Economy
Since approximately the 1990s, real-estate investing has become a mainstream trend - a game that cuts deep into the fragile stability of a healthy American family's micro-economy. The boom in real-estate investing has consequently driven up prices of home-repair materials and services, rendering the entire concept of supply and demand unfair and ineffective for non-investors. To survive, everyone must now be an investor, which surely we understand is madness.
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The current world is wasteful. I would argue that we spend 90% of our work, probably more, on wasted, duplicated or otherwise unnecessary efforts. It's important to think of how the world works at a very high level; to abstract the concept of an economy into simple terms.
The economy is a network, and networks typically have scalability, security, and efficiency issues. The key to solving those issues is always to simplify. The network of the economy has grown organically, and was not engineered (anybody who writes software will understand how that turns out).
From a high level, you see that everybody is busy working. So we have an enormous amount of effort, people work really hard, in general. Everybody then relinquishes a large percentage of their wage to taxes, and then we are taxed again when buying and selling. It's important to understand that governments are not doing this to us, we are doing this to ourselves.
I'm not the first person to say - “hey, enough of this I didn't ask for any of this, I'm going to go live in a tiny home in the country and I have every right to just sit there and everyone can leave me alone. I refuse to work anymore because I hate my job and the world makes me sick, and I don't need anything except the people I love and a roof over my head”.
The tiny home movement is actually an incredible symbol of the problem: people's desire for simplicity and autonomy.
I don't think people really want to live in extremely tiny homes, but people's willingness to do it demonstrates the severity of the problem. People aren't just willing to do it, they are gung-ho to do it because they just feel in their gut the essence of it - freedom by simplification.
So me and a bunch of other people say okay, let's not buy anything anymore or pay for any services except the things that we absolutely need, and then we won't have to work anymore.
Why should we have to leave society to do that?
People are perfectly willing to work on things that matter, things that get their hands in the dirt, things that get them working together. Things that make them feel like their life is theirs. There is control by disconnecting from the grid to varying degrees, because the grid is expensive!
I, for one, am willing to leave society, but I've always had this split-heartedness about it; I love urban environments, and I just can't stand them. I absolutely love trains. As I write this, I've been temporarily living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which has one of the most awesome subway systems in the world. It's nice to leave my vehicle at home for a while, I even brought the dog.
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Humanity is awesome, we have accomplished so much and we are so smart. But we are a world with so so so many problems, and I want people to know that these are very solvable problems and the world is ripe for change.
After spending some time writing about 100% self-sufficient collectivism, I realized that we can continue to have nice things, we just have to know where to draw the line.
The line is that it's okay to share things that we make, but only at a high level like business to business transactions work today. That statement represents the only viable economy, non-withstanding a transitional economy where collective administrations can do business with individuals and vice versa, but that should somehow be disincentivized.
Importantly, note that the above definition does not contain the selling or buying of any services. The intention is to avoid working with strangers; to avoid becoming dependent on strangers. In this sense, an internet cloud service would be okay to buy, mainly because you don't die if you get disconnected from the internet.
So now we have a bunch of people who have decided to live together collectively, so effort in planning will be required. We have to make sure that we have everyone we need to do the jobs in order to continue a viable economic product, as well as to have all the basic trades and emergency services covered. We have to decide who belongs initially, and who doesn't. You don't want to displace people against their will, so in one example you might have a company who their employees think is really awesome, and they all decide to go move on campus with their families. In another case, you might have a neighborhood that is really tight, and you put a gate around the whole neighborhood and rip up all the roads. The final boundary of a neighborhood collective might be based on some research into the best set of skills within different intersecting areas.
Collectivizing should come along with incentives like reduced taxes. Cities should incentivize and facilitate collectivizing. Businesses are already tax shelters so it's a dovetail. People will be surprised at how willing the various levels of governments are to support a good plan.
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The important thing to understand is that a lean economy is an efficient one. We don't have to sell each other things, for example, so right off the bat, we eliminate sales and advertising positions, which in the mega-economy amounts to 10-15% in most countries. In a world of 8 billion, 800 million people are selling. Is that fair? I worked hard as an engineer and tried not to worry about anything else because my mother told me that the way the currency economy works is that we are all bees in a hive, and I just do my part, and everyone else does theirs, and together we are lollipops and rainbows. The problem is that I don't see any lollipops or rainbows. I get fed garbage, I see garbage everywhere, we are in a deadlock of international Cold War with borders up and weapons ready. Nobody's taking care of me. We have a mental health pandemic, internet advertising and popup ludicrousy, and sometimes war even breaks out. When war isn't breaking out, the courts are tied up with crime. I didn't ask for any of this, and certainly I didn't agree to pay for any of it. Everybody is fighting over investments. Invest in this.
If we said that in the US, the average tax rate is 25%, 99% of that being unnecessary problem management, and that 15% of all work is in sales, 2.5% in finance, 2.5% tourism, 2.5% private transportation, 5% in energy, just on an offhand count, over 50% of all our world's efforts are wasted.
That's not fair.
