Impact

You’d definitely get a lot more productivity than at the other extreme, but not without a cost. Now instead of equal resource distribution you get distribution based on a power law – a few people will have most of the planet’s resources while most people will have significantly less. The real problem though is that the market can’t fix the problem of negative externalities; so you have some people at the top who made incredible contributions to society, but others may be there simply because they figured out ways to offload a lot of costs onto society to get to the top.

But is this really the best solution we can come up with? Why should there be a tradeoff between productivity and fairness, or between self interest and the public interest? Well, there may be a better approach, which doesn’t involve merely moving up or down the scale of self-interest vs. public interest. Maybe we can optimize for both… (Part II)

The mental model for this approach starts with zooming out – like, all the way out – and thinking how we got to where we are from the very humble beginnings of, let’s say the Stone Age. We have all this information today at our fingertips, all the incredible technology and modern amenities, but it’s not like we have any more resources today than people had during the Stone Age. The resources on our planet remained the same, but our reality is totally different.

Now think what life in the year 2024 would have looked like if people from the Stone Age forward adopted different approaches to distributing resources. If technological progress had been just 10% quicker from the time of the Stone Age, the world in 2024 would have looked more like 2524.

And that may be the best intuition to how money – and therefore access to resources – should be distributed in the economy… (Part III)

Working on /impact ||


Abundance Economy book: book.abundance.id