SpaceweaverTue, Nov 4, 2008 This is a very creative and attractive idea. Regretfully it suffers from a few serious difficulties that are not obvious at first sight:
1. In order to implement such a system, one must establish a consensual and pretty rigid system that defines what is a task how long each task should take as a norm etc. Additionally the measures of influence and capacity should be established quite rigidly for such a system to be stable. How would you measure capacity and influence anyway? It seems to me that the underlying social system needed for such implementation will have to be very ordered centralized and rigid. What if not everybody agrees to how tasks are defined and their associated value? Is there a place for competition? For dispute and resolution?
2. People having niche capacities might become extremely influential in a manner that does not make any sense: Suppose I am a person who is accomplished in performing one very specific complex yet boring task no one else is interested in doing. I become the only one that can perform such a task, and since it is a very needed task I will probably gain a lot of influence by performing it. But me being the person I am, have no great ideas or tasks I need to ask anyone else to do. The influence and time that I will aggregate will not be recycled into the community, value will be lost.
3. The system proposed does not encourage creativity and innovation: Suppose I am an extremely innovative person who has an idea that amounts to a paradigm shift in the community I live in. Like it is always with novel paradigms, no one recognizes any value or utility in my ideas because everybody is still bound to old conceptions. No matter how capable or influential I might be, it will be very difficult to implement my ideas simply because they are outside of the consensus about what is valuable. I will have to spend a lot to gain very little in terms of my goals. Probably I will exhaust all my time achieving very little or nothing. This example shows that in general such a system as proposed here does not encourage change and innovation.
Money as we have today has many serious drawbacks. Yet, it realizes a very high abstraction of value, and therefore a very high degree of freedom. This freedom is an immense power that drives our economy, but this freedom allows for misuse and abuse as well. It seems to me that the system proposed here creates a high level regulation in the definition and usage of value, but it also seriously restricts the freedom represented by money. I think the problem we should address is how to responsibly handle the freedom that money as a concept allows and not how to restrict this freedom to ensure a morally balanced behavior.
This is a very creative and attractive idea. Regretfully it suffers from a few serious difficulties that are not obvious at first sight:
1. In order to implement such a system, one must establish a consensual and pretty rigid system that defines what is a task how long each task should take as a norm etc. Additionally the measures of influence and capacity should be established quite rigidly for such a system to be stable. How would you measure capacity and influence anyway? It seems to me that the underlying social system needed for such implementation will have to be very ordered centralized and rigid. What if not everybody agrees to how tasks are defined and their associated value? Is there a place for competition? For dispute and resolution?
2. People having niche capacities might become extremely influential in a manner that does not make any sense: Suppose I am a person who is accomplished in performing one very specific complex yet boring task no one else is interested in doing. I become the only one that can perform such a task, and since it is a very needed task I will probably gain a lot of influence by performing it. But me being the person I am, have no great ideas or tasks I need to ask anyone else to do. The influence and time that I will aggregate will not be recycled into the community, value will be lost.
3. The system proposed does not encourage creativity and innovation: Suppose I am an extremely innovative person who has an idea that amounts to a paradigm shift in the community I live in. Like it is always with novel paradigms, no one recognizes any value or utility in my ideas because everybody is still bound to old conceptions. No matter how capable or influential I might be, it will be very difficult to implement my ideas simply because they are outside of the consensus about what is valuable. I will have to spend a lot to gain very little in terms of my goals. Probably I will exhaust all my time achieving very little or nothing. This example shows that in general such a system as proposed here does not encourage change and innovation.
Money as we have today has many serious drawbacks. Yet, it realizes a very high abstraction of value, and therefore a very high degree of freedom. This freedom is an immense power that drives our economy, but this freedom allows for misuse and abuse as well. It seems to me that the system proposed here creates a high level regulation in the definition and usage of value, but it also seriously restricts the freedom represented by money. I think the problem we should address is how to responsibly handle the freedom that money as a concept allows and not how to restrict this freedom to ensure a morally balanced behavior.