Never been one to let the carrier drop

One of the things I find frustrating about the current crop of politicians is that none of them are addressing root causes.

In particular, I think me and Bernie agree about the end goals. But most of what he’s saying are repeated band aids on symptoms of the problems with our resource allocation system. He’s not talking root causes. Raising the minimum wage is a example of a temporary band aid. The politicians should be talking about how our economic system can not accurately represent reality – by definition, money as we’ve currently conceived of it is a zero sum game. And reality is *NOT* a zero sum game.

Money is supposed to be, as far as I can tell, a medium for making our resource allocation system work – it’s supposed to model value. Now, I’ve already talked about the fact that any time we print more money, everyone is convinced the money is worth less, even though most people would agree that the amount of value available to us increases every year. Also, different resources have different values to people at different times in ways that are in no way related to the flow of money.

I still insist that if we have empty houses and homeless people, if we have people being paid not to grow food and people starving, we have a resource allocation system that is failing and we should be looking at how to improve it. But making laws about the minimum wage won’t do any long-term good – all it will do is slide around the prices of things. As a temporary band-aid, it’s a good step, but we should be talking and thinking about the underlying flow of resources. We’re at a point, technology wise, where we can track every kilowatt hour, every skilled man hour in every category, every gram of metal, every resource. By looking at those numbers, we could make budgets that actually made sense – instead of budgeting in dollars, for example, we could budget in doctor-hours and MRI-hours and lab-hours when talking about whether we can or can not afford to do health care for everyone. We can also look realistically at the costs involved in *not* doing health care for everyone – lost man-hours of work, lost creativity, and things like that. We can also look at the overhead-hours – the hours wasted doing incredibly dumb or even hurtful things. We can look at how much a eviction really costs us, for example, and realize how stupid we’re all being.

Analyzing root causes is important. more on this later.

You know, I’m really curious how much overhead our resource allocation system tracking some things adds. I’ve talked about how much cheaper it might be to run the city bus if we didn’t collect fares (and have to deal with keeping the collection system working, and taking the money to the bank, and counting it, and accounting..) but another, even more obvious example of how could this possibly make sense occured to me.

Why do we meter power?

How much does it add to the cost of running the power grid to have people doing disconnects? How much does a disconnect cost when it ruins resources (food), sometimes kills people (disconnects in the winter)? How much does the power meter itself cost? How about the collections department? Isn’t there something better these people can being with their time than having a job making other people’s lives worse?

We seem to have more or less agreed that most people in the USA (I’d say 95%) want large amounts of energy delivered via copper. Why not just make it a government service – no charge, it’s part of your taxes – and run it to be as efficient as possible? We’d still need to measure usage over large areas, and shut off people doing obnoxiously stupid things – but I’m fairly sure we’d save a lot of resources..

One of our long term goals, as a race, if we want to continue to exist, should be to whenever possible not *consume* resources that are not renewable, and to encourage the rewewing of resources. I’ve talked numerous times about how fracking renders clean water polluted beyond the ability to easily recover it – that in fact once water has been used for fracking it is no longer part of our usable water pool. Now, I would hope that common sense would tell everyone on the planet that water, being the #2 requirement for our type of life after air containing oxygen, is the most valuable liquid on the planet. However, as far as I can tell, that is not the common consensus despite it appearing to me to be a obvious truth.

We have learned.. the hard way, sadly, after much destruction of value.. that we shouldn’t cut down forests unless we plant and maintain new ones – this is the only way that our children’s children can still be loggers if they want to be, or indeed have anything made out of wood. We are slowly beginning to realize that we should not suck dry every oil and water resource on the planet – however, the question is, will we realize that we need to stop before our children’s children end up living in a bizarre dystopia where there are no resources aside from what they can mine from our trash?

