Decentralized Planned Economies

Decentralized Planned Economies - The Building Blocks of Society

When I say planned economies, most people shudder. But when I throw decentralized on it, some eyebrows start to raise.

Let’s try this again. 

Families - The Building Blocks of Society

Now, that sounds like a good American statement, doesn’t it? Actually, I don’t think you’ll get a lot of push back from anywhere in the world.

Unless your family wasn’t very good, of course.

Something I keep looking at: the 1950s US is continually used memetically to indicate an ideal society to return to. This is interesting to me, because life wasn’t actually better back then. But what was better?

The answer: Predictability. You could predict that you’d be able to get a job locally that would pay you enough to live in your area and your economic growth would match the company’s growth. Everyone was aligned on goals, because, as society found out in the early part of the century, if you didn’t take care of your workers, they would simply destroy your shit.

That’s too expensive, so the economists at the top decided that maybe people are more valuable than they thought.

This led us into the idyllic 1950s US, where you were guaranteed success, as long as you were part of society’s script about what’s valuable. In other words, if you were a white male who wanted to raise a family and build your life around that, your success was guaranteed.

Then we got computers, and everything broke. Ideally, the world would have continued to get more predictable for more groups of people beyond just white men. Instead, it got less predictable for everyone who didn’t have money to have people help them create stability.

In my research, I’ve realized that computers have let us raise the level of abstraction with which we can predict the world. And in doing so, we’ve created systems that push people into predictable boxes that they can measure. We’ve been turning people into computers that are trying to outrun an economy that is getting faster and faster each day.

I’ve given up on government to solve anything at this point, so I decided we can simply build better systems that they can adopt or not.

The economy is broken because it doesn’t actually value what is valuable right now. It values the perception of being valuable more than it does being valuable, because people are more disconnected from what everyone else knows than ever before. We can’t judge the quality of something we don’t understand.But the gift that the free market gives us is the ability to put risk on the books and make money on it.

That’s the key to money. It’s all about taking risks and paying off riskier decisions. It’s all about gambling.

As an individual, you are expected to have enough money saved to predict an unpredictable world. Oh, and also save for retirement. Don’t forget your health insurance, is that disease you just picked up covered?

This is bullshit. We’ve got the information about what’s needed and money is infinite. 

It’s time to start being humans.

So, I’m taking the idea of families, and what makes them so valuable, and I’m building it into an institution in society.

That’s the goal of a decentralized planned economy. You are able to own property and have predictable outcomes by being a functional part of society. We shouldn’t need everyone to pretend to compete globally. That makes communication harder, incentives less aligned, and cultural clashes that aren’t needed. 

You shouldn’t need a PhD in Math to figure out your future. You should make your best guesses with the support of society and get the ability to update your understanding of the world when you need to, without putting your entire future at risk.

The mark of an intelligent society is that it spends more and more money because as you learn, there’s more you should be spending to help understand the world and your place in it. We’ve got a society that is learning and evolving faster than ever before and we’ve sandbagged it.

Here’s the blueprint for a system that works for decentralized planned economies:

Part 1: Have predictability about income and monthly burn. 

As an individual, this can be difficult, because of the reliance on wages or entrepreneurship. As a community, this is actually pretty easy because it collectively smooths out the uncertainty of life in reward for stability of everyone in the community. This means that people are able to contribute to the community without worrying about the economic reward. The reward is the growth of the community.

Part 2: Have a memory. 

This is the part that has almost killed me so far. There’s no memory to the economy, so even though I’m a software engineer that advanced to a maximum salary of $175K, I have no support for pursuing my own thing. And when my savings ran out, I started backing out of society. I did less and less outside of the house. I simply couldn’t afford to participate, and then there’s the shame around not having money. The feeling of turning down the invitation from your son’s friend to join them out to eat at a restaurant after the swim meet. The feeling of giving up season tickets to the Columbus Crew and knowing that there’s a waitlist now. The feeling of living in a rental that is starting to fall down around us without the resources to change any of it.

Part 3: Pool Assets to generate liquidity

This part is actually the key, because it uses the things that are valuable to generate the money needed to make the assets more valuable over time. This means that things like cars and houses will generate the income they need in order to maintain and improve them. This maximizes their future value by minimizing negative possibilities and maximizing possible future resale value by allowing changes when needed without requiring the money in a personal bank account.

Part 4: Create a growth lane

Nothing sucks worse than trying to go faster because your economic situation needs to and being told you have to wait your turn or get more experience. We need to focus on an educational component that helps people grow and explore the world, while giving them a place to fall back to without worrying about what happens if they do. All I want is a chance to test my ideas against the best thinkers so we can focus on the implementation. People are dying and I’m shouting the answer from the rooftops only to be ignored because I don’t look like the right kind of person that would have the answer. So I’ve got to go against my preferences and call attention to myself in order to get a platform. I need to create a performance when I would rather simply talk to people and hash out ideas. That’s the world we’ve created, because the other growth lanes are blocked by egos with outdated understandings of the world and outdated systems.

In overcomplicating the world, we’ve created one in which we are constantly being ripped off by people who aren’t actually adding value to our lives. The future is about predictability and stability while having more space to explore. We’ve hit abundance and we need to start thinking about a future that has humans in it, because right now we’re optimizing them out of the economy.

I was extremely lucky. I grew up in a stable family where learning was prioritized and highly valued. I’m a straight white male who followed the script I was given. If you want success, you go to college, get a degree, get a job, get married, have kids, etc.

As I looked at my salary and how it was growing much faster than the salaries of people in my town, and I wasn’t able to afford the things I needed/wanted to do, I started examining the system and found it wanting. And when I realized everything was broken, the economy was killing me, and I saw a new way forward, I was lucky because my family helped me keep a roof over my family’s head when the economy kept trying to tell me I was worthless, or actually worse than that, a leech on society.

The system was designed for people like me to succeed. And I’m telling the world it’s broken because I can’t succeed in the system that the world told me was guaranteed success.

Now it’s time to patch it with decentralized planned economies. This is how we can beat the over-financialization of the world and restore society to one focused on how humans can prosper together instead of using math to justify human suffering that doesn’t need to happen.