http://replacecapitalism.com/ - "We Must Replace Capitalism with a New System that Benefits Everyone"

[Iwasamwillbe]

Replace Capitalism is a website created by Marshall Brain (who also created http://godisimaginary.com/, http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/, http://howgodworks.com/, http://decidingtobebetter.com/, http://machinethatmakesmoney.com/, http://fermiparadoxsolution.com/, and the wildly successful http://howstuffworks.com/), wherein he argues that Capitalism is not just flawed, but wholly absurd and morally depraved, and responsible for untold suffering throughout generations of humanity's existence.

Like anybody who wants people to become successful entrepreneurs, Marshall Bigbrain knows the lunatic horrors of Capitalism, a sample of which he explains in Chapter 1:

Chapter 1 – Capitalism Causes Gigantic Suffering
If you are a thoughtful, rational person, there have probably been many times in your life where you have felt that, “something is definitely wrong here.” You have looked out at the economic world we live in, and what you see seems unmistakably irrational, cruel, idiotic. There are a number of different things that might trigger this kind of thinking. If you live in the United States, this thinking might occur to you when:

• You read how much Americans are spending on medical expenses: insurance plus co-pays plus deductibles plus out-of-network charges and so on, and you know with certainty that the system has become completely absurd [ref][ref][ref].
• Or when you see a headline about another giant executive pay package, or a corrupt CEO who receives a $10 million “golden parachute” as he is booted out the door for his misdeeds. [ref]
• Or when you pick up something in the store that is priced at $5, but you know it only cost a dime to make it. Or something costs $10 to make, but the price you must pay is $700 [ref]
• Or when you see politicians in the ruling party clamoring to cut taxes for the hyper-wealthy, or to cut healthcare for 30 million Americans (so the politicians can give more tax cuts to the wealthy) – even though the majority of constituents have no desire to see these cuts happen. [ref][ref]
• Or when you read that many of Walmart’s employees make so little money that they qualify for food stamps from the government in order to have enough food to eat. [ref][ref]
• Or when you see a news story about a fat cat hedge fund manager or mogul and his $100 million superyacht [ref][ref], while tens of millions of other Americans live in poverty.
• Or when you live through a severe recession, where an “economic downturn” causes millions of people to become unemployed through no fault of their own, and therefore they are cut off from the income they need for food, housing, etc.
• Or when you read that nearly half of Americans will end up retiring in poverty [ref].

On the global stage, you might have the feeling that “something is definitely wrong here” when:

• You read that the people assembling Nike shoes make less than $1 an hour creating shoes worth $100+ a pair. Meanwhile the CEO of Nike makes $7,000 per hour. [See Chapter 3]
• Or when you read that the people at Foxconn assembling the latest Apple iPhones make about the same wage as Nike workers, and appear to be working very nearly as slaves, given that they work 70 hours a week and sleep on cots inside the factory where they work. [ref]
• Or when you further hear about the netting below windows and walkways at Foxconn so that people cannot jump out to commit suicide. [ref]
• Or when you read that people in Bangladesh are “happy” to make 38 cents an hour in a garment factory, because 38 cents an hour is better than starving to death. [ref]
• Or when you hear about another giant corporation breaking laws, murdering people, violating safety regulations, polluting the environment, etc. [ref][ref]
• Or when you read that approximately a billion people on Earth are forced to live in appalling slums, and three billion people are surviving on $3 or less per day.

All of these uncomfortable and insane kinds of things, and thousands more, happen because we live within an economic system called capitalism.
It is important to apply appropriate language to what we are seeing. We have reached a tipping point, and what we are now witnessing is insanity. Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) made $102 million in 2017, or $50,000 per hour [ref]. Robert Coury (Chairman of Mylan) made $97 million [ref]. Also:

The highest-paid executive for 2016 was Marc Lore, CEO of e-commerce at Wal-Mart, who made $243.9 million, according to S&P CapitaIQ. The CEO of Alphabet’s Googe, Sundar Pichai, brought in $199.7 million, while Robert J. Coury, chairman of Mylan, made $136.8 million. They were followed by Thomas Rutledge, the Charter Communications CEO, at $98.5 million, and CBS CEO Les Moonves, at $69.5 million. [ref]
“Regardless of how it’s measured, CEO pay continues to be very, very high and has grown far faster in recent decades than typical worker pay,” Mishel and Schieder wrote.

When an executive makes $50,000 an hour, this is insane. “Insane” is the correct word to apply. When millions of fellow human beings are forced by capitalism to suffer through grinding poverty on 38 cents an hour, this is also insane. The fact that these two things are happening simultaneously… there is no word in the English language to adequately describe the amount of insanity taking place. Such a system is demonic, and it is important to face and acknowledge the monstrosity of it, rather than turning away.
Capitalism in our lives
We are all immersed in capitalism, like a fish is immersed in water. For example, we all use money every day. We don’t even think about money anymore – money simply is. We all know in our bones that money is incredibly important, like oxygen is important. We know that if we run out of money, the next step is homelessness.
Because we all need money, we all need jobs. Money and jobs and all the rest have become an interwoven part of human existence in today’s world, to the point where we take it all completely for granted. We tend not to think about capitalism much because of this complete immersion. At the same time, we hear a constant stream of opinions and stories telling us how wonderful capitalism is. We hear things like, “Capitalism is the only economic system that works,” or “We are all so lucky to live in a capitalistic system.”
But have you ever taken the time to think objectively about the reality of capitalism as an economic system? To really think about it? Have you ever considered how many billions of people on planet Earth are directly suffering because of capitalism?
Here is the simplest possible example: through capitalism, about a billion people on planet Earth live in disgusting slums today. A slum is defined in this way:

A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting mostly of closely-packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or uncompleted infrastructure, inhabited primarily by impoverished persons. While slums differ in size and other characteristics, most lack reliable sanitation services, supply of clean water, reliable electricity, law enforcement and other basic services. [ref]
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q67gldZ1P_8 (there are hundreds of videos like this on YouTube documenting the conditions in slums)
As pointed out here [ref], “50 years from now, one in three people worldwide will live in slums.”

Given a choice, would you choose to live in a slum like this? Of course not. Would any family choose to live in a slum, where the family huddles in decrepit housing, cut off from clean water, basic sanitation services, and electricity? No, obviously not. No human would choose this. People never choose to live in slums; they are forced to live in slums. They are forced into slums by capitalism.
With the example of slums alone we can understand that capitalism is an insane system for huge swaths of humanity. One billion fellow human beings are suffering in profound ways by being forced into and trapped by slums. And there are myriad other examples, similarly depraved. We must ask ourselves: Why would we use an economic system that leaves a billion fellow humans suffering like this?
If you have a decent job (e.g. $60K+ per year, or $240+ per day, or $30+ per hour) in a developed country like the U.S., it might be easy to be complacent because you are “doing OK.” Capitalism, to you, might seem alright. But there are three things that you are ignoring in order to maintain complacency:

1. On a global scale, your situation is rare. The number of people, planet-wide, in your elite bracket is measured in the hundreds of millions. Less than 10% of humanity lives at your level of wealth.
2. Meanwhile, there are billions upon billions of people who are desperately poor, and who are therefore being crushed by capitalism. The fact that billions of fellow humans are having their lives on Earth destroyed by capitalism is insane.
3. Meanwhile, there is a tiny segment of the population, known as the 0.01%, who are stockpiling enormous, staggering, impossible-to-comprehend amounts of wealth, and you have no idea it is happening. These two videos can introduce you to this bizarre situation: [ref, ref]. In 2017, the 500 richest people on Earth increased their wealth by $1 trillion. [ref]

What can we say about these billions of people who are being crushed by capitalism? Through the rules of capitalism, approximately 70% of the people on planet Earth make $10 per day or less [ref]. This is approximately $1 per hour, or less. Also note that about half of Earth’s humans make less than $3 per day. These billions of people live in deep poverty, obviously. With $3 a day a person cannot buy much. These billions of people are therefore cut off from things they obviously need, like real health care services, decent housing, clean water, basic sanitation, and so on. If a human is making $1 an hour, obviously they cannot afford much in terms of food, clothing, housing, etc. Again we must ask: With more than half of humanity living in poverty like this, why would we use an economic system that leaves so many billions of people suffering in such profound ways?
Meanwhile, while the rules of capitalism are forcing billions of people on planet Earth into grinding poverty, these same rules are creating a gigantic and incomprehensible concentration of wealth. Two recent headlines make this problem easy to understand:

• “The top 0.1% of American households hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%” [ref]
• “World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says” [ref]

The insanity of this situation is impossible to express, yet this is how capitalism is designed.
Understanding the Full Insanity of Capitalism
Simply step back and think about the full list of insanity that directly results from capitalism. The list includes:

1. Unemployment – Every adult or family in the economy needs a good job in order to buy food, pay rent, purchase electricity, and so on. Why should any adult who wants to work ever be faced with a “job market” that has no good jobs to offer? Why would we accept an economic system that creates this situation? People must have jobs to buy food and housing, but often the capitalistic system offers no jobs. [see Chapter 14 for details]
2. Ridiculously low wages – Ditto for the billions of people forced into the terrible jobs that capitalism usually creates – jobs paying only 50 cents or $1 or $2 per hour. A wage like this results in intense poverty for the recipient. Why would we accept an economic system that leaves billions of fellow humans in intense poverty? [see Chapter 14 for details]
3. Poverty – The intense poverty that we see all around the world is a direct result of capitalism, caused by the terrible jobs (or no jobs) that capitalism prefers to create. Half of Earth’s population makes less than $3 per day as a result [ref]. Why would we accept this from the world’s predominant economic system? Why not design a new economic system that completely eliminates poverty? [see Chapter 5 for details]
4. Slums – Ditto.
5. The gigantic concentration of wealth – The purpose of capitalism is to create a gigantic concentration of wealth in the “wealthy elite.” But why do we want the “wealthy elite” to exist at all? Why accept an economic system that strives to create billionaires by stealing money from everyone else? [see Chapter 7for details]
6. Billionaires – The existence of billionaires is a complete absurdity – a totally ridiculous outcome that directly results from the rules of capitalism.
7. Asset capture – Asset capture is a powerful tool that billionaires use to concentrate wealth. It is absurd that the capitalistic system allows asset capture, yet this is how capitalism is wired. [See Chapter 9 for details]
8. Arbitrary pricing – Prices in capitalism are completely arbitrary. A company is free to charge “what the market will bear”, regardless of the cost of production – an absurdity that fuels the concentration of wealth. Why design the world’s predominant economic system to allow arbitrary pricing? Why not instead design a new economic system in which all prices are rational? [see Chapter 13 for details]
9. Profit – Profit is an overcharge – typically 10% or 20% over the cost of production – that capitalism tacks on to every sale that takes place in the economy. No consumer wants to pay for profit, yet consumers have no choice under the rules of capitalism. [see Chapter 13 for details]
10. Dividends – Dividends allow companies to distribute the profits that they take from consumers, sending all of the profit to shareholders. Shareholders do no work to receive this money, and are usually the wealthy elite [ref]. It is yet another absurdity of capitalism fueling the concentration of wealth. [see Chapter 7 for details]
11. Recessions, Depressions – Recessions and depressions are a direct result of capitalism, and cause massive suffering by creating waves of unemployment throughout an economy. Why would we use an economic system that periodically causes massive suffering? [see Chapter 14 for details]
12. Inflation – Like recessions and depressions, inflation if an artifact of capitalism that causes suffering by reducing the value of money. It is absurd to use an economic system that has inflation baked in, yet here we all are.