Sadly, the current resource allocation system is at the root of all of this. Products are made, rather than to be durable, to be as cheap as possible. This is a decision that looks like it makes sense from a “money” viewpoint but actually makes no sense at all when you put on your “value” glasses. To the extent that we can, we should be building everything that involves resources that are even remotely scarce to last through so that our children’s children can be more wealthy than we are – rather than, as is currently the case, leaving the question open as to whether humanity will even exist 500 years down the road.

Now, if we’re all hypervised, this may not matter, because some diety or hypervisor operator may step in and set things right. However, at the moment we have no clear and obvious communications from anyone who might happen to be running the universe, and the majority world religion has a number of enormous gaping flaws that makes one question deeply whether it was written by a mind more enlightened than ours.

So, more and more I am liking the idea of a bucketed currency.

One of the big reasons why is that politicians (especially right wingers, but politicians in general) like to talk about how they ‘can’t afford to do things’. One big reason for this is that our current rather broken, not to mention stupid economic system doesn’t actually keep track of the resources we have at all. Therefore, when we, for example, say that we “can’t afford” national healthcare, the truth is, we don’t even know how much it would cost! Everything gets squashed into a floating point value we call “money”, and the “money” to real resource conversion is arbitrary and generally driven by things like scarcity. It’s not a value that indicates the real value of the resource, or else fracking would never have gotten off the ground. (Any 3 year old can tell you water is more valuable than any petrochemical).

I know that it would be a major endeavor to create a bucketed currency system. I’m talking about having separate buckets to track skilled man hours in every major skill, every type of metal, energy, transit cost, etc. I’m talking about tracking a hundred thousand buckets on every product. This is something that is well within the technology we use today, but it’s a rather radical shift from the “We turn everything into one price and call it money” system that we currently use.

However, the only way you know if you can afford national healthcare, for example, is if you know how many man-hours you have of people skilled in the medical arts, and about how many people are going to need those skills. This is again kindergarden stuff, but it’s not something that seems to be widely acknowledged.

“But, with a bucketed currency system, how would we know what people could afford?”. That’s a very good question, and not one I have a great answer for yet. However, well written software could at the very least ensure that everyone had a place to live and food to eat. Yes, I’m talking about communism. I think communism could have worked if they’d had better tools to use when they were creating it.

Of course, then the next question is, why would *I* want this? I’m in the top 2% of my industry, skill wise, and I get paid very well because of it. On the other paw, I feel awful every time another friend tells me about being evicted, or about struggling to pay their medical bills. As near as I can tell, almost everyone out there is hurting. Even the 1% – at the point at which they become the 1%, they no longer have any idea who they can trust – who is really their friend, and who is just out for their money. You will note that I will not sign up to *BE* the 1%. I’m fairly sure if it was a goal of mine, I could do it. It’s not. But while I see us having made amazing strides in technology, I see a world where a whole lot of people are stressed, scared, and unhappy, be they at the bottom of the ladder or the top. And I’d really, really like us to find ways to fix that. I think that a ‘everybody eats’ policy would go a long way towards that, and I think that it’s very doable.

TL;DR=Conservatives appear to me to think that what defines what we can afford is the number of dollars available, not the amount of food, concrete, steel, and other real resources available, and that is a problem

For more about this, see http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2316

So, I’ve been thinking lately about how what money is worth – and what liberals and conservatives believe is possible – represents our faith in ourselves. When conservatives talk about how there’s not enough money to solve problem X – where problem X might be homelessness, hunger, health care – or whatever – essentially what they are saying is that they don’t have faith in humanity’s ability to come up with enough resources to solve these issues. In a previous post, I discussed the dichotomy between value and money, and explained how we often destroy the former in our chase for the latter because we have a corrupted and confused idea about what money is and what it represents. I’ve also talked about how in order to accurately abstract the value available to humanity, the government should be printing and handing out large amounts of money every year, because the amount of value available to us increases every year, often by leaps and bounds as we discover new things. In a future article, I will discuss how certain types of patent hoarding destroy value and make us all poorer so that a few corperations can garner more money, and why that’s a undesirable thing. But in this article, I am going to talk about the whole idea that we can’t do things like universal health care because “we can’t afford it”.

