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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Alternative to UBI:

Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.

When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.

This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)

In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.

What is the point of renting your resource allocation (let's just call it wealth) to someone else? If you aren't allowed to accumulate wealth, you have to immediately spend it. Whatever you earn, you have to immediately spend, so you might as well have just spent what you rented out. No one can actually borrow anything if no one else can save.

That depends specifically on the resource type being allocated.

Basically you can store value in whatever resource class is not being allocated in this way. For instance, if every citizen receives an allocation of land or energy rights, you can store value as ownership of factory equipment even if you don't own all the land the factory is on.

That proposal reminds me a bit of John Roemer's A Future for Socialism. From Cosma's review:

There is no central planning board, like the Soviet Gosplan, commanding factories to produce so many million tons of steel and size 12 leather boots. Instead, all goods, including labor (land, oddly, is not mentioned) are allocated by markets; there are many banks, making loans at interest to competing firms, who pay dividends to those who own stock in them, and are, quite cold-heartedly, allowed to go bankrupt when bad luck or stupidity force them to it. There is international trade, free in goods, somewhat restricted in capital. Market forces impel firms to efficiency and innovation, at least as much as they do today.

Clearly, a rather old-fashioned marriage, with markets as the bread-winner. Where, then, do we find the socialist better half of the union? Not in the welfare-state provisions (though there is a full set of them, like china), but in the stock market. Stock prices are quoted not in currency but in coupons, issued to citizens on attaining their majority, not convertible to cash, and reverting to the treasury at death. The price of a firm's stock in coupons will, presumably, reflect both the current value of its dividends and expectations about its future performance. Citizens can buy and sell shares in firms directly, or, more plausibly, invest in mutual funds.

In a steady state society (no productivity growth; pseudo-immortality; the marginal birth results in decreased average productivity since existing labor is already deployed to the most productive uses), your proposal seems like a decent approach. I'd prefer something like purchasing a birth license: to have a child, a parent must purchase the right to one with a portion of their allocation, roughly equal to the amount that every person is entitled to at birth. That would require substantial reproductive coercion, but this avoids punishing children for their parents' social irresponsibility. Particularly, the entire point of having a roughly equitable distribution of resources is to avoid immiseration; over time, though, those who have children will become more and more impoverished, and it will pass down through generations. Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths). I'm not convinced the disincentive of causing suffering to their children would prevent those who want them from having children.

Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.

The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.

Stock prices are quoted not in currency but in coupons, issued to citizens on attaining their majority, not convertible to cash, and reverting to the treasury at death. The price of a firm's stock in coupons will, presumably, reflect both the current value of its dividends and expectations about its future performance. Citizens can buy and sell shares in firms directly, or, more plausibly, invest in mutual funds.

I don't understand what this means. In what sense are the shares not convertible to cash? They can be bought and sold and pay dividends. Is this just a ban on stock buybucks? What does that accomplish?

Why pay them in shares in at all? Why not just give them cash with which they can buy the shares?

Finally, why not allow them to pass them on to their children? They'll find other ways to do this anyway and, to the extent that it works, it would discourage investment.

I think the proposal would prevent private individuals from purchasing or selling coupons (simply by making contracts involving those unenforceable) and heavily regulate conversions, mostly focusing on banks. Dividends would be issued from cash flows. Existing companies would fund new investments via cash loans from banks. New companies can either rely on cash loans from banks or on giving up a stake in the business to the banks; once the business reaches a certain size, it would be required to IPO, and owners would get get coupons in exchange for their labor- or cash-derived ownership stake. Banks would then be required to sell any accumulated coupons for cash (this market doesn't really exist; I suppose the government sets the conversion rate between cash and coupon, in line with how much it deems the socially optimal consumption vs investment rate to be).

The benefit of having separate capital and consumption currencies is that one can be treated as basically an inalienable; the only way you lose coupons is bad investments, and you can't be forced by circumstance to give up your claim to public ownership.

I'm not convinced this offers much over regular cash grants every person is entitled to, and it puts a whole lot of faith in banks performing oversight competently, giving investments judiciously, and making their decisions without political considerations.

Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths).

I'm not sure if the math works out that way. I'm envisioning it as follows:

  • Every year, everyone gets +1 allocation point from other people dying

  • Families split their allocation evenly at each birth.

Let's look at several family structures that are stable over generations.

Large young family:

  • Inherit 16 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have children at 20, 22, 24, 26 years old

  • The family has 2 * 16 (inheritance) + 2 * 26 (parent's age) + 6 + 4 + 2 + 0 (children) = 96 points, split six ways = 16 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 96 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 49.4 points during your life

Small young family:

  • Inherit 40 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 20 years old

  • The family has 2 * 40 (inheritance) + 2 * 20 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 120 points, split three ways = 40 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 120 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 90 points during your life

Small old family:

  • Inherit 80 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 40 years old

  • The family has 2 * 80 (inheritance) + 2 * 40 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 240 points, split three ways = 80 points each

  • Live another 60 years, dying at 140 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 106 points during your life

I don't think that a mere doubling of resources is enough to entrench an aristocracy or cast someone into poverty. More permissive inheritance laws could make for stronger effects, but that isn't how I read the proposal.

I was thinking of much longer lifespans, since mitigatedchaos referred to it being developed to deal with pseudo immortality (i.e. only dying by accidents, murder, etc.) Iirc the expected lifespan with those mortality tables is on the order of 1000 years, with a thicker right tail than our current distribution.

Though I'd suspect that even at 1000 years the disparities wouldn't be that worth worrying about. Thinking about it a bit more, only if there were significant feedback processes (larger allocations leading to longer lifespans leading to larger allocations) would my scenario be a risk.

Replace "years" with "decades" and everything else will be the same. The mechanism simply doesn't allow for concentrating allotment the way that we can currently concentrate wealth.

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