteristics: constant nominal value, bearer form, fully liquid.

And I'd contend that the store of value part is convenient, but ultimately misguided. It was a shortcut we needed to use to get from horse drawn carriages to databases. But we don't need to completely preserve the 'store of value' anymore. We can let it decay just like the world around it.

You can think of inflation as "entropy" for cash.

Yes, but I'll contend that controlled inflation(demurrage) is better than the random inflation we deal with now.

Not in your sense, I don't. I think a $1 t-shirt from a sweatshop in Vietnam is good value, for example.

As good a value as a $1 shirt made by a robot down the block? No fossil fuels burned in shipping, no slave labor. Surely there are better and worse ways of doing things.

Why? In the locally standard expectations a UFAI will have zero interest in human economics and the particulars of their arrangement. All it wants is atoms and energy.

I don't contend it will solve the problem, just that it might buy us some time if it can get some decent utility out of humans providing the atoms and energy while it ramps up to do it itself. Maybe it is just second. It is just a theory.

Would an intelligence not subject to the availability bias ever choose to not use a form of exchange where it benefited from all uses of the exchanged material in the future vs. exchanging resources for only the perceived present value? I think it is a question worth asking.

Comment author: g_pepper 20 April 2015 09:27:31PM 0 points [-]

Well, that is happening. US is on track to start raising interest rates later this year.

Great; I think that higher US interest rates are a good thing and will help restore economic stability. Hopefully Japan and the EU will be able to follow on in the not too distant future.

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?

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 03:49:35AM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: g_pepper 20 April 2015 08:00:23PM 2 points [-]

Why is money that decays (aka negative interest) a good thing? It seems to me that positive interest is a desirable feature of the capitalist system.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 03:27:58AM 4 points [-]

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

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 20 April 2015 07:57:19PM 3 points [-]

Especially upvoted for a) actually taking and acting on advice and b) for building an executable and thus testable model.

You could (also) post this in the group rationality thread.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 03:23:01AM 4 points [-]

I'm new here, tell me more about this thread?

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 11:28:29PM 1 point [-]

How much Apple stock do you own? Enough to motivate someone to kidnap your relatives and blackmail you? Then you would get interested in privacy again.

Comment author: skilesare 21 April 2015 03:22:00AM 2 points [-]

Potential absurdity bias maybe? Tim Cook has a ton of apple stock and I don't see many kidnaping attempts. Someone tried to blackmail David Letterman a few years ago and that guy is in jail. This is certainly in the realm of possibility, by I think highly unlikely. Now if you want to talk about your deadbeat brother in law hitting you up for a loan....again...maybe that is an issue worth addressing, but I bet your 3000 sq ft house says more about that than your blockchain activity.

You certainly wouldn't want to try this without some significant rule of law.

...and besides, I do think privacy is important and you have to have a mechanism for it. Hypercapitalism has a mechanism.

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