What would make a regenerative economic system?
First of all, it means interpreting flows of money as cyclic. What does cyclic mean?
Right now, when you make the decision to pay for something, then this money goes to the shop owner or the provider of the service. And then this individual or group of individuals decides where your money goes next. You don't have any say about where the money goes after you transferred it to the other party.
But it doesn't need to be this way.
Imagine this: A company earns money. Of course a certain chunk is needed to cover its operational expenses. But it has the rest to play with, or, in businessy terms, to "reinvest".
By default, company owners don't give their users any say about where to actually reinvest it. Pretty much all company owners (or the respective investors) believe that they are most knowledgeable about what's the best way to reinvest income.
Unfortunately, mostly they overestimate their own knowledge in this regard. Many companies don't fail because of a lack of income, but because they have reinvest their initial income into the wrong things.
How can we fix this?
It's strikingly, almost shockingly simple. I call it "participative budgeting": All money all users pay for a service goes into a big pot. A certain, rather small share is deducted for operational and other fixed expenses, and the majority can be distributed by the users.
I repeat: The users determine where their money goes and for what the company should spend it. New features, real and virtual events, supporting non-profit projects or anything else.
Financial democracy through fractional voting. Where you don't just vote on whether you want a feature or not, but you can allocate your share of the budget as diversely as you want. Essentially, you don't just have one vote per cycle, but as many votes as you have cents.
Participatory budgeting.
In the beginning, we, as Divizend, will mostly curate the opportunities into which someone can put their funds. Over time, we will make this more and more open. But of course technologically, it'll be open source and GPL-licensed from the start.
See how we implement it in real life in a real startup, as a new business unit of the German FinTech which is already the European market leader in withholding tax reclaims. Taking our incredibly in-depth experience in securities, dividends, capital taxes, financial data, process automation and so much more to reinvent the financial experience for everyone.
See how we make our very first steps in this, how we experiment, how we might fail, how we might succeed. Launch at 1st of April, 7pm CET. RSVP now for our kick-off livestream at live.divizend.com.
PS: Wouldn't this also be great to have for taxes? Where you don't vote for a political party every few years and then just have politicians waste your money, but instead you get the right to distribute the same share of your nation's tax income as everyone else. I don't know, let me know.
This is a linkpost for https://blog.hermesloom.org/p/what-if-users-controlled-how-companies
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The idea that random customers would be better at corporate budgeting than the people who work in those companies and think about corporate strategy every day, is a really strong claim, and you should try to offer evidence for this claim if you want people to take your fintech idea seriously.
Suppose I buy a new car from Toyota, and now I get to decide how Toyota invests the $10K of profit they made by selling me the car. There are immediately so many problems: