Here are answers to questions that have come up in response to my manifesto.
Q. What about Capitalism?
The general consensus, among people who concern themselves with these issues, is that Capitalism is amazing and very useful, but that it has certain flaws.
A lot of people (myself included) ... regard capitalism as the best economic system yet invented. Is it perfect? Hardly. Are there all sorts of flaws, blind spots, unfortunate losers, and undeserving winners? Of course. When I think of capitalism in toto, I think of what Churchill once said about democracy in toto: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”—Stephen Dubner
Capitalism is not perfect. But it is by far the most efficient and just way of structuring an economy. Capitalism offers people the freedom to choose where they work and what they do, the opportunity to buy or sell products they want, and the dignity that comes with profiting from their talent and hard work. The free market provides the incentives to work, to innovate, to save, to invest wisely, and to create jobs for others. And as millions of people pursue these incentives together, whole societies benefit. —George W. Bush
The money economy does a wonderful job at distributing certain scarce resources in such a way as to raise overall wealth and wellbeing, and does, as GWB writes, promote freedom.
Where capitalism struggles (and where we should patch it using post-currency mobile phone economics), is in pricing abundant goods, in accounting for the true costs of resource use, and in certain psychological shortcomings.
Monetary rewards are, for businesses especially, like a score system in a game. They go after the highest score possible, and try to avoid what will lower their score. In many cases, as economists know, this acts to improve the general welfare, as businesses develop and market new services that actually help people. But it should be clear that also sometimes this scorekeeping system does not lead us, as a society, in the direction that is best for us.
One place where money just doesn’t add up to welfare, is with regard to abundant resources. Because price is a function of supply and demand, the price for a thing which can be self-provisioned or infinitely supplied, like an mp3 under file sharing or an organic seed variety, tends towards zero. Capitalism does not work well when prices are close to zero: at best, business opportunities involving abundance are under-supported, or supported by alternate, weaker profit models1; at worst, businesses attempt to produce an artificial scarcity, lowering the general welfare, so as to create or maintain a profit motive in a sector2.
This is the most important issue of our time. In every sector, from food to software to culture to energy to personal interaction, this is coming up, and prevents progress on our most pressing global issues and in our personal lives. We need a better way to price what’s good for the planet, and we need it now.
Q. Do you intend to replace money altogether? Or force people to use your system?
Of course not.
I think we can build incentives and resource management that: (a) can coexist with the money economy; (b) continues to provide all of those benefits of capitalism; (c) address some of the shortcomings; and (d) does so in a non-monolithic, entirely free choice kind of way.
footnotes
1 e.g. free software is monetized by support fees; online services are monetized by advertising
2 For the computer scientists in the audience, this is a design problem. We have this wonderful distributed algorithm (think of it as congestion control) called money, and it has this missing feature. It doesn’t work for certain parts of the network, and it’s causing a world of pain.