These 12 absurdities are the direct result of the rules of capitalism. Why should humanity tolerate, much less embrace, an economic system harboring this much insanity? It is time to replace capitalism with a new economic system that completely eliminates all of these problems.
The worsening situation in the United States
This article highlights the worsening situation in the United States:

“Billionaire entrepreneur and financier Ray Dalio says there are two very different economic realities in the United States right now. That divide is threatening the nation’s stability, the Bridgewater Associates founder says, and it’s only going to get worse as technology replaces workers.
“[T]here are two economies. We talk of ‘the economy.’ Recognize that you can’t talk about the economy … there are two economies,” says Dalio, speaking to Recode executive editor Kara Swisher on her podcast, Recode Decode, published Monday.
There’s the “top 40 percent” and “the bottom 60 percent,” says Dalio. And for those at the bottom, life is hard without a lot of hope.”If you look at the economy of the bottom 60 percent, it is a miserable economy. Not only hasn’t it had growth and economic movement and so on, it has the highest rising death rates, it is the only place in the world where death rates are rising because of a combination of opiates, other drugs and suicides,” Dalio says. (Indeed, Princeton Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that drugs, alcohol and suicide are a major reason behind rising death rates among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less.)
Meanwhile, the most privileged at the top have a radically disproportionate amount of wealth. “The top one tenth of 1 percent of the population has a net worth that is equal to the bottom 90 percent combined,” according to Dalio…” [ref]

We could go on and on and on and on with examples, because they are endless. Billions of people on our planet are suffering, and they are suffering as a direct result of capitalism. If we simply open our eyes and accept what we see instead of turning away, we can find innumerable examples of capitalism’s absurdity.
Even in the United States, with the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful military, tens of millions of people are forced to use food stamps. Capitalism has reached a point where tens of millions of working Americans do not have enough money to feed themselves. And this is just the start.

• That ghetto downtown where no one wants to go? Capitalism causes it.
• The ridiculous situation with health insurance costs and medical prices in America today? Capitalism causes it.
• The purchase of the U.S. government by oligarchs and plutocrats, so that the needs and hopes of the “common man” are completely ignored? Capitalism causes it. [ref]
• The loss of thousands of factories and mills across America, so that thousands of small cities and towns now teeter on the brink of economic collapse? Capitalism causes it.
• The gigantic rents that people are now forced to pay in major cities? Capitalism causes it.
• The immense concentration of wealth in the United States? Capitalism causes it.
• The giant recession we had in 2008? Capitalism caused it, and causes all recessions.

The examples of capitalism’s insanity are endless, everywhere we look. We simply need to open our eyes to reality.
There is now a recognized condition in the developed world colloquially known as SLS, or “Shit Life Syndrome” [ref, ref]. Imagine this – we are creating societies in the developed world that are so awful, people are getting SLS. And sometimes SLS is so bad that people kill themselves either directly, or indirectly through opioids, alcohol, etc. Three recent headlines paint the picture:

• “US life expectancy drops for second year in a row” [ref]
• “Why the UN is investigating extreme poverty in America, the world’s richest nation” [ref]
• This nation pioneered modern life. Now epic numbers of Americans are killing themselves with opioids to escape it [ref]

This is in the developed world, in the country with the world’s largest economy. Never mind all of the cruelty and perversity that capitalism forces upon the human beings living in the developing world.
Why do we allow this? Why would human beings tolerate, much less embrace, an economic system that creates so much suffering and insanity?
We no longer need to accept capitalism. It is time to create a new economic system – one that is much, much better for the vast majority of humans living on planet Earth today. This book is about this new economic system.

Now how do we solve all of the atrocities, genocides, and holocausts that Capitalism has caused? With an entirely new, entirely different economic system, one that benefits everybody! To wit, on Chapter 2:

Chapter 2 – We Must Replace Capitalism

If the people of planet Earth were to sit down together, and if we were to design a new economic system for humanity to replace capitalism, what would this new economic system look like?

Have you ever thought about this question? Have you ever considered how much better things could be for everyone if we replaced capitalism with a new and improved economic system?

What if we were running our world under a new economic system that is beneficial to everyone on the planet? A system that, by design, eliminates poverty, and all of the suffering that poverty brings, while at the same time eliminating capitalism’s incomprehensible concentration of wealth that underpins all of this suffering? What if a new economic system would bring far more prosperity to the vast majority of Earth’s people than the prevailing capitalistic system ever could?

Have you ever taken the time to think about designing a better system? Probably not, because we are all immersed in capitalism.

• For many of us, capitalism is not even noticed. Capitalism is so ubiquitous that people take it completely for granted. Capitalism becomes invisible, like air.
• To some, capitalism seems so entrenched that it is not worth thinking about, as it must be immutable.
• To billions of others, capitalism in right in their faces, because their suffering is a direct result of the rules of capitalism. They live in abject poverty because of capitalism. They know deep in their hearts that there must be a better way to organize a society instead of capitalism, because capitalism destroys their lives every day. Despite their numbers, they are powerless of affect any change to the status quo. The wealthy elite control all of the tanks, bombers, destroyers, soldiers, police forces, courts and prisons.

The Answer is Incredibly Obvious
So let’s repeat the question: If the people of planet Earth were to sit down together, and we were to design a new economic system for the benefit of all humanity, what would this new economic system look like?

The funny thing is, the answer to this question is incredibly obvious. If we were to design a new economic system from scratch for planet Earth, we would simply understand that every human being on the planet has a fundamental set of human needs. Regardless of where we live, what language we speak, what nationality we are born into, etc., this truth is self-evident. Therefore:

• Every human being needs high quality, healthy food
• Every human being needs clean water and sanitation services
• Every human being needs high quality, safe, secure housing
• Every human being needs high quality health care
• Every human being needs high quality clothing
• Every human being needs high quality education
• Every human being needs high quality transportation
• Every human being needs 24×7 electricity and Internet access
• Every human being needs a computer and a smart phone to access the Internet
• And so on…

This is so obvious… Obviously every human being needs these things, and should have these things.

And given that everyone needs these things, we should design the world’s economic system so that everyone receives these things. This, too, is incredibly obvious. Every human being on the planet should have high-quality food, water, housing, health care, clothing, education, transportation, etc. It is obvious.

What if we create “a new grand vision” for our world and its economics? The new grand vision should be this: “Let’s create Heaven on Earth for every human being on the planet, in a way that enhances rather than destroys our planet.” Let’s look at each part of this statement one at a time to understand its full meaning.

The “Heaven on Earth” part reflects the fact that every human being on Earth should have the opportunity to live a great life at a great standard of living. It recognizes the fact that every human being has the same fundamental needs. Obviously we should design the new economy to eradicate poverty completely, and give everyone what they need to live happy lives free of all of the suffering that poverty brings.

For EVERYONE
The “for everyone” part means that in the process of creating this new economy, we specifically eliminate the rampant inequality seen on Earth today. It states that the world’s economy will deliver the things that people need to everyone, so that we all have access to Heaven on Earth. We mentioned these two headlines in Chapter 1, and let’s repeat them because they are so absurd:

• “The top 0.1% of American households hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%” [ref]
• “World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says” [ref]

The absurdity of this situation is incomprehensible. Yet we are currently living within a capitalistic economic system that makes these types of absurdity a part of daily life. This shocking concentration of wealth lives side by side with the horrible conditions that so many humans are forced to endure. Examples are myriad:

1. About one billion fellow humans live in appalling slums [ref, ref]
2. Tens of millions of people are living in refugee camps [ref]
3. 70% of our fellow humans are surviving on less than $10 per day [ref]
4. Billions of human beings lack access to any real health care system because of their intense poverty
5. And so on…

We must design a new economic system that completely eliminates poverty, slums, etc., along with all of the suffering created by these side-effects of capitalism.

Enhances rather than destroys
The “enhances rather than destroys our planet” part means that we, as a species, must stop destroying the planet we live on. The destruction currently comes on so many fronts:

1. Climate change due to carbon dioxide and methane emissions
2. Mass extinction
3. Collapse of fishing stocks from overfishing
4. Plastic pollution in the oceans
5. Untreated human waste in the environment
6. Deforestation
7. Loss of habitat for other species on Earth
8. Human populations beyond the planet’s carrying capacity
9. Sea levels rising
10. And so on…

The fact that all of this destruction is happening in the first place demonstrates how corrupt Earth’s current capitalistic economic systems are [ref]. Any valid economic system would prevent all of these things from happening by design. But they have happened, and are happening, and we must reverse course. We, as a species, must stop the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems, and reverse/repair the damage we have caused as a species. We must “enhance rather than destroy”, and design a new world economy that makes the enhancement process intrinsic to the system.

The new grand vision for humanity’s economic system should be this: “Let’s create Heaven on Earth for every human being on the planet, in a way that enhances rather than destroys our planet.” Now, let’s look at how far away from this goal we find ourselves today.

