Economic Devastation

[iamback]

I will just respond to the parts I didn't already address or refute upthread...

I have not been to India nor Pakistan, but everything credible I read is that their young geniuses (the "Knowledge Age" vanguard to vanquish America I presume) in the ghettos are "not ready for prime time" in the sense of being able to make any more than marginal changes to the world.  I have been to China, Brazil and South Africa, their young geniuses will not make much difference either.

Are you ready for a reality check!

India just did a Mars mission that only cost $87 million, because they know how to leverage their relative strengths.

That is a sign of the Knowledge Age in action already! In spades! So please all those who tell me it will not happen quickly. It is already happening.

As an analogy to billions of medium talent worker ants of Asia, Manny Pacquiao wins not by the power of his single punch, but by attrition of the accumulation of his rapid fire almost machine gun like punches. When he beats the 46-0 undefeated Floyd Gayweather this May 2nd, that will be another sign of Asia's coming dominance. Yeah Tyson could hit much harder, but he couldn't punch non-stop as Pacman can. A human can actually be killed by ants.

And for his recent fights Pacman has fought in Macau (instead of the USA) where the taxes are much lower! He will come back to fight in the USA this May 2 to make Floyd STFU, then anybody who wants to fight him will have to come to Macau.

The shift is underway already folks.

People want to move to the USA.  Yes, sure, some Indians and Chinese go back.  Why not?  Seek their fortune "back home" once they have earned their grubstake here.  That's called freedom!  A big reason many stay here.

No it is called socialism and free handouts and yes people love to immigrate to get it, and socialism is what destroyed Rome and every empire. USA is being leeched out of existence.

Peru is not the only place with physical and cultural constraints to an imminent "Knowledge Age".  Peru has the ANDES making transport much more difficult.

Apparently you misunderstood and inverted the logic of my upthread point. The geographical barriers are not a constraint to the Knowledge Age, which is why the USA loses its favorable economic position which fostered the assimilation during the Industrial Age.

Places like India & Pakistan treat their women like second-class citizens.

Women are not statistically in the S.T.E.M. fields and thus actually a disruptive frictional drag on the Knowledge Age. Individual women may excel, but that is orthogonal to the point. I support a woman's desire to excel in S.T.E.M. fields if she wants to, but not with government mandating special treatment for women, because this just destroys the women!

Feminism is another reason the West can't compete with Asia. You are apparently a prime example of the malaise.

RUSSIA is always on the verge of banning Bitcoin, sound like a winner to any of you?  China has recently banned GOOGLE services, ah, is that what #Winners do?

I explained upthread that the people of China are ignoring the government and the Communist Party will melt away as the Knowledge Age takes over.

The salient point is one of trajectory with the West is headed deeper into totalitarianism and the East is headed out of it.

The Knowledge Age will be held back in countries run by corrupt crony mafias...

The Knowledge Age is routing right around it. Do you know how many Android smartphones there are in China, Russia, Irag, etc!! Do you not understand that is the Knowledge Age underway.

I am not going to argue with you back and forth. If you still can't grasp your myopia, then I will just ignore you. Because I have important work to do in the Knowledge Age, not trying to get people who can't be in it because they are too ignorant.

I do respect Dr. Jim Willie, he has great insights and apparently great contacts

You are delusional. I can't really help people who like to delude themselves and aren't scholarly enough to do good study and research.

I went and looked at the latest several articles of Martin Armstrong, whom I had run into before he was sprung from prison.  I am withholding judgement on his general thesis (theses) as they are not easy to digest in a couple of sittings (like FOFOA is not easy).

Read the entire Mad Max thread. I already distilled Armstrong there.

FOFOA is another idiot who banned me from his blog when I refuted him.

I noticed nothing obvious from Armstrong about the "Knowledge Age", but perhaps contagion is arguing Knowledge Age from other bloggers (I just do not recall).

Because I am the canonical source. I invented the term.

America is splintered, we no longer have the "Melting Pot" style of thinking.  We are very diverse.  Yet China, Russia and India are very splintered as well

You have selective reading comprehension. You completely ignored that I also wrote they don't have government as 50 - 75% of GDP (instead more in the 15 - 25% range) with $100 trillion of constituent liabilities. They are coming out of socialism abyss all fresh and renewed, the West is going into the totalitarian socialism abyss all decadent and rotting.

The West will expropriate its own high tech sector and destroy it, because it must go get the money where the money is, because it has to meet its obligations. France is proposing a tax on the internet. Obama is proposing 16% tax and illegal executive order on the FCC to regulate and tax the internet as a public utility. The West is heading into Fascism.

Keep diversified, and keep your gold

It can't help you.

Does that mean I am saying, "Don't learn programming or the nuts & bolts of Bitcoin or other technology"?  Not at all.  Those are skills of the future (probably), and will likely lead to a good living.

Correct.

But, will the Age of Knowledge fix those potholes in Cleveland and Calcutta in the foreseeable future?  

Nope.

Irrelevant.

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[iamback]

Now you understand why CoinCube took the thread so seriously. He is genuinely concerned.

But I think some parts of the USA may break off from the rest and do well. Perhaps the Idaho and East WA area, to merge with Canada and Vancouver. Or just migrate to Canada, their prospects look much better given the better demographics. The socialism is mostly in the big cities. Luckily Canada has a high proportionality of Asian wealth and knowledge capital pouring in.

Americans are lucky, because obtaining Canada citizenship isn't so difficult (at least if you act now). But I don't suggest any rash actions. Be methodical. It will take some years for this to play out. You have some time to think clearly first. I am not even sure if I would move if was in the USA, I might try to hold fort some where and find a non-socialist community or just ride the socialism and hide my assets and knowledge. But I already bugged out of the USA years ago.

Whereas, Europeans are pretty much isolated — no country along their land borders with good demographic prospects. Perhaps Greece will break away from the Euro, then that would be the place for Libertarian Europeans to immigrate to. Some from Spain and Portugal escaped to former colonies, but unfortunately the situation of Latin America doesn't look favorable in the Knowledge Age due to the rampant socialism in their culture. Latin America appears to me to be headed into the socialism abyss along with the West, not coming out of totalitarianism and cronyism as China and India are. There might be exceptions such as Guatemala, although for example Panama appears to be going the wrong direction.

Europeans could consider migrating to Russia, because I think freedom will break out in Russia just as in China. I think Russia is coming out of Communism and Putin is just a temporary blip. But culturally Russia probably has a long way to go as compared to China which is on an accelerated pathway towards capitalism and free markets.

Armstrong said he was going to put out a report on the best countries for riding out this crisis. But he hasn't updated the status of that plan for the past few months. I will email him and ask for an update.

Armstrong had mentioned Florida (and I believe Texas) for their special treatment of bankruptcy and real estate exclusion. Rural Texans are very self-sufficient. I haven't looked to see what % of the Texas population is rural. But I see a lot of welfare and socialism in Texas cities.

I've done my research on countries, but I am not going to share it, because it is specialized to my situation which is somewhat unique.

We may have war first between Russia and NATO, and China and Japan, as proxy wars of the USA. So it is not entirely clear to me that migrating to Russia or SE Asia now is the wise move.

We live in interesting and tumultuous times — a Chinese curse proverb.

[OROBTC]

...

iamback

Fair enough if you do not wish to further discuss my views.

Best of luck to you brother.

[iamback]

For more drama, I will dedicate one of my favorite songs of all time to this.

The Smiths - It's Over. Or the live version.


For those who are young enough and into hands-on people work than lonely programming, I suggest starting a discreet international security services firm. Communities and even individuals will need to hire private security and install security technology to deal with what is coming[1].

[1]	http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/seattle/2014/12/19/whittier-heights-seattle-police/20628207/ http://ferfal.blogspot.com/2014/11/rural-crime-keeps-getting-worse-what-do.html (how can rich people protect their ranches?)

I hope we Anglo-Saxons (westerners) can regain ourselves and families and rid ourselves of the malaise of the trap socialism and feminism.

...

iamback

Fair enough if you do not wish to further discuss my views.

Best of luck to you brother.

Thank you so much for your kind words. Same to you brother. Wonderful to see us appreciate each other.

[CoinCube]

Lots of interesting back and forth. Lets see if some consensus can be achieved.
Essentially the arguments above boil down to the following.

1) OROBTC argues that the US may be screwed but everywhere else is in worse shape. OROBTC also notes that the US maintains several advantages in the physical economy.

2) Anonymint counters that the physical economy is declining and will be irrelevant in the future negating this US advantage.

3) pungopete468 argues that the massive gun ownership in the US coupled with the large minority of pro-freedom individuals will establish the conditions for a recovery in the US, perhaps following significant violent confrontation/fracture. He also argues that those in the USA should not abandon hope or abandon the dream that they have held onto for so many generations.

4) Anonymint counters that socialism will not be reversed in the USA and essentially that the factors listed by pungopete468 are insufficient. He argues that the Gen Y will putsh for more socialism and that this push cannot be stopped due to the factors listed in Understand Everything Fundamentally.

It is my opinion that all of these arguments are correct. The reasons for this are not immediately obvious. Lets start with the physical economy.

The Physical Economy

Anonymint is correct that the physical economy will decline into relative insignificance. He is also correct that the physical economy will collapse spectacularly when the debt bubble bursts. However, the physical economy will never disappear entirely. It is important to note that even in a full blown knowledge age the relatively insignificant physical economy will continually grow.

The physical economy is never going to disappear. There remain great fortunes that will be won by pioneers in the physical economy. As we transition to the knowledge age, however, these fortunes will decline along with the overall importance of the physical economy. The greatest fortunes of the future will be made in the knowledge economy.

The physical economy will collapse when the global debt bubble bursts. However, this collapse should not be mistaken for an immediate transition into insignificance. The physical economy will bottom at some (much lower) level and then gradually start to grow once more. It is only over a much longer time horizon long after the debt bubble is ancient history that Physical will fade to insignificance. OROBTC is correct that the advantages the USA has in the physical economy will continue to matter for the near term (the relevant planning horizon for those of us around today) Anonymint is correct that our descendants will see those advantages fade to relative insignificance (but never vanish entirely). As a store of value gold, in the long run, is likely to mirror the physical economy and decline into insignificance. In the short term having some on hand is probably good idea.

Resistance to Socialism in the US

In Anonymint's writings about Europe he predicts that Europe will not fracture but will instead grow more centralized. Unarmed countries like Japan with relatively docile populations will never fracture no matter how bad socialism becomes. It is very easy in unarmed countries for a central authority to maintain control through the police/military/violence. The mere fact that we are discussing the possible fracture of the USA is an indication that something is fundamentally different in the USA. Those 300 million guns spread among 80 million households do matter.

Socialism will not be stopped in the US. Those opposing socialism will not be able to stop generation Y and a population dependent on the government from taking the US down the road of totalitarian socialism. Anonymint is correct that those resisting socialism in the US will fail.

However, pungopete468 is also correct when he argues that Americans should not abandon hope and that "people can find it within themselves not to give up on a dream that they have held onto for so many generations; one that we've gone astray from". It may be impossible to stop the growth of socialism in the US, but it is entirely possible to slow it. This is not a battle that is starting now. It has been fought for the last 100 years. The socialist have been winning and will continue to win, but in the US they have been slowed. This ongoing battle is the reason the US has less socialism than Japan and Europe and the reason capital is fleeing the rest of the west to the USA. The result of this battle is that the US today has less taxes, a stronger economy, and less regulation. Socialism grew at a slower rate.  

It is entirely possible that a unified world socialism could strangle the fledgling knowledge economy in its infancy. If that happens we face a Dark Age. The outcome of the battle over socialism in the USA may be predetermined, but, one can lose every battle and still win the war. Resistance in the US will slow socialism globally. The West may expropriate its own high tech sector and destroy it, but this will occur later in the US. The population of the US will also get to watch firsthand as Japan and Europe go first into the socialist abyss and this will further strengthen opposition. This window of time bought by those who resist will allow the knowledge sector to thrive (for a time) in the USA even after the debt bubble bursts. The resistance will also distract and hinder a unified world socialism from potentially destroying the knowledge economy in its infancy. Anonymint is correct that socialism in the USA will not be stopped, that does not make resistance pointless.

[iamback]

Correcting false (strawman) dichotomies

CoinCube, my point from the outset of the recent discussion with you et al, was that no one can fight socialism by trying to get the entire country (nor West) to reverse course. "Slowing socialism down" is another collectivized ideal, thus antithetical to the truth. Precisely the problem with collectivism is that there can be only one direction (no degrees-of-freedom).

Rather decentralized self-sufficiency actions (e.g. finding gainful vocation in the Knowledge Age in a way that prevents the State from expropriating your earnings) that better you and yours do in fact slow socialism down, but not because that collective goal was your motivation. As soon as a person bases their actions around a collective goal at nation-state scope (e.g. we must politically stop the expropriation), they are no longer prioritizing decentralized maximum-division-of-labor knowledge formation and have become a socialist.

I am just telling everyone to give up on that patriotic crap, because it can't be orthogonal to collectivism. Instead view yourself as a citizen of your own sovereign world, not of a country of your compatriot slaves. Why be a slave to a country?

Instead be clever about maximizing your and yours situation.

The Knowledge Age will be providing that innovation in the physical economy too (e.g. no need to ship or manufacture items, just download design and print at home on 3D printer, or software for automation of physical labor with robots)! Apparently you are not understanding where the distinction is made. The antithesis of the Knowledge Age is not the physical economy, rather it is the fixed capital economies-of-scale (e.g. getting a loan to construct a factory) that enable the power law distribution of wealth to leech (collect parasitic rents) from the productive knowledge economy. It is as you forget the main point of my "Rise of Knowledge" essay in the OP is that the Knowledge Age down values financialization and stored monetary capital, and up values individual knowledge and productivity, because knowledge isn't fungible and thus can't be financed.

I think rather than focus on my statement that the value of physical commodities are declining instead focus more on the following two points.

1.

