The degree to which someone can accumulate wealth should be bounded by the earnings of the weakest wallet. At a certain point, you can earn more only if you pull everyone up.
The amount of wealth you can capture relative to your peers is currently unlimited. This is a problem (see: wealth shown to scale).
"Wealth that causes poverty isn’t wealth." - Robert Reich
We can use blockchain tech to implement bounded capitalism. With bounded capitalism, you're still incentivized to innovate/compete. But the degree to which you can accumulate wealth is bounded by the earnings of the weakest wallet. The ratio between the richest:poorest is limited with code.
For example: after you've earned your first $10M, you can't earn more unless everyone has earned at least $10K.
You can still compete and win, but players eventually have to compete to build systems that pull everyone up. In this system, wealth isn't the number of coins in your wallet. It's your history of doing things that improve others' lives.
"Public goods" generally live on a spectrum from "this thing serves the interests of one person" to "this thing serves the interests of society". Bounded capitalism installs a sort of "gravity" into the economic system that incentivizes public goods over private ones.
Bezos could still build Amazon; Gates could still build Microsoft; Jobs could still build Apple; Zuck could still build Facebook. But at a certain point, the wealth captured by their creations would automatically be siphoned away from their corporate balance sheets and towards people who need help. This would be a forcing function for compassion and sustainability.
To win this game, you have to care harder than everyone else.
This could remove the need for UBI or even antitrust. The purpose of those primitives is to prevent catastrophe. But maybe a protocol upgrade can prevent catastrophe without requiring that political kind of feature work.
Imagine how your reality would feel in a world where adtech solutions like Facebook and Google are incentivized to figure out not just how to deliver advertising for profit, but how to deliver advertising that connects consumers to products that improve everyone's life. Healthy, unifying, educational advertising could replace the toxic and divisive corporate propaganda we're faced with today. The machinery of capitalism could be tuned away from shareholder primacy and towards a primacy of universal thriving.
I'm building a game to test this hypothesis over at www.karma.fm. It's early days, but the idea is simple:
create content
deposit money into the ideas you like
get paid to engage constructively
boundedCapitalism.sol
Thoughts?
I'm of the opinion that if you can't motivate someone (whose basic needs are met) to do something with intrinsic motivation alone, the thing is worth automating away or eliminating entirely.
We should get to a point where you and everyone else can wake up and do whatever the fuck you want. You should be able to just chill out and rest without worrying about productivity.
If it's possible to build a world where nobody has to labor for food, shelter, education, or healthcare, then we should build that world. These things are human needs, and therefore rights. We have a moral obligation to believe in the possibility of building a world in which everyone's needs are satisfied.
In a world where the min-bar is not merely survival but thriving, a new type of game becomes normalized. These games pull everyone up (even non-players).
The primary difference between tomorrow's games and today's games are that you'll wake up genuinely excited to play tomorrow's games. You won't have to choose between a limited number of poor user experiences.
Basically, we need a way to test purchasing preferences in an environment where people aren't being overly coerced or constrained. The systematic monopolization of of our economy and commodification of our lives have given us a low number of low-quality choices.
To get to a world that gives us a high number of high quality choices, we need to normalize abundance of "basic shit" resources. Table stakes should include everything we need to make high-quality long-term decisions. You shouldn't have to spend your hours trying to survive, worrying about your food and lodging. You should be able to focus on your health, your friends and family, community, society, dreams, what it means to self-actualize, and what a better, more just world might feel like.
In summary, I'm not sure if free riders are such a bad thing. A free rider is just someone who hasn't yet discovered who they are, and who they can become. It's on us to build games that accelerate that process for everyone.
This term has a negative connotation but I'm not sure exactly what it means or why it's a bad thing. I believe that technology can be a great equalizing force and that we have a moral obligation to develop technologies designed specifically to make the world a better place for everyone as efficiently as possible. What do you think?
Functionally, yeah. It "taxes the rich" and "cuts checks to the poor". But it skips over banks and governments, instead using a piece of code that automatically moves money around without any politicking or bureaucracy. Just... boop. To each according to their needs from each according to their means. It'll probably be like, 10 lines of code assuming everyone is open to proof-of-personhood (to prevent sybil attacks) and managed wallets (wallets beholden to those ten lines of code).
Games that implement bounded capitalism will attract players who believe in equality of opportunity. Getting a bunch of those people together and letting them play might lead to some beautiful outcomes.
True - Jeff Bezos could still build Amazon and exploit workers in a bounded-capitalism economy. But his personal wealth would be capped, and excess would be injected directly into the wallets that need it most. He would only be able to earn more after the lowest members of society have earned more. This could incentivize him to think about how he can help the poorest members of society actively engage with the economy. Instead of "how do I collect coins", the system incentivizes him to ask, "how do I build games that people want to play".
This may slow progress, but is that such a bad thing if we're going fast in the wrong direction? The goal is to trade a bit of speed for a sustainable way of being.