"But how will this new system work", you might ask. Well you're in luck, because Marshall Hugebrain here has just the explanation. Starting on Chapter 16:

Chapter 16 – A New Economic System: The first step is food
In order to consider a new economy that will replace capitalism, let’s imagine the following scenario: We are going to find a million human beings who are currently being crushed by capitalism. They are suffering through life in a disgusting slum or refugee camp. It is important to understand the current situation and the nature of existence for hundreds of millions of human beings today:

• Their housing is tiny, dirty and dangerous. It is probably made of whatever found materials are available, perhaps cardboard, plastic, wood scraps, etc. There is no heating or air conditioning. Cooking is probably done over a fire [ref]. The floor is probably dirt, or perhaps covered in cardboard or an old piece of carpet. [ref]
• There is no supply of clean water in the home. There may be no supply of clean water anywhere nearby.
• There is no sanitation system.
• Food is scarce, often poor quality.
• None of the modern technologies or conveniences that we take for granted in a developed country are available.
• And so on…

These articles provide insight into what life is like in a slum of this type, lest there be any doubt about the conditions:

• https://www.rvcj.com/slums-india-conditions-worst-animals-will-make-feel-blessed/
• https://www.coffeewithasliceoflife.com/2015/01/23/the-slums-of-manila-philippines/
• https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/these-are-the-worlds-five-biggest-slums/

The people currently living in these ridiculous situations literally have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from a new economic system that provides a great standard of living for every citizen. They are currently living in extreme and degrading poverty, in terrible conditions.
Our goal is to provide these one million people with a new economy where their basic human needs like food, water, clothing, housing, health care, etc. are all provided for in abundance. We want to raise them to a standard of living similar to that of an American making $52,000 per year [2018 dollars], as described in Chapter 5.
Start with Food
We need a starting point for discussing a new economy for these one million impoverished people, so let’s start with food. By understanding how these one million people can grow, cook and serve their own food for themselves, we can understand how the new economy that replaces capitalism will work.
We start with food because food is essential to human survival. We all know this. Without enough food, people die of starvation in just a few weeks. With low quality food, both disease and spiritual decay are inevitable. What is “spiritual decay” in this context? It is a loss of spirit, a loss of the happiness, a loss of the will to live. There is no question that people, like all other animals, fare better on a high-quality and ample diet compared to a low-quality and insufficient diet.
Therefore, if we have a million people whose quality-of-life is important to us, we know that we need to provide them with an average of 2,500 high-quality calories per person per day. Our new city needs to produce 2.5 billion calories every day to adequately feed this population of one million people. [Note: 2,500 calories per day is high, but we use this to ensure plenty of food.]
Let’s put some stipulations on this food:

• The one million people are going to grow the food themselves.
• The food that these one million people eat is going to be of the highest quality. Imagine the food that you would be served on cruise ship, or at a banquet, or at a great buffet restaurant.
• The food is going to be professionally prepared for the one million people, and served to them in nice restaurants.

All three of these points bear explanation, because the reasoning may not be intuitively obvious:

• The new city needs to grow its own food for itself to avoid vulnerability. If the new city is dependent on some other group of people for food, the other group of people can easily cut off the supply of food and/or use food as leverage. The new city must be food-independent to avoid this possibility.
• The food is going to be of the highest quality because humans do best and thrive on high-quality diets. Obviously people could survive on 1,500 calories per day of something like dog kibble. However, these people would be miserable.
• The food is going to be professionally prepared and served in restaurants for three reasons: 1) this method produces the highest-quality food, 2) this is the highest-efficiency and lowest-waste method of food production, and 3) many people in the general population are terrible at food preparation on their own. The expectation that every “normal human being” will also be a “great chef” is as absurd as the notion that every normal human being will be a talented sculptor. Many human beings do not particularly enjoy food preparation or cooking, nor are they very good at it.

Anyone who has ever been on a cruise ship knows that the food is fantastic, that it is virtually unlimited, and that food excellence is a big part of the cruise experience. If you have ever been to the buffet restaurant at a great hotel, it is the same kind of thing – the food they serve is out of this world. The point is that the people staying on a cruise ship or staying in a hotel are not preparing meals on their own in their rooms. Instead, they go to common areas for eating – restaurants, buffets, coffee shops, snack shops – and they eat wonderful food there prepared by professionals [ref].
Understanding the new economy
Imagine that today you are living in a huge, festering, stinking slum in India, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, China, etc. You may not know where your next meal will come from. Whatever it is, your meal will be terrible and not enough. And you have no options, nor any way to improve things. You are stuck in this disgusting slum for life most likely. Approximately one billion people are living in these slums on Earth today [ref]. The current capitalistic economic system that has created these slums is serving a wretched existence to hundreds of millions of human beings each day, and our goal is to completely eliminate slums on planet Earth. Imagine existing in a slum like this, and we come by and say to you:

“Let us introduce you to a new economic system, where you contribute your time to the economic system each week, and in return every meal you eat will be cruise ship quality, and served to you in a restaurant, 365 days a year.”

What do you imagine that the response to this proposal might be from your typical human being trapped in a disgusting slum or refugee camp? Obviously the response would be enthusiastic – this sounds like a dream come true compared to starving in a slum. Billions of human beings currently living on planet Earth today would leap at the chance to have high-quality food in abundance on a daily basis. This is the kind of economy we are going to create for everyone on the planet.
If you think about the process of serving high quality food to one million people every day, you realize that there is a finite amount of basic foods that need to be harvested and/or served each day. To have cruise ship quality food, we realize that these one million people every day will need for example:

• 360,000 pounds of wheat
• 320,000 pounds of potatoes
• 76,000 pounds of rice
• 13,000 pounds of oats
• 700,000 eggs
• 50,000 gallons of milk
• And so on…

These are basic foodstuffs, all grown on farms. We simply look at the aggregate of what the one million people ate yesterday to understand what these one million people will be eating today.
We further realize that wheat can be ground into flour, and the flour can turn into white bread, wheat bread, sourdough bread, raisin bread, muffins, biscuits, pastries, cakes, pancakes, croissants, spaghetti, macaroni, rigatoni, dumplings, pizza crust, breakfast cereal in 15 forms… there are all kinds of things we can do with wheat. Similarly, potatoes can turn into mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, hash brown potatoes, potatoes au gratin, French fried potatoes, tater tots, potato chips, potato/broccoli medley, perogis, etc. Milk can turn into cheddar cheese, swiss cheese, mozzarella cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, butter, ice cream, milk chocolate, etc. Peanuts can turn into roasted peanuts, honey-roasted peanuts, peanut butter, peanut brittle, candy bars….
So there are several different activities that will be happening every day in the food sector of our new city:

1. Basic farming, where staple food ingredients (commodities) like wheat and potatoes are grown and harvested.
2. Food processing, to create intermediate products like cheese, peanut butter, noodles, etc.
3. Food cooking/preparation, where meals are created that are served to people in restaurants.

Each day, all of these different activities boil down to a certain finite number of tasks that these one million people must accomplish to produce, cook and serve the food that they all will eat. For example, all of these tasks need to be performed today:

• The new city needs a certain number of people planting potatoes today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people cultivating potatoes today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people harvesting potatoes today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people transporting harvested potatoes to the restaurants today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people peeling potatoes today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people cooking potatoes today to serve to the city’s residents in high-quality meals (in myriad forms – mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, potatoes au gratin, French fried potatoes, potato chips, potato/broccoli medley, etc. – in all of the different restaurants)
• The new city needs a certain number of people planting wheat today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people cultivating wheat today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people harvesting wheat today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people threshing/winnowing wheat today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people grinding wheat into flour today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people transporting wheat flour to the restaurants today.
• The new city needs a certain number of people cooking flour today to serve to the city’s residents in high-quality meals (in myriad forms – bread, rolls, biscuits, tortillas, pasta, pancakes, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, crackers, cereals, etc. – in all of the different restaurants)
• And so on…

The thing to understand is that, in this city of one million people, there is a finite number of tasks that must be accomplished each day in order to harvest, cook and serve meals to the one million residents. It is a lot of work, yes, but it is finite, and we also have one million people available to do the work. It turns out that, on a per-person basis, only a tiny amount of work needs to be done per day. So how do we divvy up all of the tasks to everyone fairly?
The Task Allocation System
It will be easy to write software that can look at the entire food production equation for the new city each day. This software will understand the amount of time it will take to grow/harvest all of the different foods, the amount of each of the different foods that people are consuming, the amount of time needed to prepare and serve all of the different meals in restaurants [ref], [ref], the amount of time needed to clean up, etc.
Let’s imagine that, on average, this totals up to 200 million hours of human effort that are required each year to completely handle all of the growing, cooking, serving and cleaning of all of the food for the new city each year. This means that each person in the new city will contribute 200 hours per year of their time to food production. This is roughly 33 minutes of a resident’s time each day. The software divvies this work up amongst the one million people who can do the work.
Where does this 200 million hour estimate come from? The growing of the food is highly automated and efficient using modern farm equipment today. It takes just a few hours of human time to grow an acre of wheat, for example. An acre of wheat yields about 2.5 million calories. Corn is similar in terms of human time required for production, and corn yields 14 million calories per acre at harvest. It takes perhaps 50 hours of human time to grow an acre of potatoes, which yields 10 million calories. If we need 2.5 billion calories per day for our one-million-person city, growing all the food will only take, on average, 12,500 hours per day of human time, if we assume the amount of time needed for potatoes per acre. This is only about 1 minute of human time per resident per day. If we add up all of the time needed to process the food, cook the food into meals, serve the food in restaurants, wash the dishes, clean up the restaurants at the end of each meal, etc., the total is approximately 200 million hours of human time per year, or an average of 33 minutes of human time per person per day.
What if we go a step further – we make a broad assumption that only half of the people in the new city can work on any given day. The other half of the residents are, for example:

• children who are in school
• senior citizens who are simply too old to work
• sick people who are unable to work today
• vacationing people
• and so on…

What if we assume that only 500,000 people can work at food production today, rather than one million? Then it is still only about an hour per day on average that is needed per working resident of the new city. The point is that the amount of time that any individual person needs to contribute is small and reasonable. [See Chapter 20 for details]
And now, instead of starving in a slum, all one million residents of our new city are eating like kings.
Imagine if we said to one million impoverished people, who are living in absolutely appalling slum conditions today, the following:

“We invite you to come live in a new city where, in return for contributing about one hour of your time per day, you can eat cruise-ship-quality food in restaurants every day for the rest of your life. Would you like to join us?”