Why USA lost its economic incentive to assimilate http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/12/how-might-a-china-slowdown-affect-the-world/#comment-108803 ... But as I have explained in my theory of a fledgling Knowledge Age, that the individual knowledge workers didn't have the economy-of-scale to produce and distribute their own knowledge works in a physical economy, and thus were enslaved by fixed capital in the Theory of the Firm and the Industrial Age. But the internet and virtual work and distribution has changed all that. Just like the Second Industrial Revolution was brought on by network effects from the First Industrial Revolution, we are now underway in the Second Computer Revolution where the network effects from the First Computer Revolution are starting to kick in and take effect. Anyone who fails to understand how this changes everything is going to have their myopic teeth kicked out by reality.

2.

Another two charts supporting my position of the death of stored capital and fixed capital investment Industrial Age model shows that interest rates ... have been declining inexorably since the damn of human civilization: ...

P.S. Gold will give you nothing but headaches. You've been warned. I was warning years 4 ago.

End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyed

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/UserInfo-Shelby_H_Moore.html

15 Jun 2010 - End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyed (44210 Reads)

...

26 Oct 2010 - Silver will bottom at $22, then $45 by March 2011, then crash to $25 (24305 Reads)

...

04 Mar 2013 - Reasons to Sell Gold and Silver Now (4722 Reads)
29 Mar 2013 - Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch (15616 Reads)

When I wrote that essay, I hadn't yet figured out that my logic was actually deflationary collapse, not hyper-inflation. I was using the word "hyper-inflation", but my description was logically deflationary collapse. Even if you go back to my 2006 email with Jim Willie, my analysis was pointing to deflationary collapse, but I wasn't articulating that because my mind had been polluted by the delusional gold-bug community.

As you can see above, it wasn't until March 2013 that I started to reconcile my logic and my public position on gold. Note I had been chronically ill for much of 2011 and 2012, which is why the long hiatus between forming logic in 2010 and not reconciling until 2013.

And that long delay (and inaction, as well as very poor decisions and thinking when I was so ill) cost me most of my stored wealth. I went from once owning 18,000 troy ounces of silver to a pauper today.

[CoinCube]

Correcting false (strawman) dichotomies

CoinCube, my point from the outset of the recent discussion with you et al, was that no one can fight socialism by trying to get the entire country (nor West) to reverse course. "Slowing socialism down" is another collectivized ideal, thus antithetical to the truth.

Rather decentralized self-sufficiency actions (e.g. finding gainful vocation in the Knowledge Age in a way that prevents the State from expropriating your earnings) that better you and yours do in fact slow socialism down, but not because that collective goal was your motivation. As soon as a person bases their actions around a collective goal at nation-state scope (e.g. we must politically stop the expropriation), they are no longer prioritizing decentralized maximum-division-of-labor knowledge formation and have become a socialist.

Instead be clever about maximizing your and yours situation.

In what way are these mutually exclusive? Provided one does not neglect personal decentralized self-sufficiency why shouldn't a rational actor in our current environment also participate in the local collective and attempt to restrain said collective. To do otherwise is to yield the floor to those who will make decentralized self-sufficiency more difficult to achieve.

[aminorex]

Shelby seems to like demurrage because he sees the cultural damage done by power-law distribution of wealth.  I hold to the contrary, that Coase's theorem comes into play with regard to liquidity no less than other instrumentalities, that trade effects efficient distribution.  Note that extreme concentrations are present now, after decades of regulatory capture.  It is only by corruption, which creates barriers to trade, that such damaging extremes have been achieved.  Other instances of extreme wealth concentration, such that it actually drains the pool, and sinks most boats, share this dynamic, almost without exception.  (In my limited personal awareness of the moment, entirely without exception.)

I contend that in a decentral, knowledge-age economy, where code is law, such corruption and capture is a relatively minor factor.  If it were not, then any attempt to engineer demurrage would be doomed to failure.  The very fact that one could succeed with a currency which incorporates demurrage (whether by inflation or other means) would imply that it was not necessary to do so, because the regime would be a relatively uncorrupt one.  Consequently I see nothing but downside in the attempt.  The desirable outcome is a level playing field, in which transactions are free, nigh frictionless, and contracting is libre.  Then any capital formation is efficient, productive, and lifts all the boats.  Yes, abuses will occur, but in the statistical aggregate, they are of no consequence when efficiency and freedom allow prosperity to flourish.  In order to achieve an optimal long-run result, it is necessary to accept a higher variance than one might otherwise prefer.  Life is too complex to be monomaniacal in pursuit of monotonicity.

I fear that frictions to capital formation will de-optimize (pessimize, if you will) the long-run aggregate outcome for all of humanity no less than do frictions resulting from gerrymandering the topology of the solution space.  Smooth spaces, God willing even nearly everywhere convex domains, are much more amenable to eudamonic convergence.

[iamback]

In what way are these mutually exclusive? Provided one does not neglect personal decentralized self-sufficiency why shouldn't a rational actor in our current environment also participate in the local collective and attempt to restrain said collective. To do otherwise is to yield the floor to those who will make decentralized self-sufficiency more difficult to achieve.

