It’s surprising how often during a discussion about this economic model that I get met with the words “Oh, so it’s socialism”. If the listener is socialism-friendly, they think they know what I’m going to say, and if they’re not socialism-friendly, they’re terrified of appearing a Communist, so in both cases, they stop listening. If you look up Socialism, about the only thing rigidly attributed to it is that the State owns the “means of production” (capital; things like a steel mill). Consider the following comparison of the capitalist, the socialist, and the “profitless free market” point of view, regarding the ownership of the means of production.
(more…)Money Supply
Commercial banks (the places where you and I bank) and the central bank (the Federal Reserve, in the US) both participate as needed in maintaining the money supply. Some people take this to mean that banks decide how much money there is in the country, which could be considered either true or false, depending on what one means by “money”. I’ll put it plainly: banks aren’t deciding how much wealth there is in the country, because the workforce does that by producing output. Banks are deciding how many dollars there are in the country, the units by which we measure that wealth.
(more…)Inflation and Deflation
Let’s discuss the true nature of the relationship between money supply and inflation/deflation. Imagine an island inhabited by a handful of people. They all work at the coconut tree farm, tending and harvesting coconuts and putting them in the barn for later purchase. For each day’s work, they get a seashell which they take home and put in their sock drawer. This is their island’s currency, which they will later use to buy coconuts.
(more…)A Thought Experiment About Money
The internet is littered with talk about the future of money. There’s fervor about how Universal Basic Income will solve all of our problems. There’s concern about what we’re all going to do for money when automation does away with our jobs. There’s vague talk about how post-scarcity is right around the corner and money soon won’t matter anymore. These statements indicate an incomplete understanding of what money is and how it works.
(more…)Gravity 2.0: Length Contraction Reconsidered
In the first iteration of the gravity paper, I expressed some skepticism of the concept of length contraction. It seemed like such an ad hoc, shoehorned addition to relativity, that it appeared lazy and desperate. The justification for the concept makes perfect sense, at least from the perspective of the non-aether crowd, but I wasn’t sold on it. On taking a closer look at my own theory, I began to see support for (a modified version of) it, as well as a mechanical explanation for it.
(more…)What is Money?
People say things like “I think money is…” as if money isn’t universally understood. Rest assured, money is and has to be unambiguously and precisely defined, whether you grasp the definition or not. The whole world can’t be simultaneously participating in a system of measuring wealth if the system doesn’t have very specific rules. We won’t be able to address problems with money until we’re talking about it accurately and concretely.
(more…)Particle Interactions
Physics at large assumes that all matter, even at the subatomic level, interacts gravitationally. Prevailing theory is that even though two lone protons have an incredibly strong electrostatic repulsion, they also at the same time have an incredibly weak gravitational attraction. Whether this has been experimentally verified with certainty or is just taken for granted, I don’t know. It kind of makes me wonder: how much about particle interaction has been taken for granted?
(more…)Gravity Paper: the Good Parts
I’ve read enough fringe material on the internet to know the similarities between most of the well-meaning but usually worthless crap out there and my own theory of gravity. It’s about thirty pages of fanciful speculation, twenty-six illustrations, and almost no math. The passerby audience for that is very select, and I doubt it includes any trained physicists. They have reputations to uphold, and chalkboards to weaponize.
(more…)Blockchain
The economic model presented here is perfectly suited for implementation on blockchain. Using blockchain to replace banks is actually a very minor change in the way things are already done. Blockchain is only a ledger or recording device that keeps track of who has what money, and who has given what to whom. Thats really all banks have been doing themselves, while charging interest (labor) as compensation for performing that service.
(more…)Unemployment Explained and Eliminated
In my explanation of a classless economy, I suggested that unemployment may be directly caused by the uneven exchange of labor hours. Here is an explanation of how that is exactly the case. For discussion, consider an economy consisting of four people who only need three goods: food, shelter, and clothing. Due to the degree of availability of food, and the wear and tear the environment puts on the rudimentary shelter and clothing they are able to provide themselves, it is generally understood that each inhabitant will have to spend 2 hours a day every day working on each of his or her own needs for food, shelter and clothing.
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