How many of the billions of impoverished people starving on planet Earth today might accept this offer? For that matter, how many millions of people in the United States, who are being dealt a terrible hand by capitalism in the U.S., would gladly accept an offer like this?
People have preferences
To review: We have a piece of task allocation software that knows the complete food equation for the new city each day. It knows all of the tasks that must be preformed today to feed the one million residents. The question: How does the software divvy up all of the tasks amongst the one million residents?
The first thing to understand is that every human being is unique, and therefore has personal preferences:

• Some people like to work in the morning, and some people hate waking up before noon.
• Some people like to drive tractors, and some people would prefer to frost a cake.
• Some people are allergic to peanuts, while some people would love to work in a peanut butter factory because they cannot get enough of the stuff.
• And so on…

The software system that allocates all of the tasks to the city’s residents can let people input all of their preferences like these, and then allocate tasks based on everyone’s preferences.
There may be people in the new city who enjoy variety, and say “surprise me” to the task allocation system. The software can assign tasks to these people in a random rotation. One day a person is planting potatoes for an hour on field #1,436. Another day a person is cooking gourmet French fries for an hour in the “American Bistro” restaurant. And so on. It is going to take time for a person to travel out to field #1,436, so the software accounts for that time. Because of the travel time, the software might ask a person to work 8 hours one day, and then do nothing for the next week to even out the load.
Other people might be quite specific in what they prefer to do. They can sign up for 200 hours of tasks that they would prefer to be doing or enjoy doing for the year. They could also sign up for how they prefer their time to be allocated. One person might prefer to work an hour every day. Another person might want to work for 8 hours one day a week and have the rest of the week off from food production. And so on. The software does not really care. If just gives everyone exactly what they want to the best of its ability.
If we allow people to freely sign up for tasks, there are likely to be certain tasks that no one may ever sign up to do. For example, people may be less likely to sign up for “washing dishes” than “baking bread.” Everyone can help out with these less-wanted tasks by random assignment. Perhaps, out of every year, each resident needs to spend two hours cheerfully cleaning dishes in a restaurant in order to get that task done for the new city. If no one really wants to wash dishes, say, we ask everyone to wash dishes for two hours per month or 2 hours per year (depending on the task) to spread out the load. It really would not be that big of a deal, because everyone shares these tasks.
The Giant Advantages of This New Economy
Do you see what has happened here?

1. First, we have taken one million people on planet Earth that capitalism has absolutely abandoned.
2. Then we have asked them to contribute a little bit of their time each day.
3. We have used a software task allocation system to organize their efforts.
4. And then a miracle has happened – instead of starving in a slum, these one million people are now eating the best food possible in restaurants every day.

To put a finer point on it:

1. We have taken one million destitute people.
2. They are not destitute because they want to be – they have been forced into destitution by capitalism.
3. These one million people have the ability of work, and a willingness to work, and capitalism has instead abandoned them, delivering to them absolutely appalling living conditions with no possibility of ever having “good jobs”.
4. We have simply created a better economic system for these destitute people, so they become able to work to feed themselves, and now they are eating like kings.

Think of all of the capitalistic absurdity that we have eliminated with this new economic way of thinking:

• There is no unemployment in this new system. Everyone contributes a little bit of time in return for the food they need.
• There are no ridiculously low wages.
• There is no starvation or disgusting, low-quality food like people are forced to eat in slums.
• There are no more recessions or depressions or inflation.
• There is no concentration of wealth.
• There are no economic elites stealing trillions of dollars from the system in the form of gigantically absurd executive salaries, private executive jets, demonically huge dividend payments to people who do no work at all, monster advertising budgets, absurd asset capture, corrupt lobbying, political contributions, limousines, executive parties/junkets/vacations, executive skyscrapers and so on. All of this ridiculous overhead and waste and theft is gone.

Without question, this system is shockingly better than capitalism in every imaginable way when it comes to delivering food to the city’s one million residents. Everyone is better off. For every impoverished person on the planet, which is billions and billions of people, this new economic system is a miracle. Even in a fully developed country like the United States, more than half of the population would be better off under this new system instead of capitalism. This is the simple power of the new economic system described in this book.

But wait, there's more! Check out Chapters 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. This next excerpt is from Chapter 21, where Marshall Galaxybrain tells us what this new society should do with "assholes". I think it's the best part of this whole series:

What do we do with the lazy people and the assholes?
The #1 question asked about this new economy is: How will we prevent people from being lazy? And then a related question is: what do we do with people who refuse to follow the rules and often make life miserable for the people around them?

If we want to reframe the way we characterize laziness, we could say that lazy people fall somewhere on the asshole spectrum. Why are they assholes? Because they are not pulling their weight. They are attempting to get a free ride. They are pushing their work onto the 90% of people who do work. They are not fulfilling their basic obligations to themselves, one of which is to provide food for themselves, housing for themselves, etc. through their work.

Since we can reframe lazy people as being somewhere on the asshole spectrum, this opens up a bigger and more important question: What should our new city do with assholes in general? Assholes seem to be a part of just about any human society, and all societies attempt to control assholes in one way or another. So what do we do with assholes here?

It is an important question, because assholes can make life miserable for everyone else in a society if they are not controlled.

Bob Sutton, author of “The No-Asshole Rule”, talks about assholesThink about it this way: If a million people are going to live in a new city free from the absurd rules of capitalism, the last thing they are going to want to have around is the asshole people who make life miserable for everyone else: the dicks, jerks, criminals, fuckups, racists, religious zealots, terrorists, warmongers, polluters, sociopaths, vandals, arsonists, jihadists, and so on; The people who are combative, violent, litigious, quarrelsome, seething, bent on destruction, etc. Everyone living in our new city has a right to feel safe, and to not be harassed as they walk around living their lives. The way to achieve this is to manage, remove or otherwise disable those who are bent on adding danger and harassment to society. Our city will need a foolproof way to eliminate and rehabilitate assholes.


So now we can answer the question: What do we do with the lazy people, and with all of the other forms of assholery in our new city? The important thing to understand is that assholes have broken the social contract between society and citizen, and are reducing the quality of life for other citizens. The position of the society is: “A resident has broken the contract, and they are making other citizens miserable through their actions. They are not fulfilling their responsibilities as a member of this society. Society is willing to work with them to rehabilitate them, and then they will be re-introduced to city, but not until they can demonstrate that they are willing to fulfill their responsibilities to other residents.” For minor offenses, this might involve a day of retraining. But if asshole behavior continues, the offender is removed from society for longer and longer periods until, in essence, the person is banned from the city.

Think about it this way: if a person demonstrates laziness and/or criminal behavior more than two or three times, we simply send them back to the slum that they came from. We bring in a new person who is grateful to experience Heaven on Earth.

There is no reason to allow one person to make hundreds or thousands of other people miserable with his/her behavior. There is no reason to tolerate assholes. Assholes are flagged, given opportunities to retrain and rehabilitate, and if those efforts are successful that is great. But if they are not successful, repeat offenders are removed from society so that everyone else can succeed and prosper in peace. In this way, everyone else in the city benefits from an asshole-free society. An explicit, signed social contract following a period of intense training makes this process much easier to manage, because everyone knows what is going on.

To reiterate: Imagine living in a new economy and a new society where we have effectively eliminated all of the muggers, burglars, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, stalkers, creeps, gangbangers, thugs, bullies, racists, homophobes, misogynists, drug dealers, drunks, con artists, pickpockets, purse snatchers, boomboxers, homeless people, arsonists, vandals, terrorists, religious fanatics, cat callers [ref], prostitutes, spammers, phishers, swindlers, con men, embezzlers, bribery-seekers, corruptors, free-loaders, beggars, paparazzi, drug addicts, public restroom defilers, line cutters, road ragers, kidnappers, lazy people, etc. It would be like living in a dream world. We could all walk around on the streets anytime, anywhere, day or night, and feel safe and secure. Our lives would never be in danger. We would never have to look over our shoulders and worry about the person walking behind us. No one would be harassing us on the street, accosting us, holding a gun to our head for our purse or wallet. We would not have to worry that a terrorist will walk into our favorite restaurant or nightclub and start shooting. This level of safety, security and personal freedom is the goal of our new city. We seek a city free of assholes and asshole behavior. We achieve it by explaining these goals to everyone, by having everyone sign a written contract where they explicitly agree to be a decent human being, and then we retrain (and eventually eliminate) the recalcitrant assholes. With the assholes eliminated, this new city will be Heaven on Earth.

Now for the penultimate part, Chapter 22, where Marshall Transcendentbrain expertly refutes all counterarguments made against this New System:

Chapter 22 – A New Economic System: Understanding the questions and objections

Let’s quickly review the new economic system that we are proposing in this book:

1. We start with the end in mind: we are designing a new economy where all participants in the economy have the opportunity to live happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilling lives at a great standard of living. An economy where there is no poverty, and where there is none of the rampant inequality of the type seen in the United States today. Specifically:

• • Everyone gets high quality, healthy food
  • Everyone gets clean water and sanitation services
  • Everyone gets high quality, safe, secure housing
  • Everyone gets high quality health care
  • Everyone gets high quality clothing
  • Everyone gets high quality education
  • Everyone gets high quality transportation
  • Everyone gets 24×7 electricity and Internet access
  • Everyone gets a computer and a smart phone to access the Internet
  • And so on…
  • And everyone gets these things in a way that is sustainable, so that we do not destroy the planet we live on.

1. As long as a resident is willing to productively contribute his/her human time and effort to the new economy, the resident is able to partake of the bounty of the new economy. In addition, as robotics, AI, automation, etc. advance, everyone in the new economy benefits because there is less and less work that the residents have to do. A classic example would be dish washing, or truck driving. Once these tasks are completely automated, then no human will be spending time on these tasks anymore, and everyone working in the economy feels the benefit of the lightened workload.
2. So let’s take food as an example product, as described in Chapter 16 of this book. Every human being needs food, obviously, and this new economy is providing food to everyone at cruise ship quality. To feed the one million people in this new economy, the residents need to plant, grow, harvest, prepare and serve an abundant amount of delicious, attractive, appetizing, high-quality, healthy food. This is not rocket science… On any given day, the city needs to serve three million meals and a bunch of snacks. In order to make this happen, each day there are a certain number of tasks, requiring a certain number of human hours, that need to be performed in terms of harvesting, cooking, etc.
3. To handle all of the food tasks, the new economy uses a comprehensive computerized task allocation system. Residents enter their preferences into the system (some people do not want to wake up or work before noon, some people are allergic to peanuts, some people prefer tasks of type A (e.g. baking bread) and some people prefer tasks of type B (e.g. driving tractors), etc.), and the system knows all of the tasks that need to be performed. The task allocation system divvies up all of the food production and preparation tasks amongst the residents to the best of its abilities based on preferences and skills.
4. It is the same for clothing, as described in Chapter 17. On any given day, the city needs to produce a certain amount of clothing in a huge variety of colors, sizes and styles, based on all of the clothing items that the residents are ordering. All of these orders generate a list of tasks needed to produce all of the clothing, and the task allocation system allocates those tasks amongst the residents to the best of its ability based on preferences and skills.
5. It is the same for housing as described in Chapter 18. The city needs to build and maintain the housing for the one million residents, and on any given day there are X tasks that must be done to fulfill this obligation. The task allocation system divvies up all the housing tasks amongst the residents based on preferences and skills.
6. It is the same for every other thing that the new economy needs to do every day. The city needs police officers, fire fighters, electrical linesmen, chip makers, laptop assemblers, doctors, etc., and all of these activities break down into a set of tasks each day. The task allocation system divvies all of these tasks up amongst the residents as best it is able based on preferences and skills.
7. There are some tasks (those of scientists, engineers, chip-making technicians, teachers, doctors, nurses, etc.) that require training, sometimes significant amounts of education and training. The task allocation system understands all of these education and training tasks and divvies them up amongst appropriately trained residents. Residents choose to become scientists, engineers, chip-making technicians, doctors, nurses, and so on, and the economy provides all of the training they need to do their jobs.
8. There are some tasks that need to get done and that no one wants to do. There are several ways that these tasks can be handled: 1) They can be prioritized for research and then automated, so no one has to do them anymore, or 2) They can be distributed amongst all of the residents to “spread out the pain” to everyone equally – everyone ends up doing a small number of unpleasant tasks, or 3) These unpleasant tasks can be offered with minor incentives in order to make them more attractive to some of the residents, or 4) people who have violated the laws and rules of the city can be assigned these tasks as punishment, etc.
9. The new economy wants science and technology to advance as quickly as possible, so the system allocates quite a bit of human time on a daily basis to research and development. Researchers are creating new drugs, new robots, new CPU and laptop designs, etc. In addition, people can do R&D on their own as described in Appendix C and D.

