Post #14: We Broke Money
Economy no worky so goodie anymore.
To clarify the above technical jargon, the economy is still awesome. It’s still the most cutting edge element of our civilizational operating system (COS for short). And yet, the “economy upgrade” has been part of our COS for long enough that we can now see, and feel, room for improvement. That means another upgrade is on the horizon. In comes the post-economic era.
In this post, we’ll take a look at our COS through a more functional lens and why the economy is falling short of its function. By the end we’ll clarify the problem that a COS upgrade needs to solve.
A Better COS Let’s Us Get More Out of Ourselves
It’s as though humanity is employed by the same company, each of us working for this 8 billion person enterprise called civilization.
Like any company, we have to clarify our mission, set the strategy, and execute.
The right civilizational operating system enables this coordination process to happen and equips each of us with an owner’s mindset over our collective future.
In the last post, I proposed this rough sketch to represent our current COS architecture:
Here’s a slightly revised version to show where each layer fits within the “clarify our mission, set the strategy, and execute” process:
The understanding layer generates our high-level mission statement. To the best of its ability, it answers the question- “where are we and what are we doing here?” Then with that existential context in hand…
The coordination layer takes that high-level direction and creates strategies to direct civilization’s efforts. These strategies take the form of political processes and the resulting policies.
Then the cooperation layer takes both the high-level mission along with the politically generated strategies and delegates responsibility. The economy delegates by empowering many people to execute projects that move civilization in the high-level direction.
As our COS has evolved into this three part process, a trend has unfolded. With each addition to the COS, we’ve become capable of directing our energy on shorter and shorter time horizons. To say that differently, the trend means we’re gaining better control over ourselves as a collective, similar to the body metaphor in the Learning to Walk post. We’re moving from super broad strokes directions coming out of religion to highly nuanced movements coming out of the economy. Religions write lists such as the ten commandments or five precepts which, to paraphrase, say “be nice to each other.” Economies create highly nuanced person to person instructions like “go to work between 9am-5pm and design a landing page for the launch of these new straws made from recycled sugarcane.” Prior to a complex economy, our civilization was fat thumbing its way forward in comparison.
We want this trend towards more nuanced actions and at larger scales to continue because it means we can more effectively pursue our definition of meaning.
The Free Market Ain’t So Freeing
We attribute the success of our economy-driven cooperation to the “free market” model. This model trusts people with the freedom to interact how they see fit. A person can put their money towards whichever product or service they’d like and they can invest their money to create a new product that doesn’t exist yet. This strategy of decentralizing capital allocation lets many people have a hand in building the future. It has worked well to build a better future.
It works because having more people participate in the capital allocation function of society increases the odds that we spend our time in valuable ways. For example, if there was 1 person who could “allocate capital,” or make decisions as to which projects we should focus our collective energy on, it’s unlikely that this one person would be able to pick as valuable a list of projects as if 1,000 people were in a position to think critically about what is valuable for civilization. As it happens, our economy has enabled millions upon millions of people to take up the responsibility of allocating capital, which means a wide variety of valuable projects get worked on. This decentralized capital allocation strategy has allowed us to express our collective definition of meaning through nuanced coordinated action.
Our “free” market experiment with lots of capital allocators has run for a few centuries now. Using the U.S. as the prime example of an economy at work, the country has generated many innovations over the past 200 years of economic motivation, creating a healthier and happier human experience.
That said, we now have the benefit of hindsight. We can see that an economic system that is meant to provide freedom to pursue meaningful actions actually does the opposite over time.
The flaw of our current economy is that over time the symbols we call money fall out of sync with the value they are supposed to represent. To say that again in a slightly different way, over time money stops equaling value. Money breaks. And if the economy motivates us to pursue something that isn’t valuable…well, shit.
This “symbolic error” of our existing money takes on at least a few forms: 1) Money can be “printed” without the creation of value (i.e. what the U.S. Federal Reserve effectively does by controlling money supply) 2) Money can be “earned” by completing tasks that aren’t actually valuable (i.e. optimizing ads platforms or damaging the planet) 3) Money can be held and not invested into value creation (i.e. wealth inequality). This symbolic error means that people either work on tasks that aren’t valuable or we lose trust that money represents value, which disengages us from our work. Either way, the symbolic error causes human civilization’s probability of progress to decline.
In Comes a Post-Economic Era
One way to think about an upgrade to our COS is to increase the amount of “meaning” or “existential relevance” captured by our civilization.
Now that we can see our economy is buggy and it’s motivating the pursuit of non-valuable tasks as well as demotivating pursuit altogether, we need to push a COS upgrade.
Once this upgrade is pushed, it will enter us into a post-economic era, which is to say that the newest civilizational trend driving our behavior won’t be the “economy upgrade” anymore.
So what does the upgrade need to accomplish?
The upgrade needs to solve the symbolic error.
We need to position ourselves, each of the 8 billion of us, to effectively pursue meaning. Solving the symbolic error will require reimagining the economy within the context of civilization’s entire operating system. That means the solution will involve orchestrating the understanding layer (religion / science) with the coordination layer (government) with the cooperation layer (economy).
Next Up
Next I’ll explore what a solution to the symbolic error might look like. How do we make sure that we are motivated and that the work we are doing is meaningful?
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What’s this substack all about?
We need to upgrade our civilization’s operating system. This newsletter is a research project that explores how our current operating system came to be, which improvements would be helpful, and how we can make an upgrade happen. This substack’s goal is to land on a project that can be built to upgrade our civilization’s operating system.
I chose to write this publicly to get feedback on these ideas. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. Upgrading our COS and building our future is a team effort.
I loved the disconnection between the exchange of money from value creation, its intended purpose. What happens if there's a UBI and value could, in theory, be totally uncoupled from money. What sort of existential crisis does our society devolve into? Money is a progress incentive with ebbs & flows on its direct correlation.
I preferred this blog to the former because I found a developing understanding on my part. That being said I keep thinking about concrete examples as to how they might fit into the schema. If someone finds growing lettuce meaningful as it feeds civilization and is generally a benign activity then how does that fit in the several categories? If someone else wants to create an elixir to remedy all sorts of ills and then sells it door to door without any oversight if it works that is meaningful in a good way; if it poisons people well not so good. Then economy backs away from support which is how things work. What is our way around this - AI evaluating a priori? Maybe that's the answer.