Because you will waste time and effort that could have been used to actually achieve it without being slave (dependent) on what the State does. And you will not stop the State from spiraling into the abyss, because the majority is going to demand expropriation. You can't suddenly change the situation of the majority. The majority has no other option and all the (political or even violent) fighting you do can't give them another option.

The economic reality and trajectory was written into stone decades ago. It can't be altered. The economic reality is what it is.

My advice to everyone is pay off all your debt because in a deflationary collapse that is underway (see oil under $50 today!) the government can take your assets and leave you with debt to pay but no assets to pay with. And debtor's prisons are returning. Even though I was reduced to near pauper, I prioritized paying off my credit card debts in 2014 and did pay $20,000 of it off for less than $10,000 by accepting best offers for negotiated settlement. I only have about $2000 of debt remaining (except that my ex took out a $25,000 student loan recently and I don't know if the USA will try to pin that on me).

Also radically reduce the risk to unjust IRS audits and assessments, because these will become more common.

Also radically reduce the risk to lawsuits, because these will become more common as westerners get desperate.

Then the next priority is to align your vocation with the Knowledge Age and so you have income even during global economic collapse and your skills are transportable to any location you might choose to move to as the chaos takes form.

Gold can become an albatross around your neck, because you can't reliably and easily move it internationally. In fact, I lost much of my wealth because I couldn't physically carry my 18,000oz with me from USA to the Philippines, and so I had to trust others and that is one facet of where the losses accrued over time.

[iamback]

AnonyMint seems to like demurrage because he sees the cultural damage done by power-law distribution of wealth.

It has nothing to do with culture nor ideological preferences. You have ostensibly not understood why the Knowledge Age is important.

The maximum-division-of-labor is inhibited by the financialization of economies-of-scale, whereas in the Knowledge Age, the producers of knowledge can move their productions directly to the end consumer, thus the middle man of finance is cut out. The Theory of the Firm middle man is similarly cut out.

It is all about advancing the rate at which prosperity accelerates.

Sorry but rpietila and you still don't get it. Try to read my "Rise of Knowledge" essay linked from the OP more carefully (or perhaps you never read it?).

The desirable outcome is a level playing field, in which transactions are free, nigh frictionless, and contracting is libre.

Exactly. But you can't accomplish that without funding mining. Transaction fees have scaling issues one of which is they are a friction on trade.

The Knowledge Age places no value on (perpetually) stored monetary capital, thus debasement to fund mining has no such adverse cost. Debasement is only expropriating from those people who try to parasite on the Knowledge Age and moving backwards to the financialization Industrial Age.

The Knowledge Age worker needs liquidity and trade, not long-termeternally stored monetary units, because his knowledge wealth is growing orders-of-magnitude faster than the debasement.

Did the light bulb turn on yet?

P.S. the problem of the world today is there is too much useless stored monetary capital (we created $200 trillion of global debt and gave it to ourselves and expect it to generate wealth!):

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/12/how-might-a-china-slowdown-affect-the-world/

So what kind of world are we in – one with excess savings, or one with excess demand? I would be truly surprised if anyone suggested that we are in the latter world and not the former. A world of excess savings is prone to bubbles, and either debt-fueled consumption or high unemployment, and this pretty much describes the world we have been living for the past two decades.

...

In the United States during much of the 19th Century, an erratic and unstable financial system combined with the huge infrastructure needs of a rapidly expanding continental economy meant that the US was almost always in short supply of money and capital*, and so to a large extent its growth rate was constrained mainly by British liquidity. When money poured into the US from Europe, and mainly from England, investments in the US grew apace and the US economy boomed, until some event caused the taps to be turned off (the collapse in silver mining in the 1820s during Latin America’s wars of independence, for example, which was followed by the US crisis of the 1830s and, as a matter of interest to those interested in Chinese history, with the replacement of silver exports with opium to the silver-starved Qing government in China). Whereas Britain may not have been an engine of growth for 18th Century India, or at least for the Indian textile industry, it was for much of the 19th Century the world’s engine of growth because it supplied much of the capital that a savings-starved world needed to fund investment.

But when savings rates are excessive, which is often a consequence of income inequality and a high state share of GDP, as I show in one of my earlier blog posts, the problem the economy faces is insufficient demand, not insufficient savings available for investment. In fact as consumption declines with the rising savings rate, it tends to reduce the need for productive investment, so that both productive investment and consumption tend to drop.

[iamback]

I fear that frictions to capital formation will de-optimize

You assume a false dichotomy.

The Knowledge Age is about maximizing the formation of capital in the form of accrued knowledge, not in the form of financialization or stored monetary units.

Money becomes a language for trade, not for power law stored monetary suppression of maximum-division-of-labor efficiencies.