There are three huge advantages to this new economic system for every resident:

• There is no poverty. Anyone who contributes their productive hours into the system partakes in the bounty of the new economy.
• As AI, robots, automation, etc. take over more and more of the work, the amount of work that residents need to do declines. For example, when researchers create robots that wash dishes in the restaurants, people no longer need to wash dishes, so there are no more dish washing tasks assigned to people. The workload of the city goes down, and everyone in the city benefits.
• “Prices” are now completely rational. The “price” of anything is the number of human hours needed to create it. Rational pricing eliminates the concentration of wealth. If it takes five minutes of human time to create a shirt, then a resident can have the shirt by contributing five minutes of productive time to the system.

This new economic system is a radical improvement over capitalism. If we extract a million people from a slum, or free a million people from a refugee camp, or recruit a million people living on food stamps in the United States, and we set them up in a new city practicing this new economic system, their lives will become immeasurably better in every quantifiable way. They will suddenly have access to great food, great housing, great health care and so on. Everyone in the new economy contributes their productive human time to the system, the task allocation system manages all of the tasks that need to be accomplished, and everyone benefits from a great standard of living.

Questions and Objections
Inevitably, people will have questions and thoughts about any new system, so let’s address them here. If you have additional questions, please ask them in the forum.

The most common objection goes something like this: “Your ideas fly in the face of common sense. What you are proposing cannot possibly work. Capitalism is the only economic system that works.”

In response, I think this quote is incredibly interesting:

Two billion of the world’s seven billion people live on less than $2 a day, below the poverty line, Rosling said. And only one billion live about the “Air line,” the term Rosling uses for those who spend more than $80 a day and whose lives are filled with gadgets, including airplanes. But how many live above the “Wash line?” Rosling asked. How many of the world’s seven billion have access to a washing machine? Only two billion. These people live on $40 a day or more. Everyone else — about five billion people around the world — still washes their clothes by hand. [ref]

Capitalism has had centuries to work its “magic”, and this is the current state of things. Yes, capitalism is sort of working for a small slice of humanity. One billion out of 7.5 billion inhabitants of planet Earth make the requisite $80+ per day to have any reasonable hope of riding on an airplane. And really, as we saw in Chapter 5, a person needs to make $220+ per day to live a reasonable life in America at a decent standard of living. Meanwhile, half of humanity is living on $3 per day or less, which is wretched, and demonic.

Note: 1 billion/ 7.5 billion = 13.3% . 13.3% of the people on planet Earth have the economic means to ride an airplane under the economic system known as capitalism. Even if a capitalistic miracle happened over the next 50 years and this percentage doubled. It still means that 73% of humanity is cut off from the benefits of modern life. This is an abysmal record.

The point is, capitalism is awful for the vast majority of people on planet Earth. There is no question about this. And if the “invisible hand” were going to fix this problem, it would have done so. Capitalism has failed for the majority of humanity.

Simply step back and think about the full list of insanity that directly results from capitalism. The list includes:

1. Unemployment – Every adult or family in the economy needs a good job in order to buy food, pay rent, purchase electricity, and so on. Why should any adult who wants to work ever be faced with a “job market” that has no good jobs to offer? Why would we accept an economic system that creates this situation? People must have jobs to buy food and housing, but often the capitalistic system offers no jobs. [see Chapter 14 for details]
2. Ridiculously low wages – Ditto for the billions of people forced into the terrible jobs that capitalism usually creates – jobs paying only 50 cents or $1 or $2 per hour. A wage like this results in intense poverty for the recipient. Why would we accept an economic system that leaves billions of fellow humans in intense poverty? [see Chapter 14 for details]
3. Poverty – The intense poverty that we see all around the world is a direct result of capitalism, caused by the terrible jobs (or no jobs) that capitalism prefers to create. Half of Earth’s population makes less than $3 per day as a result [ref]. Why would we accept this from the world’s predominant economic system? Why not design a new economic system that completely eliminates poverty? [see Chapter 5 for details]
4. Slums – Ditto.
5. The gigantic concentration of wealth – The purpose of capitalism is to create a gigantic concentration of wealth in the “wealthy elite.” But why do we want the “wealthy elite” to exist at all? Why accept an economic system that strives to create billionaires by stealing money from everyone else? [see Chapter 7for details]
6. Billionaires – The existence of billionaires is a complete absurdity – a totally ridiculous outcome that directly results from the rules of capitalism. No single human being contributes billions of dollars to the economy. Jeff Bezos steals the productivity of hundreds of thousands of people to amass a fortune under the absurd rules of capitalism. Three of the richest people in the U.S. are the children of Sam Walton – they do nothing but exist, and the absurd rules of capitalism allow them to steal billions of dollars from us. [see Chapter 7 for details]
7. Asset capture – Asset capture is a powerful tool that billionaires use to concentrate wealth. It is absurd that the capitalistic system allows asset capture, yet this is how capitalism is wired. [See Chapter 9 for details]
8. Arbitrary pricing – Prices in capitalism are completely arbitrary. A company is free to charge “what the market will bear”, regardless of the cost of production – an absurdity that fuels the concentration of wealth. Why design the world’s predominant economic system to allow arbitrary pricing? Why not instead design a new economic system in which all prices are rational? [see Chapter 13 for details]
9. Profit – Profit is an overcharge – typically 10% or 20% over the cost of production – that capitalism tacks on to every sale that takes place in the economy. No consumer wants to pay for profit, yet consumers have no choice under the rules of capitalism. [see Chapter 13 for details]
10. Dividends – Dividends allow companies to distribute the profits that they take from consumers, sending all of the profit to shareholders. Shareholders do no work to receive this money, and are usually the wealthy elite [ref]. It is yet another absurdity of capitalism fueling the concentration of wealth. [see Chapter 7 for details]
11. Recessions, Depressions – Recessions and depressions are a direct result of capitalism, and cause massive suffering by creating waves of unemployment throughout an economy. Why would we use an economic system that periodically causes massive suffering? [see Chapter 14 for details]
12. Inflation – Like recessions and depressions, inflation if an artifact of capitalism that causes suffering by reducing the value of money. It is absurd to use an economic system that has inflation baked in, yet here we all are.

These 12 absurdities are the direct result of the rules of capitalism. Why should humanity tolerate, much less embrace, an economic system harboring this much insanity? It is time to replace capitalism with a new economic system that completely eliminates all of these problems.

The obvious question to ask is this: Given the real statistics about poverty on planet Earth, where only one billion of the planet’s inhabitants have any hope of riding on an airplane, while 6.5 billion do not, why does anyone consider capitalism to be a good system? The answer is simple: the wealthy elites (the 0.1%) own the majority of the world’s media apparatus, and the majority of the world’s governments, and they are able to pump out a gigantic flood of propaganda in support of capitalism. They are able to use the education system, the media, government policy, etc. to push their propaganda. They can also work both overtly and covertly to sabotage any efforts to find alternatives or remedies to the problems that capitalism creates.

Please go back and read Chapter 16 again. Approach it with an open mind, and somehow try to put aside the fact that every minute of every day of your entire life has been spent immersed in capitalism. Consider how many billions of people are suffering because of capitalism. And then think about how simple the new economic system described here is. We can take a million people out of a slum (where even the most obvious necessities like food and water are a vast struggle), apply their human time in this new economic system, and we can allow these one million people to eat like kings. All that these people need is an economic system that organizes and utilizes their efforts, and their lives can be transformed from wretched poverty to immense prosperity. Capitalism has absolutely no way to make this happen. In fact, capitalism is wired to do the opposite. Capitalism is the reason why we have slums.

The statement “Capitalism is the only economic system that works” is absurd. Any thoughtful and rational person can understand the statement’s absurdity simply by looking at the worldwide economic state of humanity today. The fact that 70% of human beings on planet Earth make less than $10 a day is absurd. Capitalism does not “work” – capitalism destroys billions of lives.

What happens to the lazy people?
The most common question is, “What happens to the lazy people?” or “How are lazy people punished?” Or someone will make a blanket statement like “Everyone will be lazy – this new system you are proposing cannot work!” or something along these lines. There seems to be an amazing concern about laziness.

The first thing to understand is that it is easy to detect laziness. The task allocation system can assign a task, and it knows how much time task completion normally takes. So the task might be cooking a dish in a restaurant, or plowing a field, or sewing together a garment, or putting shingles on a roof, or assembling a portion of a laptop computer on an assembly line, or whatever. A person who is lazy or who stops working will take too long. The task allocation system will notice this problem and flag it. The system might choose to retrain the person, or dock the person a vacation day, or issue a warning, depending on the situation. If the laziness persists, the system would deal with the lazy person further. Eventually, the system can expel the person from the city and send him/her back to the slum, refugee camp or ghetto he/she came from. It’s that simple. The whole point of this new economy is to make everyone’s lives better. A lazy person who is not contributing is blocking this process. So we talk to the lazy person, work to help him/her, and eventually replace him/her if necessary with someone willing to happily contribute productive time, and receive a great standard of living in return.