The conservative approach to anything that involves giving resources to people is “we can’t afford it”, with the automatic assumption that the conservative will somehow be less wealthy if those lazy welfare moms get a free ice cream sundae. Now, in fact, we probably can afford it – with all we know about automation and science, and all we’re learning, we could probably feed everyone, clothe everyone, give them all free houses, etc. If our goal were to give everyone everything tangible they wanted, we probably could give them that experience. (more on that later) Whether it would be good for them is another, more complicated question, because many people have a need to draw self-esteem from their jobs, from the feeling that they’re doing something useful.

I suspect if you told a lot of people that it was possible for us to feed all the hungry, house all the homeless, etc, without taking any wealth from their pocket at all, their response would still be that we shouldn’t do it – “Because I had to work for this, if they get it free, it makes my work less meaningful and it’s not fair” is one possible explanation of this, while another one is “But if we didn’t give them free food, we could give me more.”. Conservatives, please contact me and tell me I’m wrong if I am, so I can update this and learn more about how you see the world.

I would argue that the simple knowledge that there are people starving and cold and homeless makes us all less wealthy, and that some people have not taken some factors into account.

Now, I’m going to digress from that for a minute to state something. I think everyone deserves everything they want, except insofar as the things they want are hurting other people. I even think people deserve to have the *experience* of hurting other people if they want it – just that no other people should actually be hurt. I think this is technologically achievable and I think it’s desirable.

Now on the other paw, there are those who say that we only appriciate the things we earn. I think it’s possible that this is somewhat true on earth but I think it is the result of our culture – I do not think our culture does a good job of programming us to be healthy and happy – in fact I think it often does a good job of programming us *not* to be healthy and happy. I think it would be possible to build a set of beliefs under which we could be given things and appriciate them even though we didn’t have to work for them – and I think this is a desirable thing to do, because I think – yes, really – we should be trying to give everyone everything they want.

Anyway, back to the question of “we can’t afford it.” Many times, our need to not take care of our fellow man so we can feel good about how they aren’t getting “something for nothing” ultimately costs us far more in real value than just giving them what they need would. I’ve heard of cases where people have looked at the cost of having homeless vs. the cost of sheltering them, and the cost in dollars was actually higher to keep them homeless (see http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/09/24/canada-homelessness_n_1908876.html). Now, I suppose we could just actually say “well, if you’re homeless, you don’t deserve to live” and just execute them and/or provide no services at all. However, I’d *really* rather not live on the planet that would make that decision.

Often, in the case of theft, it would be far cheaper just to give the criminals what they wanted to steal than to keep them in jail, for example. But we’re horrified by the idea that someone could get something for nothing – even though, as automation and the number of people wanting jobs goes up, we have far more hands to build things than we have things that need built.

For some of this, I blame the particular set of morals that our modern world espouses. I think the idea that we deserve to suffer is wound all throughout several of our religions, and I think it’s deeply flawed. We *don’t* deserve to suffer. We *choose* to suffer, as a race and as individuals, and to some extent we have not yet figured out how *not* to suffer, and we do deserve the freedom to *choose* to suffer, but we also deserve the freedom to choose not to.

Anyway, back to the whole money thing. Part of why I am a left-winger is I have optimism, and hope. I believe that we *can* afford to treat everyone well, that human ingenuity and creativity is more than up to the task of making us all wealthy, healthy, loved, and well cared for. I believe that the reason it looks like, on paper, that we can’t is that we have a system of accounting that is fatally flawed, and I think we should all be holding the people who are upholding that system accountable for that, as well as educating them as to why their system fails to abstract value and is keeping us all far more poor in real value than we should be.

Of course part of the problem is that the issue at hand can get attached to theology – the honest and deeply held belief that people don’t deserve anything unless they work for it, that people should have to work harder than they are, that the poor are somehow not good enough to be anything more than poor, that they’re all gaming the system and they deserve to suffer for that.

