Introduce yourself I am coordinating a project about empowering communities and grassroots initiatives to build resilience and adaptation to climate change, with a book featuring 16 authors around the world covering themes around permaculture, local leadership, alternative economic models and general systems change. We are looking to launch this in September, before the COP26 summit. You can see a summary of the whole project at COP26 Project - Climate adaptation, resilience and systems change | Arkbound Foundation
It would be great if you could feature this on your network and social media. Likewise, we can do the same about your work and even help raise awareness of your objectives at the COP26 itself, which we share.
Introduce yourself As director of applied research at NewCities, I’m most curious to see how these experiments evolve and their applicability back into the real world.
Witnesspedia entries I’m new to Witness, and look forward to exploring each distrikt!
Introduce yourself I am interested in which significant elements and narratives worldbuilding strands coalesce against. I would like to see how that stimulates me ludically.
Witnesspedia entries I have only had a brief look at the Witness, The History section intrigued me. I wondered if any ARGs were concealed within Witnesspedia
Speaking of ARGs, @matteo_uguzzoni runs the Trust In Play project in which Edgeryders is a partner. I also applied for funding for Avantgrid: Joule de vivre! but it didn’t come through, but that idea was later developed into the distrikt of Avantgrid.
Introduce yourself This sounds awesome!
I’m an economist working in the Research Department of a central bank. I’ve done some policy work, Public Economics, Public Choice Theory, a bunch of Macro stuff, incentives in debt issuance, defense budgeting.
I’m very interested in market failures, and see most of them as relating to externalities. These are often sadly not solvable by markets, and government often (usually) sucks as resolving them as well, but is usually better than nothing, so we use it.
I’m also a lifelong sci-fi/fantasy fan.
(EDIT: Forgot to mention that I gave a presentation on the Economics of Science Fiction Universes at the Helsinki WorldCon in 2017)
My interests, beyond looking around at all the cool stuff, is looking at failure points. Where do the various systems break down? Why do they or do they not? What’s their patch/solution/escape valve/preferred murder mechanism/eventual death spiral? How can we do our best to fix them?
Witnesspedia entries I don’t know yet, I need to read a lot more.
I’m fascinated by Avantgrid - WTF??
DR - opt-in total Communism with an as-close-as-we-can-get-to-omniscient central planner that is not part of the system nor being incentivized by it directly. What to Big Mother get out of it? Over what dimension/s is it optimizing? How do we avoid it turning into a paperclip maximizer? Though I suppose that last is limited by the computation power required to run it, since it sounds like it rises exponentially rather than linearly, making WORLD DOMINATION practically impossible.
Hygge - a viable MMT system? How does it control inflation? Maintaining a low unemployment rate is a good start, but usually not enough. And the handwaved giving all the basic stuff is…interesting.
Introduce yourself I am a writer who is very interesting in alternative social models and how we can evolve better ways of being. I would like to contribute ideas and other evolutions.
Night, it would have been fun for you to have been at last week’s discussion on Mazzucato’s Mission Economy, as she had a very sharp criticism of market failure theory. For what it’s worth (and having been a part of the attempt to use MFT to fix the environment) I agree with her. But then we were missing a contrarian voice, since @petussing (who agrees with you) could not make it.
Yeah, I have been wondering the same myself. The best I can do is some kind of Leontiev input-output matrix analysis. Literally the oldest trick in the book, since Quesnay was already using it in the 17th century! Hopefully you or someone here can do better than me.
Thanks @alberto!
I’m really new, so not familiar yet. How would I find out about those kinds of discussions? I would love to be in on some of them in the future, time zones permitting.
Regarding the inflation question for Hygge, some initial thoughts - do we think of these economies as basically closed/autarkic ones? I think of this mainly in the sense of possibly incompatible economic systems/philosophies. If they’re basically closed, then the MMT thing becomes at least possible. All money comes from the economy and stays in the economy. There’s no need of a separate central bank or it’s a part of the Ministry of Finance, since there’s no need of a separate inflation-controlling/money-issuing/monetary-stabilizing authority. The government does all of that internally.
If the economies are open, then this is all much more complicated. Money can leave the economy, making it impossible to tax back to properly limit inflation. The government could contain inflation and have Hygge at full employment, and then have a foreigner come with a large pile of local cash and start buying things. This would cause inflation, so the government would have to raise taxes/issue bonds. How long does this take to work? I mean, can they increase taxes in real time and have people pay more immediately? If not, you could get into an inflationary dynamic, and only deal with it through taxation with a lag.
I think external trade would make inflation control difficult in the short-term. They could control inflation on average over time, but not necessarily at any particular point.
How are they penalized for inflation? I mean, what happens? How does it constrain the government directly? For absurd example, do the people get angry and riot if prices move too much?
There’s also the whole question of flows of people into and out of the nation/economy, but I’m still trying to think about that one and what the incentives are to emigrate versus the costs of it. Do people do that a lot? What percentage of the population changes Distrikts in a…year, say? Is this “foot voting” a real constraint on governments/cultures?
And you would be welcome. In fact, if you have some knowledge you would like to share, we would be happy to organize a discussion around it, with you doing the sharing. We are going to file these events with the tag learning-program. It is going to be minimal overhead, no social media hustling, no nothing.