Actually you ostensibly don't understand the definition of "capital" (I know you do but why the conflation?), because you conflated it with money. The money you are storing is not capital and in fact (given the $200 trillion debt bubble) is anti-capital, i.e. money and capital have diverged because of the corrupted system. The real capital is the decentralized, bottom-up knowledge that drives the economy. Top-down knowledge is an oxymoron, as I explained in my essay "Rise of  Knowledge" which is linked in the OP.

It was in the Industrial Age that the requisite large economies-of-scale and large upfront fixed capital investment costs, enabled monetary capital to parasite on the real capital of the economy and extract parasitic rents.

We thus assume money and capital are correlated, but not so.

Prof. Pettis even writes about "social capital", which is another example of stored money not being correlated to capital.

http://mic.com/articles/7970/the-difference-between-money-and-capital-in-the-american-economy

Much confusion in economics results from the common practice of referring to money as capital. In fact money and capital are two different things. Capital is the real resources that producers use in order to make the goods that we all consume: things like factories, machine tools, trucks, and roads. All capital exists in a specific form. Money on the other hand is non-specific; it can be used to buy anything that is available in the marketplace, including capital goods. This is what leads to the common practice of referring to money as capital.

In the Knowledge Age, the only capital for example a programmer needs is a personal computer, an internet connection, a desk next to his bed (or sleep under the desk), a six-pack of Jolt cola, gift coupons for Dominos Pizza, and most importantly knowledge of how to code (which is by far the most expensive item on this list).

[aminorex]

AnonyMint seems to like demurrage because he sees the cultural damage done by power-law distribution of wealth.

It has nothing to do with culture nor ideological preferences. You have ostensibly not understood why the Knowledge Age is important.

If you don't perceive the dangers of ressentiment, read Beyond Good and Evil and review 20th century history.  It's not an outlier.  It's human nature.

The maximum-division-of-labor is inhibited by the financialization of economies-of-scale, whereas in the Knowledge Age, the producers of knowledge can move their productions directly to the end consumer, thus the middle man of finance is cut out. The Theory of the Firm middle man is similarly cut out.

I agree, as far as that goes (yet it remains to be seen how far it goes and how fast it gets there, and we have to survive the ride meanwhile) but you're conspicuously avoiding the applicable substance of Coase's theorem - I might argue also, a consequence of Ricardian trade.

The desirable outcome is a level playing field, in which transactions are free, nigh frictionless, and contracting is libre.

Exactly. But you can't accomplish that without funding mining. Transaction fees have scaling issues one of which is they are a friction on trade.

100% agreed.  Funding PoW is necessary.  All necessaries are givens. They may not be desirable on all grounds, but up to the limits of that necessity there is no point in attempting to optimize conflicting aims.

The Knowledge Age places no value on stored monetary capital, thus debasement to fund mining has no such adverse cost. Debasement is only expropriating from those people who try to parasite on the Knowledge Age and moving backwards to the financialization Industrial Age.

Substantive disagreement here.  In a world of frontiers, yes.  In a world where everything is titled and walled, no.  If Babbage had built his engine and the knowledge age came about 100 years earlier, I would probably be siding with you on this point.  As it is, material effects require material resources which can only be assembled (non-coercively) by trade, requiring capital formation.  Space is not a "final frontier";  it's the walls of our prison.  (The mind is the true frontier.)

The Knowledge Age worker needs liquidity and trade, not long-term stored monetary units, because his knowledge wealth is growing orders-of-magnitude faster than the debasement.

Competition will be brutal.  In this embryonic proto-phase, the niches of the solitary actor remain unsaturated.  Given the population conditions which pertain, that won't last long.  Collective action is the only way to accomplish what cannot be accomplished by a lone actor and automation, and in the knowledge age, that is all that offers substantive value-add on a sustainable basis.  That does not imply a royal charter style corporation, but it does imply that the organization of external agencies on a large scale will provide substantial value creation opportunities.  And the only way to do that (non-coercively) is trade, requiring capital formation.

the problem of the world today is there is too much useless stored monetary capital:

Agreed.  But only for the reasons I already mentioned - the oceans drained to water the emperor's gardens, and float the emperor's yacht.  You want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[aminorex]

I fear that frictions to capital formation will de-optimize

Actually you ostensibly don't understand the definition of "capital" (I know you do but why the conflation?)...
We thus assume money and capital are correlated, but not so.

Prof. Pettis even writes about "social capital", which is another example of stored money not being correlated to capital.

I would argue that money is merely a liquid form of social capital.  Crypto breaks the final illusory threads binding it to matter.  But liquidity is a marvelous tool for organizing humans.  And the need to organize humans on a free basis will not go away.  Without a viable means of achieving it, the vacuum would be filled by coercion.  The non-coercive way requires capital formation.  The means of knowledge production are still means of production.  The social capital required to create large-scale value remains a capital requirement.  Knowledge does not obsolete capitalism per se.  It does transform it into something unrecognizable to a 19th century robber baron.  It does render wage slavery as we know it today obsolete.  It may yet render the charter corporation obsolete.  But it still requires capital formation.

