Steve KelseyI have been working on this blog for a few months now, exploring new concepts for economics. On the journey I have had a few insights that, as time has gone by, have acquired greater power to explain how our economy really works and direct us towards better models. In this short blog I am going to summarise these key insights and how they interact.
1. A Physics based economics
There is a simple and powerful way to define wealth in physical term. Wealth is intelligence applied to base matter. It is measured by the energy used to embed intelligence in base matter. Viewed through this model we can see the fundamental role energy has in building our economy and civilisation.
This insight leads us immediately to consider entropy and its cost. Entropy is a huge cost in the act of embedding intelligence into base matter. We are highly inefficient in our use of energy to create wealth due to the entropy of our methods.
Entropy drives the need to continually consume and recreate. Entropy is consumption and wear over time, and all things are consumed and wear out, from food to machines to cities. Entropy is a huge cost for our civilisation, so we must direct our efforts to reducing it at all points.
The more efficiently we can embed intelligence in matter, the longer that order can be maintained, the wealthier and more capable we will be.
2. Thinking Money
In 2009 money as we know it changed forever. The launch of the bitcoin genesis block showed it was possible for code to become money. Money as code opens up a completely new possibility, money that is an active agent, able to to interact in our economy and make autonomous decisions about how and when it can be used. We can build money that thinks.
Autonomous, intelligent money can transform our economy driving out fraud and speculation, directing resources towards building civilisational wealth. We can design money that thinks, building our intelligence into a resource that has already transformed the world, but can now do so based on a physics based model of our economy.
We can create classes of money that support daily life, main street not Wall street. We can design money that allows investment in future civilisational wealth, defined on our new physics based economic understanding. Every economic and commercial evaluation we make today can be built directly into the coin we used, so that it can evaluate and perform to optimise our civilisational wealth.
We can build new classes of money to defend our built economy from the minds that have turned our financial markets into casinos and our businesses into Ponzi schemes. We can design money that is owned by us, the people, not governments or banks, a fully democratised wealth building money that works tirelessly on our behalf.
3. Communal Wealth
With thinking money and a physics based economy we can reshape how wealth is built and shared, returning community to the centre of our world.
The role of ideology is and always has been the creation and preservation of inequality for an elite. The role of corporations was once to increase the efficiency of production for all but is now the concentration of power in the hands of a few. We don’t want that, we certainly don’t need that, and now we have the tools to change it.
Community is the basis of civilisation, the fundamental building block. We can return civilisational wealth creation to the community level by using democratised money, cutting out the ideological and financial tools invented to sequester wealth, building new tools that maximise the returns for everyone.
And this community can be distributed as well. It may be the town or area in which you live, but it is just as likely to be made up of like minds which may never meet physically but believe in building the civilisation they want.
4. Finance is redundant
Evolution is the survival of the fittest and everything that makes us vulnerable has to end. Anything and everything that detracts from the creation of civilisational wealth is redundant. Everything that seeks to destroy civilisational wealth is an act against humanity.
Interest, profit taking, speculation, Financialization, all divert human effort away from the creation of civilisational wealth and towards the accumulation of money for an elite. But money isn’t wealth. Money is an abstraction, a conceptual tool, a imaginary value without meaning until it is is ‘spent’ to acquire civilisational wealth.. We are squandering our potential and endangering our long term survivability as a species with our current obsession with money over civilisational wealth.
Our legacy system has turned from a benefit to a threat. We need to start over, building a physics based economy that is protected and enabled by thinking money for all our communities, great and small, connected physically and virtually, returning us to a path that increases our future potential.