But honestly, simply look at the economic reality we see today. There are millions of people in Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, etc. who are working (and working hard) for $1 per hour or less. They make all of our clothing, our shoes, our electronics, our appliances. They are the polar opposite of lazy. All for $1 an hour. The idea that people will not work is obviously absurd, simply by looking at the world we live in. People are already doing all of the work for $1 an hour, but currently they are getting none of the rewards of their labor.

The simple idea behind this new economy is that everyone contributes their productive time, and everyone receives the amazing benefits of the economy.

A derivative of the previous question is, “What if a person does a task in a sloppy or incorrect way?” Again, sloppiness or inconsistency is easy for the task allocation system to detect. Say that a person produces a meal, and the meal’s recipient complains. Or the person assembles a laptop, and the laptop does not work. Or the person is assigned the task of plowing a field, and the inspector looks at the plowed field and sees that the work has been incorrectly done. Again, the system can deal with the sloppy person in some rational way, and if the sloppy behavior continues, then the person is expelled from the city. Sloppiness and laziness are essentially the same thing, and are handled in the same way.

How will people feel about this task allocation system?
Another question that arises is, “How will people feel about this task allocation system?” The answer, if you think about it, is simple: the vast majority of American workers, and workers around the globe, already work for businesses and corporations under a task allocation system. It is not like someone comes to work and stands there, with no one telling him/her what to do. Current task allocation systems that people experience are far less flexible and customizable, and drastically less rewarding, than the task allocation system proposed in this book.

The vast majority of Americans get a job, are told to arrive at work at a certain time each day, and are told exactly what to do every minute of every day by a computer program or a manager. If someone works on an assembly line, drives for Uber, works in a restaurant, works at Walmart/Target/any retail establishment, works in an Amazon warehouse, etc., this person is already working under a task management system. Even doctors work under a task allocation system – they have a schedule of patients to see each day. The big differences in the new economy described in this book are:

1. A person has the ability to input preferences, input preferred roles, etc. and
2. A person gets to live at an incredible standard of living in return for the work contributed.

Think about a person working at a fast food restaurant today in the United States. The person is told when to work, is told exactly what to do through the tasks assigned to him/her, and in return receives a tiny wage. The person doing the work does not get to participate in the U.S. economy in any meaningful way because he/she has, essentially, no money. The person doing the work lives at a terrible standard of living. He/she likely receives less than $16,000 a year, in an economy where $52,000 a year is required for a single adult to live at a decent standard of living [see Chapter 5 for details].

Meanwhile, if we assume that the person doing the work works for McDonald’s, nearly all of the money earned through their work is flowing up to the elite. Here are some headlines:

• McDonald’s CEO Easterbrook sees pay package nearly double to $15.4 million [http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-mcdonalds-executive-pay-0414-biz-20170413-story.html]
• McDonald’s raises dividend by 7% (to $4.04 per share per year, or $3 billion per year) [https://www.thestreet.com/story/14315933/1/mcdonalds-raises-quarterly-cash-dividend-by-7.html]
• McDonald’s spent more than $988 million on advertising in 2013 [https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/...-more-than-988-million-on-advertising-in-2013]
• And so on…

Not to mention all of the asset capture (see Chapter that occurs through McDonald’s. All of that money comes into McDonald’s on the backs of workers, who receive a tiny slice of the value they produce. The elites concentrate all of the real wealth that the workers create.

In the new economy described in this book, everyone who contributes their productive time receives an abundant slice of the full economy’s production.

Why would people work if there is no profit?
Another common question is, “Why would people work if there is no profit?” The answer is obvious: the gigantic majority of people on planet Earth work for wages, not for profit. And wages are ridiculously low for most. 70% of the people on Earth make less than $10 per day. In capitalism, in the United States, the only people receiving profit in any significant way are the elites, who receive gigantic piles of profit, to the detriment of everyone else in the economy. See Chapters 7 and 13 for details.

This next one is a statement more than a question: “This new economy cannot possibly work, because it has no price signaling.”[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal] The first thing to understand is that the pricing techniques used in capitalism are completely arbitrary, and therefore completely absurd, as described in Chapters 6 and 12. In the new economy described in this book, there is price signaling, but it is different in the new economy.

In a standard capitalistic system, prices are expressed in terms of money, and prices are completely irrational. For example, an Epipen can cost $40 one year, and $100 the next year, and a couple of years later it costs $300. There is no reason for the price increase except greed, and there is nothing to prevent the price increase. So the price goes up and up. Meanwhile, the CEO driving this gigantic level of theft gets paid $98 million a year – nearly $50,000 an hour. [http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/epipen-mylan-chairman-98-million/index.html]

In short: “Price signaling” in capitalism can be, and often is, completely absurd.

In the new economy, everything has a price. The price is expressed rationally, in terms of the aggregate human time needed to produce the product. People can make decisions about what they want to buy based on these rational prices. The huge advantage is that these prices contain none of the absurdities seen in capitalism:

• There are not millions of executives making trillions of dollars a year by jacking up the prices.
• There are not trillions of dollars being wasted on dividends or advertising.
• There are no executive jets, limousines, parties, bribes, etc. distorting the prices.
• There is no profit
• And so on…

Here is an example. In the new economy, there might be 500 different designs for jeans that people have contributed to the design catalog. Some of these jeans are popular, and can therefore be produced on assembly lines and might contain 10 minutes of aggregate human time [see Chapter 17] per pair of jeans. Other jeans in the catalog are hand-stitched and much more complex. Say that the most “expensive” jeans in the catalog are hand-stitched from tail hairs of special Himalayan yaks, and these jeans take 35 hours of aggregate human time to produce.

A person who needs a pair of jeans looks at the catalog and picks the pair he/she wants, contributing the stated amount of productive human time to the system in return for the product. If a person wishes to contribute 35 hours of time to receive one pair of jeans, this is his/her prerogative. I suspect that the vast majority of people will not wish to do so, but you never know. This is price signaling. Every product in this new economic system is expressed as the human time required to produce each product.

How will unpleasant tasks get accomplished?
A derivative question then is: “What if no one wants to snip the tail hairs off of special Himalayan yaks? How will the task get done?” At the very least, the people who are ordering Himalayan yak jeans should be willing to contribute their time to the task. If they are not willing, and no one else is willing, then the task will not get done and the jeans will not exist.

“OK, then how will other unpleasant tasks get accomplished if people can opt out of them?” Let’s take sewage system cleaning as an example. Everyone uses the sewer system, and therefore everyone is potentially on the hook (unlike yak hair jeans, where only those who want to purchase these jeans are on the hook) to help clean the sewer system. Cleaning the sewer system is an unpleasant task, no question.

As mentioned previously, there are several options for getting a task like this done: 1) This task can be prioritized for research and then automated, so no one has to do the task anymore, or 2) This task can be distributed amongst all of the residents to “spread out the pain” to everyone equally – everyone ends up doing a small number of unpleasant tasks each year, or 3) These unpleasant tasks can be offered with minor incentives in order to make them more attractive to some of the residents, or 4) unpleasant tasks can be assigned to people who have violated the social contract and are therefore being punished, etc.

Think about jury duty today. Jury duty is unpleasant, but it is considered a civic duty, and everyone shares the load. When you get called for jury duty, you report, or you go to jail.

“OK, but what if I refuse to do a sewer-cleaning task assigned to me?” Then you fall into the lazy/sloppy category described above. Let’s say you are assigned a one-hour sewer cleaning task, and you refuse. The task allocation system might ask you to do some other task, but do it for two hours, in place of the one hour of sewer duty. The extra hour of work that you have contributed goes to someone else as an incentive to do the task that you refused to do.

How can an economy exist if there is no money?
Another question has to do with money: “It does not sound like there is any money in your new economy, which is of course impossible!”There is not money (in the dollar bill sense) in this new economy, but there is a representation of value in the form of productive human time. The task allocation system keeps track of it for everyone. Let’s say that you contribute an hour of your productive human time to the system, as requested by the task allocation system. Now you can receive an hour of products and services from the system. So if a T-shirt takes five minutes of aggregated human time to produce, you can have the T-shirt, and you have 55 minutes left to “spend” out of the hour that you contributed.

A related question: “What happens if a person is a workaholic?” Let’s say a person wants to voluntarily work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, all year long? This person will be able to contribute, and therefore spend, 3,120 of productive human time in a year. Alternatively, “What if a person wants to work minimally and live simply?” This kind of person would be able to limit clothing, housing, etc., and work a smaller number of hours per year. But the person will still need to contribute productive human time to the system. There are certain things, like food, water, healthcare, police/fire protection, etc. that are provided city-wide, and are required by each resident in order to live. Everyone contributes to these activities. Therefore, each resident will be required to contribute some number of hours per year to live in the city, regardless of how simply they may live.

How will healthcare work?
A question on health care: “Do people have to ‘pay’ for their health care according to the amount of health care they consume?” There are two ways to look at health care:

1. One way is individual responsibility. If an individual gets cancer, and consumes 2,000 hours of health care services to beat cancer, then this person “owes” 2,000 hours of productive human time to “pay for” those 2,000 hours. Meanwhile, a young, extremely healthy person might spend only 1 or 2 hours on health care services per year, and therefore needs to contribute very little time.
2. The second way is to understand that health care needs are often a lottery (a person does not willfully get cancer, or get in a workplace accident). Also, as people age, their health care needs always increase as the human body deteriorates. In addition, people may consume a lot of health care services, and then die long before they can contribute back.

Therefore, it is likely to be the case that everyone in the city contributes an equal number of hours for health care throughout life. Everyone in the city together consumes, say, 80 million hours of human time in the aggregate on health care. This total number is divided equally among the working residents. This is how health care works across most developed nations.

Another health care question: “What if someone gets depression? Many people in America suffer from depression. How will a person with depression be treated?” One big reason why so many people in America suffer from depression is because of capitalism. Capitalism is a terrible system in terms of mental health because there are so many ways for capitalism to deliver economic catastrophe to millions of people. What happens if you get cancer, or get in a serious accident, in America? You will experience significant medical costs, even if you have insurance. What if you lose your job? You can eventually become homeless if you burn through your savings before finding another job. What happens if there is a deep recession? Millions of people will lose their jobs. The economic system used in the United States today is a recipe for disaster, and an open invitation for mental health problems like depression. Capitalism is a breeding ground for high stress and depression.

As already mentioned, capitalism is the source of SLS, or Shit Life Syndrome, which today affects millions.

