I was trying to think about how to make altruism the optimal choice for non altruists and realized that it has already been done. Money...
Capitalism has its flaws but It is extremely successful because it does exactly that. When a person does something which helps another person using the capitalist system, they get money, and can then spend that money to benefit themselves. The net effect being huge benefit to everyone through efficiency in scale.
But capitalism seems to cause a lot of bad things as well. If it was successfully making altruism the selfish choice, then it wouldn't do this. So what is missing?
There's a few things but the main two are:
Money doesn't detriment those who detriment others.
Money is exchanged based on beliefs of benefit, not 'actual benefit' and so can be manipulated.
So. With this in mind, what if we made a better version of currency?
I'll leave that question as a ongoing discussion point. But here is my promised counterintuitive version of currency. It will likely seem dumb at first glance, but I am fairly sure it would inherently solve a good number of problems and can be improved upon.
Probably a bit to much lead up. It's just normal currency with public accounts and transaction records. But where each coin decays into more of itself and anti-coin. The anti coin can be "given" to someone to take away their money, or burnt to do nothing. The decay could be tweaked to match desired inflation. Anti-money would have a maximum lifespan to prevent buildup.
I want to influence your thoughts as little as possible so as to not add my biases to your judgment, but I have thought about this a good bit and am still suggesting it, so I hope that if you determine it is a bad idea, you have thought about it more than me.
But yeah. Thoughts? Improvements? EA crypto?
A more straightforward idea is the economist Thomas Piketty’s proposal for a steeply progressive wealth tax. He has discussed how to close loopholes around this by taxing income, financial assets, land, and inheritance, and also taxing wealth that tries to "exit" a high-tax country for a low-tax one.
Anti-coin seems like a harmful technology. A billionaire could use their anti-coin to make all their critics on Twitter homeless and destitute. It seems incompatible with widely held liberal political values.
Thought about this and it is completely possible as you say, but the interesting thing is that such a billionaire would loose vast swaths of money, as that action would make them unpopular and a target for anti-coin. Additionally, a person who has a larger numbers of critics will likely end up with fewer anti-coin. The interesting thing about anti-coin, is, despite explicitly allowing something which is bad. It encourages good behavior.
A steeply progressive wealth tax is a good idea, though I would not say it solves the same problem anti-coin attempts to solve.
Progressive wealth tax is a solution to the power problems and inefficiencies caused by wealth distribution. People don't need billions of dollars, and having that much more doesn't make you much happier. So even distribution is much better for the average person.
The currency is supposed to better solve the problem all currency partially solves. Making the selfish choice to benefit others, and thus increasing benefit through efficiency of scale. As I said before the currency we have does this quite well, but it doesn't do it perfectly because it doesn't work with negative benefit. If someone burns tires and sells the energy to someone, the person gets benefit from selling the energy, but isn't detrimented by the displeasure of their neighbors.
Of course in reality what I just said is wrong as our legal system and laws fill in the gaps which currency doesn't solve, but large systems are more easily corrupted, require more overhead, etc, so building as much of this into simpler systems as possible is beneficial.
If you forget about my currency and just think about how we could make that kind of system, there are a few properties that are fairly essential... Shoot, my bedtime screen blocker is about to kick in. I'll edit and finis the post later. Thoughts?
I don’t think there’s any good way to simplify or purify the processes that exist in law and politics of deciding which behaviours are unethical or have a social cost and therefore should be taxed or punished, such as through a carbon tax or laws about air pollution. Anti-coin turns this into an online vote, like American Idol but Black Mirror. You could get rid of the whole currency aspect of it and just allow people to vote online on who should receive what punishments, such as a fine, community service, house arrest, or prison time. But this would be an engine of cruelty.
Liberal democratic societies work because our institutions and norms encourage pro-social behaviour and enforce safeguards against our anti-social impulses. I think it’s interesting to observe how quickly pro-sociality breaks down and how anti-social behaviour becomes the norm when you put humans in an unnatural environmental like Twitter. Cruelty and aggression completely take over. When we design social systems, we must take into account what encourages the better angels of our nature and what brings out our worst instincts.