The next event is already scheduled (see). It concerns Witness, because we feel that, in order to support the kind of economic thinking we want, Witness needs its own social science, the functional equivalent of economics but fit to operate in a multi-paradigm world. We call it aethnography, and are even trying to build a piece of it with ethnography + graphs (white paper, work in progress).
And this brings us nicely to open vs. closed economies.
Look: it’s a participatory, fictional world. We can make it anything we want. If you want to have a go at a closed distrikt, we can make one and build it from the ground up. It would have firm border control (an island, trawled by the larger body of Witness?); there would be no station for the Migrant Train, or perhaps a ghost one, closed, patrolled by guards like the U-Bahn under East Berlin when the Wall was still up…
But me, I would like to look at open economies. “Open” does not need to be wide open. Already in The Assembly we imagined an economy where
This model is inspired to what Cuba was trying to do in the early 1990s, looking for a way to interface with capitalist economies that would not be Washington Consensus-style total surrender. In those years I visited both Cuba (who tried to hold some kind of line) and Albania (who did not, and its public services vaporized: if you wanted to send a letter, you needed to use DHL, because the postal service no longer operated and post offices had been pillaged).
And the same is for migration. In practice, the Distrikts of Witness are subject to the same temptations as the countries of Earth. They want some migrants, but not others, and they would not mind getting rid of some of their own residents. Take Libria:
The reason why I like open economies: because another, slightly more respectable side of Edgeryders is trying to convince the Powers That Be to experiment with different economic paradigms. And all those experiments will fail if they require that the entire world switches to some other regime. So, we need to think through scenarios like yours:
But that’s the entire beauty of the thing: deep, coherent worldbuilding! What do you think?
I think this project (AKA you/hopefully us) should deal primarily with economies that are not closed. Openness is a spectrum, but totally closed is at the very least impractical and more likely authoritarian in the extreme. The DPRK is not a model we want to replicate, except perhaps to show how bad it can be. Now I’m wondering how to steel-man that…
My note above about it being much more complicated is true, but not at all a reason not to think about it. After all, when we talk about economic policy, we try to look for all the holes we need to plug, all the corners where it fails, all the incentives we need to fix or at least not screw up (as best we can).
The biggest downside of complicated is that it’s hard to explain to people, particularly politicians. Since they are those who get the policy advice, they’re the ones we need to work towards. This sometimes means going for third-best solutions, because the first-best is far too revolutionary and the second-best is too complicated to explain to the minister in 5 minutes.
But that just means that we need to think about it more, and about how to explain it better. Cooperative economic worldbuilding seems a great way to do that.
I’d have to think about what I can contribute. I know some things about policy advice, but you can learn a lot of that by watching “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”.
I gave a talk on the Economics of SF Universes at a WorldCon, trying to get across some basic ideas about “what is economics, what are some of its implications, and how can we use them to understand/play around with/poke holes in some of the science fiction we love, with examples.”
I also need to read a lot more of the Wiki so I can avoid repeating question that have already been asked.
Sorry, I don’t understand the reference (my native language is not English).
Since you already have such a talk, maybe you could simply repeat it for a small audience (possibly of one! At the first talk we were perhaps 10 people). It seems like a low-effort, fun way to start sharing ideas.
Sorry, it’s a relatively recent usage. It means to argue against the best possible version of the other side’s position. It’s the opposite of strawman. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/steelman
Gladly
How would we set that up?
Are there a decent number of people here on European time? I’m in GMT+2
Interesting question. Do you know about Mansa Musa, supposedly the world’s richest person ever? He was a Malian potentate in the early 14th century – when he went on pilgrimage to Mecca he caused ruinous inflation everywhere he went, because of the vast quantities of gold carried by his 12,000-strong slave retinue. So it has happened, though not lately. Such a problem may not be relevant to a populous and rich country, but a relatively small place like Hygge could be vulnerable.
But inflation is not a problem. I know this is not orthodox, but it is such an obvious thing. The problem is two-fold: one is uneven inflation, such that the price of one item may rise much more than others. This can be a big problem if that item is, for example, energy, as with the oil price inflation in the US in the 70s – it meant that anything that included oil or oil products saw price inflation, but not other items, and critically, not labor – workers were being priced out of being able to purchase energy-intensive goods, such as heating oil and gasoline, and therefore transportation. It caused a mess. But money inflation is different – it inflates the price of everything equally.
In that case you have the other problem, which is that typically the prices of products would rise faster than the price of labor. So workers would be prevented from buying the things they would normally be able to afford, perhaps including basics like housing. The solution to this, which has been used before, with mixed success, is indexing. If all wage contracts and loans and taxes and probably a few other things are indexed to the inflation rate, then people are insulated from the inflation. This would be especially true in Hygge, where there is a nanny state that has a great deal of control over such things as taxes and contract law. The reason for mixed success in practice has been that the economies were not indexed ENOUGH, so those who were not lost out – but that would not be true in Hygge. And since, as you say, over the long term the inflation would be contained, it would simply be a periodic irritant because of price changes.
But then we were missing a contrarian voice, since 