It's not fair because that means 50% of effort in the world is wasted on things we either don't want, don't need, or to solve problems that shouldn't exist. This is not even counting money spent against borrowing to buy homes or wasted on cars and fuel, or on utilities and the messes they make of our cities. The point is we are working more than twice as hard - and all just to have a big mess of a world.
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So we do a little engineered reorg of the world, improve scalability, increase efficiency, your puppies, and kids play out front with each other, everybody's off leash, well, unless your dog is a jerk. You can hear the birds chirping, everybody is friends, and most importantly of all -god-damn all, is that we are working together on things that matter. We're eating better, everybody's fit, mental health improves. I once paid $20,000 for two weeks at a yoga rehab center to get the same thing.
Who's to decide what matters? Well, right now, managing violence matters. Violence leads to desperation, and then desperation matters, hence the courts, insurance, and prisons, etc.. We all agree that national security matters. We all agree that personal security matters, that privacy matters, but take a bird's eye view and see that people are not happy, and see that it's because we have nothing real to believe in.
The first step is to set a good example. Nations that struggle with education need good education, and that starts by example. Right now the signal is “make money”, which isn't helping anyone. The example that needs to be set is to literally convert your community to a paradise to rival any resort, simultaneously demonstrating that theft and corruption and exploitation are symptoms of desperation, not evolved human desires.
It seems overly simple, doesn't it? 500 people can decide to make and live in paradise? Why hasn't it been done before? Lack of education, science & technology. The concept of a company barely came into existence in the last century. This is a modern academic and professional pursuit. Misplaced faith. Our spouses aren't going to tell us what to do, we need to pull together, use the internet.
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Sometimes collectives will struggle - so much so that it's possible there is lack of income for extended periods of time. Perhaps the collective is producing a product that suddenly is obsolete, in which case no income will be available. Since we know it's going to happen, we have to plan for it.
It's important to think from the ground up.
Collectives should be able to survive extremely long periods of zero-income. So, let's be disillusioned; while we're not exporting a valuable product, we can't import valuable things. Valuable things are nice, but they're not always necessary. Food is necessary, but I'm struggling to imagine what else. We already don't have cars or gas to pay for. We already make our electricity. Our houses already exist. We have internal professional ability to fix our things and each other. What is it exactly that we need to consume? All we really need is food and occasionally repair materials. Plan for this - grow your own food when possible. Save money when possible. Stock spare parts, or better yet, know how to make your own parts - 3D printers will be invaluable going forward.
The amount of income required for routine operation should not be anywhere near a collective of people working full-time. Let's say we had a collective of 100 homes, each worth a half a million dollars - we estimate that homes typically cost 5% of their value per year to maintain, and we'll cut that in half since we're doing our own labor. 2.5% of 100 homes is $625,000 per year, and let's say the typical family's grocery costs are $800 per month, since we will be preparing our own foods from scratch and growing as well, we'll cut that in half again for 100 homes we have $480,000, so roughly our operating costs for 100 homes are $1M, and have potentially at least 200 adults capable of earning income, but probably only 25 must earn $40,000 per year. This is a clear example of the cost-efficiency of a maximally lean micro-economy.
Figure: Income required per year in a collective vs. the mega-economy
Everyone will still have work to do in the community, but our efforts will go further and directly toward our own healthy, safe, and beautiful community. Our efforts will be of higher quality.
If one day the money stopped coming in, we'd be ok for a long while.
We all should be one step away from living completely self-sufficiently, because from time to time it will be required, and we must not have crises or displace the people we love. When times are fruitful, invest in self-sufficiency!
Collectives absolutely must not be allowed to hold or take any debt, which will prevent insolvency. It's possible that companies that are currently operating within a debt framework that also wish to start a collective could be dual-entity.
Figure: Decoupling money and happiness. Product and habitat systems affect each other, but are not interdependent.
Critical to the principle of collectivism is the decoupling of constant income from the ability to be happy and productive. This means that the key to happiness is education in matters of survival like food production and basic trades. When a small community has all the skills required to meet and exceed survival needs without help, we are empowered to live happy and productive lives.
A collective could struggle in two scenarios:
In one scenario, the collective is just starting to form, and they neither have the group skills nor materials to begin. In this case, it is absolutely the most effective and long-lasting kind of charity that can be bestowed, to educate and supply basic materials to other groups. A one-time initial donation should provide the community with the ability to build and maintain their home with little to no income. Agriculture will always be a viable export.
In another scenario, a company who once had a viable product is suddenly obsoleted and unable to make money - in this case, the collective must stop growing and just maintain. Because collectives plan for this, there are years of savings, spare materials available on-site, as well as free access to food, water, electricity, and all needed services. In this time, restructuring of revenue and sizing models is required.
What's important in any scenario is that happiness and productivity need not be directly connected to income. Even during times of substantial income, collectives should in principle continue to run the entire habitat system without that money, donating, or investing in further self-sufficiency when necessary, or growth when appropriate, or charity.
When we are happy, we are peaceful. Today's very real relationship between money and happiness results in misguided efforts and violence.