a world UI to update and fix capitalism
Primary elements will form an interface in which we can
- aggregate what we really want - all of us, and go far beyond just needs
- reverse-engineer that pooled "basket" of needs, wants and desires
- design best ways to achieve that basket
- call ourselves to the new set of work needed to implement the designs
- align our training to be able to do that new set of work
- implement support systems to facilitate being able to switch to and to be effective in that new set of work
- align necessary resources
- make what we have determined we really want.
End world hunger. Get paid and work only as much as really needed. Live our best possible lives. Enable such contentment that we no longer have any cause to support any call to war. Stop wasting money on military.
Sunlight bathes the Earth in so much energy that what falls on only a small percentage of the Earth's surface could power every manner of energy consumed today. However, the sun's energy is very diffuse and to successfully harvest enough energy to be usably scalable takes aligning it to be focused. (We haven't done nearly enough to switch to renewables, but there are proof-of-concept collection facilities.)
In the same way, we as world inhabitants, have an incredible amount of power but it is very diffuse. What we buy essentially is a confirmation of what the economy did right, but it is rearview. The economy has to have Supply first for us to Demand, and it's risky to put Supply out - it may or might not get bought. But ultimately, we have to buy goods and services before the economy "knows" (gets affirmative feedback) that it got it right. Until we actually spend our money, we have the power. Analogously, what work we do - pick among job offers, go get training to do a different job, etc. - is a confirmation that the economy is asking for the right work. So we have a power, but as individuals we have little say in "what's out there".
It is entrepreneurs, corporations, businesses, investors and banks (corbs) that have been the socioeconomic entities that have done the focusing of our choices - they take a look at what we have bought up to now, how much money we have, and what we are likely to buy, and then they decide to make (or not make) goods and services going forward to match their guesses. Their survival depends on their guessing right. That entails a lot of risk, stress, waste of product not bought, bankruptcy, etc.
The problem with this model is that corbs have profit as their goal, which would be fine if they were all small such that no one entity could dominate its market. But the endgame of capitalism is monopoly, not utoipa, and with monopoly come some very unpleasant behaviors - the ability to price gouge, buying out and shelving competition, infiltrating and controling the writing of laws governing how the corbs operate, SLAPPs, etc. So we need a way to align ourselves so good things happen for people rather than predatory profits for monolithic corbs.
To that end I am calling on you to consider helping to start an open source project in which (and this list is surely missing other needed elements)
- people dynamically register how they would spend a $150,000 salary
- creative/idea folks would input new ideas and improvements that would be incorporated into what people could choose
- systems architects would participate and design the infrastructure to make what people say they want
- in style of GoFundMe, purchase the resources to build the infrastructure
- trainers would upload training courses to work the jobs entailed to build and run the infrastructure
- manager types would coach, include, inspire and help align folks as they choose how and where to participate
- there is a reward feedback protocol for folks who participate more, whether time, talent or resources, in helping to achieve what is wanted
A major endpoint of this system is to get the economic and civilization horse in front of the cart (true demand), rather than today's supply-side push way of doing business currently, where • corbs best-guess at what to provide that we may or may not want (based on what money we have rather than what capacity the economy as a whole is capable of), • that eventually tends towards yielding huge profits for a few owners rather than what is best for people, that tends towards misusing world resources, • corbs provide jobs that squander folks' time and talent and are convenient for the corbs, • corbs may find tastes changing or better ways of making or serving, which makes them need to change on such a large scale that resulting layoffs leave huge numbers of people unable to realign as fast as the needs for different work, and • now so many people being laid off, so little-to-no money in their pockets, the economy suddenly no longer has the direction of what those people's needs/wants/desires are because those people no longer can buy what they used to.
The intent is not to just outright give people $150,000/year, but to leverage people's concept of what money is today - what it buys, what people get paid, etc. - as a value metric to put the bar not just higher, but more accurately determine people's true preferences, both of what they want and what work they can and will do. Having this we can eliminate risk and know where and how to expand all we do and make. Should there not be enough of a specific thing that people have indicate they'd like if they had more money, we don't jack the price, we increase economies of scale to not only make more but make it more effectively and bring the price down so that people end up achieving above $150,000 of value (or they work shorter hours and still achieve a level of life far above where they are now).
Regarding "how they would spend a $150,000 salary" - this will take some work and getting used to. It's essentially budgeting on steroids. But in addition to aiming for economies of scale, we want to also incorporate granular customization as much as possible so what any one person, when inputing a want, can customize as much as possible. As an example, think of buying jeans. Let's not just ramp up how many jeans of generic sizes to make, but establish a fitting system (BAM local fitting rooms with laser body topography?) to allow everyone to put in for jeans that will fit perfectly. End result: we make all the jeans we collectively want, without frustrating out of stock or overstock that has to be discarded.
Consider this: There is enough food grown that everyone in the world could be fed. It's just there are so many who are poor and can't buy the available food. And they are poor because they don't have a way to participate effectively in the economy. If they were able to know and do jobs that fulfill what we all say we want, they could do far better than just no longer starve.
There'd need to be a slightly different funding and reward system for R&D. Currently either R&D is done either at universities and the students and professors with successful ideas jump out to start companies to milk the value of their work, or by corbs that then charge prices far higher than cost plus a bit extra for profit. Excellent ideas and hard work of R&D absolutely deserve significant rewards, but reaping many extra millions or billions because an idea is so wanted, bulldozes the fact that their idea or service would be worthless • without 7 billion people in the world to whom they can sell their good or service, • without human legacy providing a knowledge base for any new idea to start from, • if our Earth is destroyed by the very concept of "value of resources" indicating that they think of the Earth as a lemon to be squeezed until dry rather than a billions-of-years old system that is more precarious and interconnected than we appreciate.