There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.

Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy.

You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money.

You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse.

My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it.

Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind.

(Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)

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monknomo 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

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OkayPhysicist 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement.

It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.

Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.

All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.

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monknomo 10 hours ago | parent [-]

you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.

And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger

	▲	OkayPhysicist 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Any solution needs the damping function to be intrinsic to the system, rather than tacked on as policy. Policy ends up being dictated by the powerful, so if your system's only check against runaway wealth accumulation is policy, eventually your guardrails will be demolished. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But eventually, self-propelled wealth wins. There are models of currency that try to include such dampening intrinsically (Tankies love talking about various experimental forms of currency as "labor vouchers" to try and sidestep the "moneyless" pitch of Communism), but I've yet to see one that really addresses the "wealth begets wealth, hierarchy begets hierarchy" problem.

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scottyah 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.

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pixl97 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?

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6510 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.