I did have a good conversation with a member of my extended family which opened my eyes to the one glaring problem with the welfare state – that generally people need something to make them feel useful (as I’ve said, I think we could fix this culturally so people realized they were a positive force just by being them, and having friends, and living) and so people on welfare have self-esteem issues that result from them not feeling like they are useful. And I won’d deny that I would probably go nuts if I didn’t have some sort of work to do to occupy my time (although as has been mentioned many times before I really wish that that work was more music and less IT)

Note that this article has been edited from the original, which I feel was bringing in issues that are irrelevant to the discussion.

Now that we’ve talked about that, perhaps it is time to look at Resource Allocation As A Group

In my previous post, I explained a few things about my views surrounding money.. now I’m going to do a stream-of-consciousness on people with a high (>$10 million) net worth.

Please note this is based on my current understanding of the reality model I’m experiencing, which may be flawed.

We have a fixed amount of capitol in the system. We add too it sometimes, but not very much nor very fast, because whenever we add a lot, a bunch of people not in possession of all the facts think it means the capitol is worth less, instead of realizing that it’s because we’re actually generating wealth out of thin air all the time – new ideas, new intellectual property, new ways of getting things done – and new children who will grow up to create and build more wealth. Because we’re becoming more wealthy in real-world things, we need to print more money to match, or things are gonna break.

Because we have a fixed amount of capitol, it’s important to *keep it moving*. If it stops in one computer register (i.e. some billionare’s bank account or a stock in the market), it’s no longer a available resource in the system for facilitating getting things done. People can’t pay wages with money they don’t have. In addition, the value of money sitting in a bank account beyond a person’s conceivable personal needs is *negative*, because the reduced amount of money floating around ‘live’, migrating, making transactions happen will result in less of those transactions occuring and those transactions often generate value. (Think of the inventor who doesn’t have enough money for a lab vs. the one who does). Holding onto money beyond your personal needs *reduces it’s value* by a real-world, food-and-drink-and-housing-and-entertainment definition of value.

TL:DR=People are making decisions based on dollars when they should be considering the real value – concrete and steel and the like – involved.

I’m not really sure how to write this, so I’m just going to do a stream of conciousness writing and hopefully it will capture some of the ideas I have.

First of all, I have concluded that some of what the department of defense does is in essence a entitlement for people who like to hurt people. So, if you are one of those madly anti-entitlement people, you really should be upset about the DoD. There’s no way that we need the level of military technology we have. It’s a gift for the DoD contractors, pure and simple. Nor do we pay the actual people who put their lives on the line very well – so it’s not even a entitlement for the group of people who one could argue deserve it for putting themselves in harm’s way in the interest of implementing the decisions of our government. It’s pork for the people who want to make a bigger bomb, a better rifle, a larger aircraft carrier, even though we already have a vastly larger army than anyone who would conceivably want to pick a fight with us.

Now I must mention in all fairness that the DoD is not all bad. My father worked there for a while, and every project he ever chose to share with me that he had chosen to support was one that generated value for the human race, that made us all richer. But people who make bombs, and guns, are making tools for destroying value.

Beyond that, however, I think that our culture has a very sick idea about money. We think it’s worth something – that it’s more important than people. Money is our tool, but instead of us using it it has come to use us.

Money is not value. Value is what money buys – and what we want. No sane person really wants money – they want value. You can’t eat dollars, and they’d make a lousy house – but dollars buy food and shelter, which you can eat and live in. However, money can’t *accurately* abstract value, for a whole host of reasons:

1) Some types of value are forever and infinite. Once a great book is penned, or a song or movie is laid down on tape, that content is now ours, now and forever. With our current level of technology, distributing and copying it cost fractions of a penny. Using money to try and pay for that content is having a finite resource (dollars) try to chase a infinite one (content). In terms of real value – things like great movies and works of art and automation that works and whatnot – the human race is far, far, far wealthier than it ever has been. In terms of minds and hands to create amazing things, the human race is wealthy indeed. But the amount of money in the world has not kept pace with our wealth, and things in the economic world are coming unglued because of it.