[iamback]

And the need to organize humans on a free basis will not go away.

We fundamentally disagree then.

The maximum-division-of-labor (at its asymptote) means humans don't need to be organized top-down. Top-down organization destroys knowledge production, with one silly example being that everything rpietila has invested in being destroyed:

* silver
* Bitcoin
* Monero

All collapsing or in Monero's case going no where fast. Why is Monero not going fast to change the world? Because paying people to code does not motivate them. They just do the minimum to get paid. People get motivated to change the world, when that is the reason they are doing it in the first place, not for the money. Programmers don't need much money, as I detailed in the prior post. The more they program (the more they don't leave their desk + proximate bed with pizza and Jolt cola), the less money they need, because they thus don't go outside to spend any.

Knowledge does not obsolete capitalism per se.  It does transform it into something unrecognizable to a 19th century robber baron.  It does render wage slavery as we know it today obsolete.  It may yet render the charter corporation obsolete.  But it still requires capital formation.

Yeah that capital formation is the accrued knowledge capital, not money.

We can use money as a language to push energy into short-term priorities, but (since top-down is not omniscient) the long-term accrual of knowledge is bottom-up, serendipitous, and can't be (perfectly a.k.a. frictionlessly) top-down organized.

[iamback]

You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent. You can do like they did in Vietnam massacre an entire village hoping one of the many you kill is the enemy. I do expect the socialism to kill itself this way.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, because probably you are not a programmer and you (apparently) don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

Your model is also failing to understand that the programmers (hackers) don't need you. They can survive on Jolt cola and pizza and coding. The rest of the world could do what ever it wants and it doesn't matter to us. But you need us for everything. Your world doesn't survive without our code. Fact is that knowledge now makes the world go around. And knowledge is all that really matters now. Human nature will ascribe to what matters economically, always has. Just as you can't tell human nature that financing Model Ts is a productive activity because it employed more people than today's car factories. You can't stop the progression of technology, because economic paradigm shifts hand victory to all those who don't try to dig trenches with spoons.

[1]	http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345

[aminorex]

You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, probably because you are not a programmer and you don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

[1]	http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345

I am, in fact, a programmer.  (I wrote ~200 lines of C++, 75 lines of python, 50 lines of shell, and 12 lines of matlab today.) So is any CEO worth his salt.  He's just programming the organization, rather than a dumb automaton.  His unbounded entropic art form is essential to achieving human potential. Moreover, 90% of all humans should never write a line of code that anyone else is going to depend upon.  99% should never write a line of code that a human life may depend upon.  Yet they are almost all useful for some constructive purpose, when suitably guided.  Which requires capital formation.

[iamback]

You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, probably because you are not a programmer and you don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

[1]	http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345

I am, in fact, a programmer.  (I wrote ~200 lines of C++, 75 lines of python, 50 lines of shell, and 12 lines of matlab today.) So is any CEO worth his salt.  He's just programming the organization, rather than a dumb automaton.  His unbounded entropic art form is essential to achieving human potential. Moreover, 90% of all humans should never write a line of code that anyone else is going to depend upon.  99% should never write a line of code that a human life may depend upon.  Yet they are almost all useful for some constructive purpose, when suitably guided.  Which requires capital formation.

You aren't a programmer in the sense of understanding my point, until you've written an application with 10,000 lines of code. Then you start to appreciate the point that no one can compete with what you did. Programming is individuality. The capital is the formation of that individual expression, i.e. the knowledge itself not the monetary.

Everyone will be trading their knowledge creations. I have no idea why you think only a few percent would. People (consumers) are diverse with diverse desires, situations, and needs. One size fits all sucks. Have you tried the one size fits all shoes lately?

Some will create more knowledge value than others, and thus relatively be able to trade for more knowledge.

They will use fungible money to trade with, because it is more efficient than barter. But they don't need that money to retain its undebased value for decades. They will turn that money over as fast as possible to accelerate their own knowledge production. To the extent they can't, then it is best to debase that money, because they are no longer efficient with that much monetary capital. Thus it logically follows that if we don't want monetary capital to diverge from knowledge capital, then we must debase the monetary.

You apparently view the world as Cathedrals. The world is a Bazaar.

Suggested reading material:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg9940008#msg9940008
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.html


P.S. I do agree that there will still be some top-down organization, but it will become more localized (i.e. decentralized instances of localized top-down structures) and thus long-term stored money will wane.

