The Mutual Patronage Society
I had the thought earlier that the latest book by Steven Brust was so-so, and it was a relatively expensive hardback, but I was happy to have bought it anyway both because I did still enjoy it and I'm glad to be supporting one of my favorite authors. The idea that we like to 'support' people whose work we like is interesting to me. What if we could assign our 'support' to a certain set of people? Perhaps splitting it up with arbitrary weights, perhaps not. Such that they were in some way rewarded proportional to our 'value', and inversely proportional to the number of people we support. So, the fewer people you assign your support to, the more it is worth. Equally, the more people support you, the more value you might have, and the more your support would be worth. I like the idea as a system of flows, but what would be the inputs to the system? And is it really much different from what we have right now?