A person may still get depression in the new economy – there are many things that can trigger depression [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/work-and-depression_n_5823534.html, https://www.thewildwong.com/working-with-depression/]. The resident will receive appropriate treatment under the health care system. A resident in the new economy has access to significantly more time off, in terms of vacation days and sick days, compared to just about any human being on planet Earth today, so he/she can take time off for recovery. And the resident can continue working at assigned tasks, perhaps requesting a different mix of tasks or different timing in order to soften the blow. For example, it is well known that exercise helps relieve depression [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases...in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495], so the task allocation system can respond by assigning more physical tasks.

Here is another statement: “People simply will not work in your new economic system!” Statements like this are silly. Think about a cruise ship operating today, under capitalism. The ship’s crew members are cooking and serving the food, often for low wages, often with extremely long shifts. Crew members on cruise ships often get zero days off, are sleeping in tiny crew cabins, and they work 15-hour days for months at a time [https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=1059]. It sounds very nearly like slavery. Meanwhile, the passengers are eating cruise-ship-quality food. This kind of life is completely normal for crews on cruise lines under today’s capitalistic system. Hundreds of thousands of people are working in this demonic system, no problem.

The difference in the new economy is that the people cooking and serving the food are not enslaved. Instead, they get the full benefits of the new economy. They are doing their jobs, as assigned by the task allocation system. In return, using the cruise ship analogy, when they are not working they receive all of the amenities that any passenger receives on the ship. The cooks and servers get all the luxuries and perks that the passengers get, and all of the passengers are periodically working. Everyone benefits.

How will any innovation happen in this new economy?
Another question: “How will any innovation happen in this new economy?” One thing to point out is that, even if we simply take today’s technology and never innovate at all, there are billions and billions of people on planet Earth today who would be 100X better off under this new economy than they are under capitalism. Take the millions of people working essentially like slaves at Nike or Foxconn. Take the millions of garment workers in Bangladesh earning 50 cents an hour or less. Take the billion people living in slums, or the tens of millions of refugees, or the tens of millions of people on food stamps in America. All of these people are being screwed by capitalism. Put them in this new economy with today’s technology and their lives are radically improved in every important way.

We are going to add significant amounts innovation to the mix, so their lives get better and better. There are several different mechanisms that will promote innovation in the new economy, as described in Appendix C.

How do we deal with problems?
Another question: “How will the new economy deal with problems that arise?” In any society, new or old, problems inevitably surface. Here is one possibility for dealing with problems:

1. We create a piece of software and a website for handling problems.
2. The purpose of the software is to create and manage a comprehensive list of all of the problems that the city faces. Create a petition mechanism and vetting system so that residents can insert new problems into the system. The goal is for the system to give visibility into ALL of the problems in the city, and to let everyone in the city see all of these problems in a completely transparent way.
3. Now we need to prioritize these problems. This would likely be done through surveys of different audiences, because different audiences will prioritize differently. For example, if we survey scientists, and the general public, to prioritize a comprehensive list of the city’s problems, there may be differences between these two groups. But there will also be some commonality, and this might be a sweet spot. The software is going to make public the prioritizations of different constituencies. For example, young people and old people might prioritize differently, or male and female. Survey all of these groups, understand what is important to them in terms of priorities, and post them for all to see. (the web site can do a lot of this surveying automatically from known groups of real people)
4. Now residents come up with proposed solutions and policies that address the problems. What if someone out in the general public has a great way to solve a problem, but no one knows about it? This web site would make it visible.
5. Let the public see the array of possible approaches for each problem, with estimated budgets. The web site can lay them out, scientists can comment on them, the general public can comment on them, related research papers can be attached to them, etc. What if we have a survey that shows a certain policy is overwhelmingly favored by the public, but the scientific community is leaning in the opposite direction? It would be great to expose this.
6. A method to address a problem is selected (for example by voting). We put solution X in place to solve problem Y. Does solution X work? We can track it. What was the stated goal of solution X? Is solution X achieving the goal? Is problem Y diminishing? Over a time span, is solution X succeeding or failing? The software can track this with statistics, surveys, etc. Bottom line: Bad solutions will be exposed so they can be replaced with better solutions.

In this way, every problem is visible to everyone, and the most pressing problems get addressed quickly.

Seed capital
Another question: “Where will a new city get the money it needs to start up? Where will it get raw materials like steel?” These questions are answered in Appendix E, on funding.

Another question: “What is the optimal size for one of these new cities?” For the sake of discussion, we have used the idea of one million residents throughout this book. The optimal size for the city may be more like 2 million, or 5 million, or 10 million residents. City size will likely depend, in large part, with the amount of manpower and training and equipment that is needed in the technology sector. If, for example, the new city is making its own chips, it will need a fabrication facility. If this facility costs $1 billion, that works out to $1,000 per person in a million-person city, but only $100 per person in a 10 million person city. There are also needs in terms of expertise. If 10% of the population has STEM affinity, then in a 1 million person city, this yields 100,000 STEM workers. In a 10 million person city, it yields one million STEM workers.

Economic decisions
Another question: “This new city will need to make decisions. For example, where will the airport be located, and how will it be designed? How will decisions like this be made?” Every city in America has one or two airports. There are no cities with a hundred airports – for example, a different airport for every airline in every city. The one airport for a city is designed and paid for by the city, as part of the city’s planning. There is no reason why the same kind of process will not apply in the new city.

The previous question brings up another: “How does the new economy make its economic decisions?” For example, why do most cities have one airport, rather than 100? Why is there one water system, one sewer system, etc.? In these cases, the cost of the system’s central feature is large, and duplicating it makes no economic sense. Runways are the central feature of airports, and runways are incredibly expensive, so there is a big economic incentive to share this cost, and to utilize the runways as much as possible in order to spread the cost out. Hence, one airport for a city. If airplanes were replaced by drones that can take off without runways, then the economics change and dozens of airports may become a possibility.

It is the same for the pipes in the water and sewer systems – pipes are the central feature. If it cost $1 to run pipes to a house, there might be many water suppliers. Since it costs thousands of dollars to run pipes to a house, it makes sense to centralize on a single pipe system. Also, in the case of a water system, there is no advantage gained from having two suppliers – both are going to deliver exactly the same thing. Water is water. It is easy to look at economic advantages and disadvantages of different options and make clear decisions.

Why doesn’t milk come to houses in pipes? Reasons:

• Unlike water, not everyone uses milk.
• People use 100 gallons of water a day, but far less milk.
• Water does not spoil in the pipes, unlike milk.
• Water costs less than 1 cent per gallon, while milk is $3 per gallon.
• And so on.

All of these factors mean that we purchase milk a gallon at a time at the store rather than having a city-wide milk piping system delivering milk to every home. Again, the economics – meaning the amount of human time to do it one way or another – makes the decision easy in most cases. Universality also plays a role: if everyone in the city needs something, then centralizing it makes sense.

Uniformity vs. variety
Which raises this derivative question: “Why don’t we have everyone wear identical jump suits in this new economy?” Economically, this would be the most efficient way to do things. It would require the least amount of human time to clothe everyone, if everyone wore exactly the same thing every day. So why not require everyone to wear identical clothing? First, we understand that things like food preferences, clothing preferences, etc. tend to be very personal and individualized for each human being. One person likes chocolate, and another person likes vanilla – this does not make a lot of sense, but there is no denying that preferences are a central part of human behavior. On the other hand, things like water, electricity and internet bandwidth are not like this at all – everyone drinks and bathes with the same “water”, and everything is powered by the same “electricity”. These are commodity items, without any preferences.

Therefore, in the case of clothing, as described in Chapter 17, we can let everyone in the city individually decide how their clothing will work by voting with their hours. The design catalog for clothing will have thousands of different designs. Some pieces of clothing will take just a minute or two of human time to create, some will take hours. Each person can decide how much of their personal time they wish to devote to their clothing needs. One person might choose to dress very simply, and will spend just an hour or two per year on clothing. Another person might feel that elaborate clothing is very important, and choose to spend 200 hours per year on clothing. Each individual chooses to do their own thing based on their personal preferences.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that one of the researchers in the city invents a new type of water. Let’s call it water2. Initially, usage of water2 will be small, as with any new product. It will be sold in containers in stores, or delivered to the home in containers for the small number of initial customers who use it. But let’s imagine that water2 is just as useful as water, and so consumption of water2 grows and grows. Let’s also assume that water2 usage is universal, and eventually everyone in the city is using water2 at the same rate as water. Eventually, everyone in the city would be using 100 containers of water2 per day. This would obviously become a ridiculous situation long before consumption got to the 100-container-per-person-per-day level. The problem of water2 delivery would show up in the problem system described above, the problem would be analyzed, and the problem would be solved. The solution would probably be a city-wide water2 delivery system of pipes, identical to the city-wide water system. This may sound ridiculous, but this is exactly what has happened in some areas. People wanted water2, in the form of cheap water for watering lawns. Thus water2 can be “reclaimed water”, not suitable for drinking but suitable for irrigation, toilet flushing, etc. So a separate pipe system gets installed for reclaimed, non-potable water. Again, the decisions are made by analysing the economics.

Doctors and nurses
Another question: “How will the new economy train and deploy its doctors and nurses in the health care system?” This is a great question, especially if you are an American. In America, doctors are highly (some would say ridiculously) trained people, and the supply of doctors is intentionally constrained by the American Medical Association, so there are not enough doctors. Under capitalism, this artificially low supply compared to the demand means that doctors are incredibly expensive. You can learn more from sources like these:

• https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-disparities-000557?lo=ap_d1
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFoXyFmmGBQ
• http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/11/why-are-american-doctors-paid-so-damn-much/#

In a rational economy, where there is no need to artificially inflate the price of a doctor, not every doctor or nurse needs to be ridiculously trained. The vast majority of patients have simple and/or well-understood ailments. The medical system does not need a doctor with 10 years of education setting a bone, diagnosing another case of the flu, stitching a cut, etc. There can be many tiers/levels of training and skills across the medical spectrum.

In the new economy, people who express an interest helping other people medically (there are lots of people who would choose this path given the opportunity) receive training and have their talents and skills deployed into the healthcare system by the task allocation system.

