contemporary society is founded on a sort of economic namaste: "the money-lover in me recognizes the money-lover in you"
money is the ultimate intermediary, a translation layer between all the desirable things it is possible for others to give you
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RT @a_yawning_cat
going to start w/ a beautiful notion and then end with offending everyone:
first, the beautiful notion:
Community is held together by mutual Love for the same thing…
https://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1396162217209307139
in PL theory, we call this an intermediate representation (IR), a common language, a middleman between "frontends" & "backends"
you contribute to society on the frontend, and get Surplus Points for it
and then you cash in your Surplus Points on the backend to get what you want
an IR makes it possible to compare very different things to each other; how many cows is a new car worth? how many new cars is a house worth? how about cows to houses?
as more desires emerge, we see a combinatorial explosion of valuation problems
this is where an IR is useful
some technical context: IRs exist to solve a structurally-similar problem in PL theory; how to translate code in any one language to another, when there are a very large # of them?
you could solve this with a "barter system" as well, but that's v hard!
intermediaries are useful
people often don't like intermediaries bc they make a system more complex, in some ways
this is true, but like w/ any engineering challenge, every choice has tradeoffs; here, you trade one additional layer of complexity for a vastly reduced number of overall moving pieces
there are many issues w/ money; it's not easy to make it work well. we've seen many of its possible failure modes; that's why we have so many regulations around this stuff, as the crypto world is rediscovering
but, a tool being hard to use doesn't mean it's not useful
people also don't like money bc they feel controlled by it, embedded within a larger system they don't understand, buffeted around by its whims
I'm sympathetic to these concerns; economics is complex & no one teaches you personal finance
but it's the least bad thing we've tried
every time someone tries to reinvent civics, at some point they run into the problem of limited local information, which sets an upper bound for the efficacy of central planning; to get around this, you need some way of decentralizing decisions
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RT @pee_zombie
also vastly underestimates the power of emergent phenomenon thru convergent local decisioning
standard leftist vision of an at-scale well-organized society suffers from the s…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1334342881205760001
in order to do this, you need a way to "push out" decisions to locales where the necessary information is present, & to "pull in" the decisions about the results
this is a distributed computation problem; in the economy, money functions as the transport layer, feeding back info
@pee_zombie I think we have
We need to build an [[interlay]] for decision making.
@pee_zombie anagora.org/interlay
@pee_zombie I believe the interlay should be operated as a [[commons]].
this is highly non-trivial to design & implement, which is why historically economies have grown emergently from individuals' desires, each innovation being added just-in-time, agile rather than waterfall
they may indeed be a better system than money, but we haven't found it yet