The Global Economic Future

There is currently an opportunity to explore a different global economic future than we’ve had until now. I welcome you to spend some time on what that future might look like. Here are some of the topics on my mind:

• How we want to be judged as a society should be considered. Right now, we base this off the the GDP, which doesn’t consider how we treat our most vulnerable. There are many reasons this is not a good model to use, here are five. I would suggest the World Happiness Report is a better metric – although it sounds idealistic, it includes GDP, but also health life expectancy, generousity, social support, freedom to make life choices, perceptions of corruption, and dystopia.

• Which model do we use? Mutual credit is the most appealing, it cuts out the middle men, especially the corruptable middle men. It removes government, federal banks, banks, and corporations in the process. This means this model will be hard to get national adoption, as banks and governments are tightly integrated today, so it would take revolutionary participation from citizens to adopt this at a scale where it become standard, but it can be started on its own independantly.

• A digital option. The benefit of cash, is it can be completely anonymous, and there are many good reasons this is important. Consider any purchases with a stigma attached (morning after pill, or a trans corset), grey market (legal cannabis in one country and travelling to a country where it’s illegal, like Canadians going to the US (it’s federally illegal there), or having a perpatrator pursue a stalking victim through online purchases). All of the government endorsed digital options are completely traceable. Any government with complete access to all financial transactions can maintain power forever, and FINTRAC and FINCEN are getting close. The digial option does need to consider the auditability of financial crimes, however, even if it’s not with the digital option itself. Cryptocurrencies have presented new challenges, so the FATF has mandated that virtual currencies all be traceable. This will force the the splinter of what I would call pseudo-anonymous cryptocurrencies, to “legal” (completely traceable) vs privacy coins (untraceable – soon to be illegal to use commercially).

• Credit unions are better than banks, in that they are co-ops, every person gets 1 vote, so more democratic. The problem with cryptocurrency is we teach that you shouldn’t trust third parties, but put that trust upon yourself. I would love to see something like a digital credit union that helps ease the onboarding of non-techies into the cryptocurrency world, but also open the door to voting of all kinds, and a digital credit union using technology like DecisionTree could facilitate that.

• Churches are great wealth generators due the 10% tithe, but requires religious belief of the same variety. They do community well, but they require a non-scientific belief. If there was a non-religion way to build community with a tithing based principle, monies could be distributed to the poor, sick, elderly, and other vulnerable populations. If you agree with me that at least part of of the measure of a progressive society is how we treat the most vulnerable, this needs to be integrated in at the system level with at least auditability or ideally an incentive.

• Reciprical altruism? As a producer, I only want 1:1 mutual credit until safety in maslow’s heirachy has been solved. Then I want to start “cashing it in” for in the future when I want/need it, and I would be willing for a % to start going to an “altruism church”.

• Guaranteed Livable Income (GLI). I can’t see a way around this, and the faster we bring this in, the better. Right now if you’re on social welfare, or disability, you’re capped at what you can earn. For example, on disability, you can’t make morethan $500/month or you’re taxed on that. Why on earth a government would cap employment like that is silly. With GLI, you’re taxed only a little bit if you work a little, the more you work, the more you’re taxed, in a slow and steady approach until your salary is that – that you can live comfortably. In Canada for example right now, the base would be say $22,000/year for anyone who can’t work or find work. We would remove all of the other welfare supports to find this. As with welfare right now, if you can’t work for whatever reason, you just get your $22k/year. I would guess that at around $60k/year you can live comfortably in Canada in a lot of places, so instead of capping welfare recipients at $500/month, you would be incrementally taxed up until you’re making $60/year, at which point you’re taxed similarly to how people making $60k and over are now. There’s not much difference in terms of happiness between making $60k/year and $150k/year, so if we can get most Canadians into that range, that seems like a worthwhile goal, while protecting the vulnerable and maintaining an incentive for them to work if/when they can.