2) Some types of value can be destroyed, but we do not attempt to match that with money. When a war happens, we should really take a bunch of money, and burn it, because we’re destroying the value that it represents. (Although, for some wars – WWII, for example – we also need to mint a bunch more for the scientific discoveries that were made by necessity to cope with the war). In a recent war, we burned one of the oldest libraries on the planet.. that ought to be a huge pile of bills thrown on a bonfire somewhere.

3) Some types of value are multiplicative – that is, they create other value. Automation is a great example. Once discovered, automation is in category #1, but it also enables us to get more resources for less man-hours. This makes us all wealthier, but it can also make that wealth inaccessible to the people who just lost their job to a perl script

We need to make sure we – and especially our children – see money not as value, but as a symbol that represents value – and understand that it can only work properly if it accurately maps to the amount of value our race has. (And probably not even then! ;-)). Deciding not to give health care to people – live minds and hands that create the value money is based on – because of our debt – is in essence increasing our debt. We’re destroying real value by letting those people suffer and die, and we ought to be destroying money to match the loss of value that results.

Whenever a hardworking immigrant walks “illegally” over our borders, our nation becomes wealthier by the value that person can create, be it fixin’ cars or pickin’ strawberries.. and we ought to be printing money to match. Whenever someone leaves, we ought to be burning money to match the loss of their creative power and energy.

What’s most important is that the people making decisions.. the presidents, and kings, and governers, and senators.. understand that money isn’t value, but a symbol that abstracts it. Whenever we make a decision that reduces the amount of value in the world in order to increase the amount of money in it, we are demonstrating stupidity on a colossal scale, and the tool is using us instead of us using the tool.

What scares me is that NO WHERE in the recent government budget discussions did I hear anyone talk about this! And I see many people – mostly conservatives – who seem to be under the delusion that the money *is* the value, and use this argument to justify treating their neighbors and friends horribly for the sake of dollars. This to me is the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility – letting the tool use you, instead of you using the tool.

Similarly, I see liberals who think that enough money can somehow will a resource that’s scarce into existence, without having to come up with some way to get it. While I talk about giving everyone everything, I do in fact have concrete plans (more on this later) on how we would do that. But I have heard liberals talk about shutting down all oil pipelines – right now – without considering how we would then get food given that our transit network runs on oil.

For some of my evolving thoughts beyond this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?cat=13

For more about this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346

NOTE: If you got here via http://valuenotmoney.sheer.us, please note that is a series of essays – please follow the link at http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346 for the next one.

I feel like if there are places available to live, and people living under overpasses who would rather be living in houses, we’ve failed. I don’t care if those people like to drink, or don’t feel like waking up at 9 am.

I feel like if there are people wanting to travel, and seats empty on airplanes, then we’ve failed. I don’t care how many bits are set in the registers in some computer that pretend to be their account balance.

I feel like if there are people who want to work, and things that need doing, and those people aren’t able to find jobs then we’ve failed. I don’t care about the registers in some computer that pretend to be some corperation’s bank balance

I feel like if there are people who want to learn, and seats left at the university, then we’ve failed. I don’t care about either the bits in the register that are the university’s account balance or the bits in the register that are the individual’s.

I understand that the value of money is largely tied into our beliefs about it. I also understand that there is someone who would rather be living indoors than under a street overpass, but who would also rather be writing music than software at this point. So I feel like you (plural, whoever’s in charge around here) have failed me. Or maybe I have failed me, because maybe I do this to myself out of a lack of faith that you would pay me to do what I want to do. On the other hand, I’ve dipped a feeler in the water in the form of my tunecore account, and money has not come in in droves despite the fact that one of the songs I cowrote with Jessica has a million downloads off my web server. So someone out there is cheating. Okay, enough, stop. The money thing is stupid anyway, and most of us know it if we stop and think about it. Really, I am telling you to grow up, whoever is hoarding all the money. Get that stuff in circulation. Stocks = meaningless. Let’s crash the system, and force it to reboot in a way that fits the earlier statements in this blog post. Chris, aside from the drugs to make everyone docile, This Perfect Day was a fucking awesome system. Why isn’t it here today?

