Are you familiar with the work of Michael Hudson? I just learned of "...and forgive them their debts" [0], and looking forward to reading it.
While I'm generally in favor of debt forgiveness for 2021 America, in his talks he's primarily described jubilees in the context of regime change: a new conquering emperor, or an aspiring revolutionary leader, cancels the debts to secure the loyalty of workers and soldiers, and the nobility has to acquiesce at the point of a sword.
What I can't figure out is how this could be done on a predictable timetable (as per the Biblical jubilee concept: every 7 or 50 years). In a conquest scenario, a lender might only withhold lending if the current power structure looked weak; but if debt forgiveness was institutionalized, why wouldn't they just cease all lending on Year 6 or Year 49? (Or, more likely: fold the probability of forgiveness into a usurious interest rate, so they collect the same income on average.)
As it stands, I think debt forgiveness can only be done as a one-time solution to gross inequality and/or social instability; and that institutional reform (to not need jubilees) has to be done upstream (such as public banking, Georgist land trusts, etc). But I'm very open to being convinced otherwise.
I am aware-ish of that and (edit, forgot the "and") Graeber's book but haven't read either.
The Geiger counter randomized debt jubilee is a bit of a play on the scheduling problem.
I do agree debt jubilees only make sense as a emergency post-hoc fix. If you think about it, UBI + good confiscatory taxes at the margins is basically a nice smoothed amortized debt jubilee. That's much better.
Ha, Graeber's debt book is a different one [0]. I can vouch for its excellence, but I don't recall him discussing jubilees much.
A cursory search isn't turning up much, do you have any reading material for the Geiger counter idea? Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Agreed on UBI, etc. One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
Yes, I forgot the "and". "that Graeber" lol. Pity there is no more "that graeber" :(. To think Chomsky outlived him...crazy...
> Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Pure spitball. If predictibility causes bias, try randomness. PRNG is fine except one could exfiltrate the hidden state maybe? So try something even more black-box like a hunk of radioactive something.
> Agreed on UBI
:)
> One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
There is the quote "I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows". I had some crude thoughts in my own head, but with some friend's advise on putting in that terminology, it seems both that the stocks are are more fictions and the source of the economic problems of society. I question the ultimate game example then because it seems very "stocks first", dividing up some amount one off. I would much rather see "capitalism without ownership" or "rents all the way down".
Then eventually things implode, society collapses, a dictator takes over after claiming they will help the starving masses and so on. Starving masses who have lost their life savings do not make for a good place to live even if you avoid being one of them. Society should be protected from the fallout of capitalism to a reasonable degree.
I don’t know what the alternative is are you in favour of propping up private companies and keeping this status quo? That’s alternative of free markets. Right now they aren’t free. AOC and Ben Shapiro of all people agree for once. This is a stage 7 brundlefly economic system.
"Free markets" are never perfectly free or even close to it. Only the writers of utopian libertarian science fiction think that.
The question is how you manage that lack of freedom and to whose benefit you try to manage it. I prefer it be managed towards the general stability of society. Of course it will be managed in an imperfect way but I prefer the goal be a stable society.
edit: The government intervening will never really make the market more free but it wasn't free to begin with (see robinhood today). So you lose a bit more freedom but you shift the benefit of the overall loss of freedom from "a bunch of rich people get richer" to "society as a whole get's richer and more stable." Not fully but a bit further.
While i agree with you in principle, there's a difference between "this market is regulated" and "this market will be bailed out at random on the whims of politicians, while this other market or firm won't" in which case we start to have issues.
My argument is government intervention is the problem. You can’t fix the problem with more of the problem. Say your house was on fire do you add more fire until it burns down and call that problem solved.
Governments also commit mass murder on behalf of the interests of private capital, ranging from feudal land enclosures, to the United Fruit Company in Honduras [0], to modern oil interests and the military-industrial complex.
> Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.
Organised groups of people do these things, governmental or not - private corporations are responsible for plenty of similar occurrences, and so are NGOs (e.g. religious groups). Centralisation of power is bad, absence of checks and balances is bad, lack of accountability is bad - but insisting that limited-liability corporations be allowed to grow arbitrarily large is the opposite of avoiding those problems.
>Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.
All caused by revolutions caused by massive economic issues and societal issues. In other words, capitalistic collapse of society leads to dictatorship which leads to horrible things. Like I said in the post you replied to. So thank you for making my argument for me.
If you lost your life savings on GME, you deserve to starve
edit: the only way you could be losing your life savings on GME is with a dumb, arrogant short position. yes, you should starve...isn't this what a short sale is anyway? A bet that someone else will starve?
Personally I prefer to not be stabbed to death by a starving person who lost their life savings on GME so they can steal $10 from my wallet. Massive societal implosions tend to have a large blast radius.
I think you don't appreciate how angry people on WSB are. It's pure distilled anger. They want to relieve that anger somewhere and do it nonviolently. A handful of people losing money is the perfect pressure valve.
If you deny them this opportunity to vent their anger then they are highly likely to stab you, not because they wanted $10 from your wallet, nah it's because they are still angry and want someone to pay for it and going by the events that lead to WW2 a lot of them considered a life to be an equally valid price.
The comment I replied to was "Good free markets should be free. No government bailouts no problem." Not "no bailouts for hedge funds doing shorts." See the distinction?
