What A Token Economy And A Voting System Have In Common

[Jack Waugh]

The term "real economy" would mean a understanding of the valuable substances and objects found in the world in which humans live, and how those objects and substances are found, converted, used up, and so on. For the purpose of this definition, the concept of "valuable" turns on the uses of things and substances for maintaining human life. For example, if people cannot eat enough, they die. Reflecting on that, we have to recognize food as valuable.

Understanding the real economy would also take into account substances that have negative value, or that may have negative value depending on their location and state. For example, if human waste is not removed from the immediate vicinity of the human that produced it, there are problems, but the same waste when moved and converted, can become valuable fertilizer. For another example, GHG emitted into the colonized atmosphere contribute to a risk of early extinction of the human race, and so should properly be reckoned as carrying a negative value.

Some behavioral experiments on monkeys or chimpanzees have involved introducing to them a token economy. The animals might be shown that putting a token in a machine will convert it for them into preferred food, such as grapes, and experiments have been done involving the earning and exchanging of the tokens.

Each set of national laws and policies concerning money creates a token economy, called the monetary economy.

Usually the monetary economy functions as an imperfect reflection of the real economy. People in their habitual patterns of thought often think of money as though it were the real goods and services that money commands. That is why when someone works for someone else and is compensated with a wage or salary, they are said to be "making" money. A more precise description would say they are making something of value (one hopes), which the money is a token for, but they are not really making the money itself. The national monetary authority does that.

I say all this only to point out that a monetary economy and a voting system share a fundamental similarity. Each of them is a scheme for converting individual decisions into a collective decision. Obviously, in the case of a voting system, the collective decision is usually about which candidate gets to serve in an office in government. In the case of the monetary economy, the collective decision is about the movement of the actual goods and services bought and sold. For example, if I pay you $3 for a gallon of gasoline, the gasoline that used to be under your control has come under my control. If we consider all the sales and purchases for money that happen in a given country on a given day, those constitute the collective decision made on that day via the money economy as driven by the individual decisions of those who voluntarily bought and sold.

One of the collective outcomes that a monetary economy can produce is monopoly. Another is advertising. Others are various forms of pollution of the air, water, and soil. Others are resource depletion. Others are various degrees and forms of international exploitation, possibly including colonization, color revolutions, and hot war.

Does this comparison enable any insight on voting systems that we didn't have before thinking about the comparison? I don't know.

[rob]

@jack-waugh Not entirely sure how it applies to voting systems, but it's an interesting topic.

I see money is a way to make barter more efficient. Barter would exist, in the absence of money, it would just be more complicated that it is today.

Let me offer a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you are starting a colony on an Earthlike planet, with 1000 other people. There will never be communication with Earth again, so Earth money is essentially meaningless. Nobody cares about gold, and they certainly don't want their limited resources spent mining for gold. You've brought some technology like computers and phones, but you don't want to waste them mining bitcoin or the like. But bartering isn't efficient and complicates every transaction. (aside from the few transactions where you each have exactly what the other wants and they seem equal in value)

You need to provide incentive for people to work or the colony won't survive.

What do you use for money?

[Jack Waugh]

@rob Do you think people don't want to work?

The community could vote on what projects deserve work time. Upon agreement on that, they could ask for volunteers to do the needed work. If there were portions of it for which insufficient time or productivity were volunteered and served, a system could be put in place where by default, people would be rotated through the undesirable jobs.

[rob]

@jack-waugh I think most people would prefer not work, at least not work on most of the things that society needs. Plenty of people like to work on things they enjoy, but that (here on Earth) no one would be likely to pay them to do. The only jobs I can think of that people would do even if they aren't paid are either very rare, or it is very rare people who have the talent to do them well enough to make a living at them.

What you are proposing seems both idealistic and kind of oppressive. I don't want to be "rotated through undesirable jobs," that's forced labor. I also don't want to spend my time working on things I hate or am bad at. Even for "undesirable" jobs, some people are more suited than others.

Does your system have any mechanism for incentivizing people to not be lazy? Are they punished if their productivity is low? Are they rewarded if they work really hard?

I also don't see how voting for what needs to be done to be remotely efficient. It certainly doesn't scale up to larger societies.

Regardless, I was treating the need for currency as a given, and trying to find a way to keep it both stable and efficient. Not attempting to make it unnecessary.

I have some ideas on that, but I'll wait until we're talking about the same thing.