And hoarders.. of which I’m one and I speak to myself as well.. give it away. I’ve done it, over and over, and you will feel sooo much better knowing it’s in circulation and being used in the ways it was meant to, instead of in your way. Living in the ebay world means you don’t *have* to hold onto everything, because you can always get what you need when you need it. Aside from the issue of money – which, as I’ve said above, needs fixed and I keep waiting to see someone with the clout to do something about it stand up and admit that it’s all just bits in computer registers, and what’s needed is better software and less of a “You must work to deserve to eat” attitude.

Joe McCartney would have my balls.. except this is my time, not his.

So, as most of you have noticed, money is broken. Various people have different theories on how it’s broken, why it’s broken, or what we should do to fix it, but only a few billionares actually think what we’ve got works well.

From time to time, I post posts about particularly broken things (like margin accounts). Today, I’m going to point out a set of ratios – the money : human time available, money : physical resources available, money : information available, and money : energy available ratios.

The one I’m going to focus on first is the money : information available ratio, because it is the one that is the most demonstratably broken. When people create new intellectial property, they are presumably creating value for humanity. When a artist records a new album or a programmer writes a new application, they get paid for it. What’s interesting about this is that it seems like a lot of our prized monetary systems – like inflation – are based on the idea that there should really be a fixed amount of money in the world, and it should be tied to physical resources. i.e. your $1 buys you 0.0001 ounces of gold. The problem with this is that when people create things that are all, or even mostly, ideas, it *breaks*. They’ve just created a new resource. It’s like they synthesized that 0.0001 ounce of gold out of nothing! In order for it to work out okay, you really need to inject more money into the system, *without* inflation, to line up with the more stuff (information, movies, albums, whatever) that now exists.

Next, the money : energy available ratio. This one goes several ways. We’re spending money to buy stored energy (i.e. gasoline, NG, etc) and to buy energy converted from the sun, wind, falling water, etc. But whenever someone insists on generating energy via some direct-from-the-sun conversion method, they again mess with the whole system.  Again, it’s like they’re synthesizing more gold. We’re supposed to have a certain amount of energy for sale, all stored as oil here and there, and there they go demonstrating the ability to produce unlimited amounts of energy with just a little bit of technology.

Next, the money : human time available ratio. This is where things get *really* broken. The assumption in america seems to be that every one who wants to be able to buy things and eat and live indoors and the like should either A: work, B: have rich parents, or C: be disabled. In general, it seems like people think there’s something immoral about not wanting to work. This would make sense if we didn’t have a *shortage* of real jobs. But the reality is, a lot of our jobs are makework – shuffling papers around, system overhead caused by the monetary system itself – or work that a really simple robot could do, and probably will do soon. Part of what we need is to embrace that in a world with 6 billion people, *not everyone needs to work*. Many hands make light work, say the Chinese, and by all indications they’re right. Especially when those many hands are connected to many minds that can program computers to do the work for them. 😉 However, the current system makes it very difficult for those who don’t work to continue, for example, living indoors. This is, in fact, dumb.

Next, the money : physical resources available. You can make a good case that right now, there is a finite amount of stuff – raw resources, metals, oil for plastics, whatever – in the world. Also a finite amount of land. However, space exploration and nanotechnology could both change that, if we wanted them to. If we put the kind of energy into discovering new ways of generating wealth that we put into blowing each other up over the existing wealth, we could all be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. What we’ve got now is a system for resource allocation that has the government paying farmers to not grow food while people dig through trash cans in order to feed themselves. It’s broken, and it really needs stripped out and replaced.