Philosophy, Economics, and Virtue.
“Flourishing manifestly requires external goods in addition, just as we said. For it is impossible or not easy for someone without equipment to do what is virtuous”
Aristotle
“Do Well by Doing Good.”
Benjamin Franklin
Economics is the art of virtuous equipage if it is legitimate, if it is not madness.
JMF
Part 3
Money;
The Ultimate Equipage
Money, as I define it, is an evolving value calculus allowing relative valuations of disparate products in market situations for purposes of time and place arbitrage. To this point it must be frangible, consensual, and a reasonable store of value because of its consistent managed scarcity to function as fiat money.
(It will vary in value as it tracks the goods and services needing relative valuation with money in circulation, sometimes incidentally more, sometimes incidentally less. It is never just a payment system in modern times, although that is generally its origin, and is subject to windfalls as capital.)
Markets, which are very efficient resource allocation systems, need money in order to function and money implies buying and selling as its raison d’etre, some kind of a market, which is a focus of arbitrage in a fairly abstract and general sense of the phenomenon of buying low and selling high across time and locations.
Markets, as I define them, are the focus of arbitrage operations moving plenty, windfalls, to scarcity at a profit and translating windfalls of goods and services into windfalls of capital.
Together money and markets define an economy as they go about the business of virtuous equipage, of doing well by doing good.
Economies serve polities, which guarantee title and manage the value of money. Polities may be wealthy. Individuals are only stewards of that wealth, necessarily for the greater good.
However, money, after the Economic Singularity of robots building robots, becomes problematic in determination and usage. Prices, the basis of time and place arbitrage, are market determined in the manner, price = (utility (x) scarcity) to this point.
With robots building robots, productivity is asymptotic to infinity, it gets closer and closer to the infinite and more meaningless with each increase. Prices are essentially utility defined. Resources figure in, of course, but that's a separate calculation being addressed by schemes for asteroid mining and will soon be meaningless also.
Inflation can be viewed at this point as ∆money supply/∆production but, post singularity, with productivity becoming increasingly meaningless, this calculation becomes increasingly meaningless in determining the value of money.
Instead the value of money is maintained by manipulation of robot registration fees and protective tariffs against unregistered robots, not as market intervention but as fiscal policy.
Do Well and Be Well
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