[iamback]

Post-scarcity, Post-Industrial World

Aminorex, if someone handed me a $billion but I found I couldn't buy what I wanted with it, what would be the value of those $billion digits? In fact, the $billionaires can't buy what they really want. There are only so many possessions you can buy, before you've bought duplicates of everything. This is why they look for overpriced symbols of wealth to purchase so they can feel they haven't run out things to buy.

Needs and desires drive the economy.

If I don't want "one size fits all" software and manufactured items, but I rather want them highly diversified (far beyond the diversity that a factory or top-down command economy can produce), then I have no choice but to pay the producers of software and 3D printer designs in the form of money that they find most capitalistic (i.e. the one they can use to build their capital).

But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?

Your theories derive from physical resource scarcity wherein people need significant money (i.e. 30 - 50% of their income) just to survive or for basic needs, but there is no resource scarcity. Programmers are just fine with Jolt cola, pizza, and a desk to sleep under. We are not lacking physical resources.

What motivates us is knowledge exchange and seeing our work being used and appreciated.

We only need money as a way to make our knowledge exchange more fungible. We don't need money as a long-term store of oppressive destruction of our capital by top-down outsiders who aren't contributing any capital in kind.

This is why rpietila and I no longer understand each other. We understood each other only when I was temporarily deluded as silver bug from 2007 to 2010.

I understand human nature will try to create artificial scarcity to try to have power, e.g. wars can create physical scarcity. But they never succeed long-term.

[iamback]

I can make my argument to aminorex more succinct as follows.

Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be (fully) valued as capital.

The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

This is why all money is debased since Mesopotamia and that will never change. And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.

The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control. But PoW solves that, and we need to fund PoW anyway. And tx fees are anti-scale and anti-commerce.

Really I don't know why it took you so long to realize this!

[aminorex]

Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be valued as capital.

The ability to transmit capital through time is no less important than the ability to transmit it through space. 

If a crypto could only function on the surface of the earth it would be slightly less utile than one which could be transmitted to orbit and back -- only because there are few humans in orbit.  But, God willing, there are plenty of humans in the future.

The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy.

An enormous part of the economy is in the future.

The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents.

When you create a reserve of liquidity, none of the real capital leaves the economy.  All you do is make all the float more valuable.  The real (social) capital remains in the network.  By removing excess accumulation from one point in time and airdropping it back in at another point in time, you are able to create some serious waves, inject energy into the system, and compound value through (token) capital formation.  Itś all just symbol pushing, programming.  Rob me of the ability to compound entropy in this way, and you destroy uncountable degrees of freedom.

The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

Lazy people don't do capital formation.  Any minimum ROI required to stay in the game just means I need to concentrate a larger hoard in order to transmit value into the future.  You make that endeavor exponentially more difficult with a linear increase in debasement.  That sucks.  Very poor trade-off:  Linear benefit, exponential loss.

This is why all money is debased since Mesopotamia and that will never change.

Mesopotamians were just saving in the wrong commodities.  If they had been hoarding cultural goods as assiduously as they hoarded wheat and gold, they could have transmitted far more wealth into the future than they could physically accumulate.

And man would never fly, according to the best minds of the late 19th century.

Mesopotamians could not conceive of a knowledge age.  We are standing on the shoulders (and stomping on the faces) of giants now.  We can invent uses of social capital which can achieve things no Assyrian despot could ever have conceived.

And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.

Only as long as the state forces them to take it.  Remove coercion, and no one will accept your will-o-wisps.  It's more like Gresham's dictat than law.  If you remember the law, you must surely remember why it was true.  Take away those conditions, and it is no longer true.

The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control.

Disagree: The problem with debasement is that it destroys the freedom to program.  It places bounds on entropy.

But PoW solves that, and we need to fund PoW anyway. And tx fees are anti-scale and anti-commerce.

Really I don't know why it took you so long to realize this!

I realized it long ago.  Long before I stopped fighting it.  Because it is worthwhile to fight it up to the limits of its necessity -- and no further.

Oh, and I have written 1000 lines of code in a day, on many occasions (much to the detriment of my health at the time).  I've written about a dozen >>10kloc apps, and spent years working on a system over a million lines, ultimately leading the effort for a while.  Which could never have been accomplished without a whole lot of capital formation.

I am currently working on a project which requires a greater degree of capital formation than has ever been achieved in human history.  If successful, it will benefit many many millions of people in the first generation, and hopefully those benefits will compound to the whole species in future generations.  But it requires the transmission of large amounts of capital through time.  Just because no one has done it before does not mean that it can not or should not be done.  (Because it is unprecedented, it is incredibly unlikely to be successful, but the benefits are great enough so that I am willing to expend my life on it.)

That's why I strongly disagree about debasement.  Debasement threatens this project, and makes it much more difficult (and no less worthwhile).  If I can conceive it, and potentially accomplish it, then others may as well.  Some will have bad ideas.  Some will have good ideas.  That's how freedom rolls.