A central thing to understand when it comes to doctors, nurses and other trained professionals is that this new society is willing to train people, and lots of people have a desire to be trained. For example: Think about what happens today with doctors. They are artificially scarce, because the American Medical Association (AMA) works very hard to limit the number of doctors, so that doctors (who are the members of the AMA) can have high salaries. To be a doctor in the U.S. you need a full undergrad degree (4 years), then a full medical degree (4 more years), then 3 to 7 years of residency [https://study.com/requirements_to_become_a_doctor.html]. All of that to be a family doctor, or a pediatrician? Even to be a brain surgeon, it’s silly. Especially with AI advancing so rapidly. Medical training could be radically streamlined, and millions of people in America could become doctors if we simply trained them. But then doctor salaries would crash, and the AMA would never allow it.

Apply this same kind of thinking across a whole society, across all of the roles needed in a society. When we have a million people in a new city, and we say to all of them, “look, to live here we need you to contribute 40 productive hours a week for 42 weeks a year, and we will train you for free. What would you LIKE to do?” There are people who would like to drive a tractor because they like farming. There are people who would like to be doctors and nurses because they like helping people. There are people who would like to be engineers, because they like designing and building things. And so on. Everyone in this new society will need to contribute, and they can make their contributions in ways they enjoy.

This often leads to a statement like: “No one will become a doctor unless they get paid a million dollars a year!” A statement like this is absurd because it untrue on two counts. First, the number of people driven strictly by greed like this is in reality very small. If it were not small, the existing economies of the world would not work. Simply look at our world – the vast majority of people work now for small amounts of money.

Second, in the new economy, everyone needs to contribute in order to receive. This is incredibly simple and obvious. It takes 200 million human hours of time per year to produce and serve food to 1 million people. One way to accomplish this is that everyone contributes 200 hours per year toward food production equally. Another way to accomplish it is that someone who finds food production enjoyable (e.g. cooking food, or farming, or whatever) spends 1,000 or 1,500 hours per year doing what they enjoy, while someone else spends their time primarily in clothing production, and someone else spends their time primarily in healthcare, and so on, based on individual preferences. The latter system makes a lot more sense, since everyone has preferred activities where they enjoy spending their time. A person who hates the sight of blood is probably not going to self-select into healthcare.

The point is that everyone in this new economy will be contributing in one way or another. And for the most part, people will self-select into their preferred forms of participation. There are plenty of people who will self-select into healthcare, plenty of people who will self-select into farming, and so on.

Another important point: A person working in healthcare is not “better” than or “more important than” a person working in farming. Both healthcare and food production are vitally important to human beings. Without farmers everyone dies of starvation – it is that simple. One thing that will naturally happen in this new economy is that everyone living in this society will have a much stronger appreciation for the work that other people are doing. Everyone is contributing in some small way so that the city as a whole has everything that everyone needs. There is no dog-eat-dog here. In this context, each person’s contribution is important. A doctor is not more important than a farmer – both roles are vitally essential to the city’s prosperity.

The central problem with capitalism as it is practiced today in the United States is that it is a blood sport. There are winners, and there are also losers. Inevitably there are more losers than winners, as in any sport. And once you become a loser even once in capitalsim, you often fall down a rabbit hole that can be very difficult to climb out of. Now you have children, and they are down in the hole with you, and they are disadvantaged as well. And then the winners take more and more and more for themselves, in what appears to turn into pathological greed, rather than “doing what is best for society as a whole”. Capitalism a terrible way to run a human society. It is time to replace it with something much, much better for everyone.

Blowhards
Which leads to an obvious final question: “What do we do with the people who believe they are super wonderful, and who demand that they receive 100X or 1,000X of what everyone else is receiving?”These people believe they should live in a 66,000 square foot house like Bill Gates, and believe it is their god-given right to receive it. Often these people expect to do no actual work. Most upper-Escalon executives in capitalism fall into this bizarre, deluded category – this is how capitalism has evolved the concept of the “elites”, and why there are people like Tim Cook at Apple making $50,000 per hour. These people will refuse to work at tasks assigned by the task allocation system, or they will be sloppy at the work they are assigned, because they are “too good” to work.

Here is the good news: eventually these blowhards will be expelled from the city. They will get flagged as lazy/incompetent, and they will be expelled because they will not work. The social contract in the new economy is simple: everyone contributes, and everyone receives from the bounty that is produced. Without a contribution, the blowhards are expelled. Good riddance to them.

Information about Marshall Godbrain here:

The goal of ReplaceCapitalism.com is to radically improve the human condition on planet Earth by defining and explaining a new economic system that works for the benefit of everyone.

The basic premise is extremely simple. If we, as an intelligent and rational species, were to sit together and design a new economic system that eliminates poverty and benefits everyone, what would this new economic system look like?

The answer to this question is incredibly obvious. If we were to design a new economic system from scratch for planet Earth, we would simply understand that every human being on the planet has a fundamental set of human needs. Regardless of where we live, what language we speak, what nationality we are born into, etc., this truth is self-evident. Therefore:

• Every human being needs high quality, healthy food
• Every human being needs clean water and sanitation services
• Every human being needs high quality, safe, secure housing
• Every human being needs high quality health care
• Every human being needs high quality clothing
• Every human being needs high quality education
• Every human being needs high quality transportation
• Every human being needs 24×7 electricity and Internet access
• Every human being needs a computer and a smart phone to access the Internet
• And so on…

This is so obvious… Obviously every human being needs these things, and should have these things.

And given that everyone needs these things, we should design the world’s economic system so that everyone receives these things. This, too, is incredibly obvious. Every human being on the planet should have high-quality food, water, housing, health care, clothing, education, transportation, etc. It is obvious.

So how do we accomplish these goals? This is the purpose of ReplaceCapitalism.com:

1. To demonstrate the absurdity of Capitalism as an economic system, and allow us to understand the massive suffering that Capitalism causes for billions of human beings
2. To define and explain a new economic system that will benefit all of the human beings on planet Earth

Please see the Home Page to get started and to see the table of contents for the site.

About the Author
Marshall Brain is most widely known as the founder of HowStuffWorks.com, an award-winning website that offers clear, objective and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world around us actually works. The site, which he created as a hobby and took through several rounds of venture funding, was purchased for $250 million by Discovery Communications in 2007.

As a well-known public speaker with the ability to deliver complex material in a way that is easily understood by audiences of all types, Brain is a regular guest on radio and TV programs nationwide. He has been featured on everything CNN and Good Morning America to The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2008 and 2009, he was the host of the National Geographic channel’s Factory Floor With Marshall Brain, a series of one-hour factory tours taking the viewer on a journey into the world of product design, engineering and manufacturing.

Brain is the author of more than a dozen books as well as a number of widely known web publications including Robotic Nation and Manna.

You can learn more at MarshallBrain.com

Well, what do you guys think?

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Same shit, new asshole.

"What do we do with the assholes?"

NO JOHN YOU ARE THE ASSHOLES.

And then John was a zombie.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

How Capitalism Works

The essence of capitalism is economic freedom and the belief that widespread personal wealth will lead to societal well-being. But does anyone even practice true capitalism these days?

money.howstuffworks.com

 

[Rei is shit]

That is a whole lot of r.etarded autism but I agree that capitalism has something very wrong with it. Not the sort of problems he identifies though.....

Spoiler

 

[Niggernerd]

Replace capitalism and implement a new system that only benefits the kiwis around the world. Gibs me my NEET bux for vidya and gunpla.

 

[The Manglement]

Oh, god. I read a book by this asshole like 10 years ago and thought it was awesome. Link. I feel ashamed now. It's basically just normal programmer techno-utopianism where societies can decide 'hey, I want everyone to be millionaires now and everyone gets to do whatever they want and there's no jobs and free blowjobs for everyone and nobody is mean ever or tries to abuse the system.'

 

[Memento Malum]

Yes, the economic philosophy that catapulted humanity into the modern age and has outlasted every competitor should be replaced.

What's the Churchill quote? "It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried." I feel like capitalism is an analogue for economics.

I like how the new system completely de-persons the "asshole". Who gets to decide who is an asshole, Marshall? Oh you do. How convenient.

 

[nagant 1895]

If everyone were as smart as Mister Brain then his plan would work. Rational actors don't real.

 

[Marco Fucko]

If everyone were as smart as Mister Brain

Gonna stop you right there buddy.

 

[Irrelevant]

Did I miss it or is he not actually offering an alternative? Deconstructivism is easy.

The no-assholes rule for lazy people he considers leeches on the state also seems outright "fascist".

 

[Damn Near]

"UM can someone go to work for me and make money for me? Thanks! I'm a huge fag!" - this fag

 

[JULAY]

Capitalism is the worst economic system that there is, except for all of the other ones.

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Did I miss it or is he not actually offering an alternative? Deconstructivism is easy.

The no-assholes rule for lazy people he considers leeches on the state also seems outright "fascist".

"IT'S NOT FASCISM WHEN WE DO IT!!"

 

[Tootsie Bear]

Oh, god. I read a book by this asshole like 10 years ago and thought it was awesome. Link. I feel ashamed now. It's basically just normal programmer techno-utopianism where societies can decide 'hey, I want everyone to be millionaires now and everyone gets to do whatever they want and there's no jobs and free blowjobs for everyone and nobody is mean ever or tries to abuse the system.'

Yeah, it's one of those... central planning economies/governments based around technology like the The Zeitgeist Movement and Venus project. While it sounds good on paper, or should I say typed, it's not very realistic.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

The Zeitgeist Movement and Venus project.

That was my first and last thought on the subject.

 

[The Manglement]

Did I miss it or is he not actually offering an alternative? Deconstructivism is easy.

The no-assholes rule for lazy people he considers leeches on the state also seems outright "fascist".

So I read more of the OP, and his actual explanation for the 'no asshole' rule is hilarious.

Think about it this way: if a person demonstrates laziness and/or criminal behavior more than two or three times, we simply send them back to the slum that they came from. We bring in a new person who is grateful to experience Heaven on Earth.

So basically his 'superior alternative to capitalism' is predicated on the fact that there is an inexhaustible supply of fresh-faced optimistic people willing to work for the system. Imagine trying to preach an economic system that would fail if any significant amount of people adopted it, and doesn't solve the problem of massive city-sized slums.

It basically works the same way Hollywood 'works.' You do what the system wants, or you're kicked back to Kansas and some other 17-year-old from Duluth will suck Harvey Weinstein's dick instead. This is exactly what we should base our economic system on.

 

[Beautiful Border]

Capitalism isn't the best system, but it is the least-worst system.

 

[Mariposa Electrique]

This dude is insane, he talks about having voices in his head, yet people are taking him seriously.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

This dude is insane, he talks about having voices in his head, yet people are taking him seriously.

dude what is religion lmao

 

[Non-Threatening Niall]

Capitalism is just plain human nature with a marketable name