little big cookie shake

[keturn]

I've been spending a lot of my attention on alternative currencies lately, driven by an interest in the Portland Timebank community and partners. I've been in some discussions lately about different directions the timebank might develop in, and some of these conversations have succeeded in challenging enough of my assumptions about economies that

Comments

being unstoppable with money

[keturn]

Oh, the other thing I had was the thought that the people who are really successful in our current economy don't let that whole "I don't have any money in my account" thing stop them, as my hypothetical buyer does. It takes money to make money and they'll borrow aggressively, putting themselves in millions of dollars in debt, in order to create whatever venture it is they want to make.

[boojum]

I have heard of a situation which kind of went to the opposite extreme. It was a babysitting time-bank, where hours were the medium of exchange (possibly with a fudge factor for lots of kids? I don't recall). It got into a state where everyone was hoarding their hours because they were afraid of not having hours when they needed them, so nobody was willing to pay hour-points for babysitting, so nobody felt like they could easily earn hour-points, so everybody hoarded the hour-points they had, so.... The administrators of the system ended up solving it by adding hour-points evenly to everyone's account, so that everyone felt more flush. Even though they were still all in the same relative positions, in a closed system, this worked, because emotions were part of the endless spiral of doom

[boojum]

On a larger scale, conspicuous consumption is a standard, but not entirely necessary way of playing the social standing game, which seems to be mandatory in human societies. It seems like if you were in a society that was sufficiently thought-divorced from American-standard, you might be able to shift the ways in which social standing is expressed to ones that worked better with your proposed economic system. They'd still be nasty ways of putting other people down, alas, but they could be different nasty ways.

[keturn]

oh, boojum, you misunderstand. my king-sized bed of caviar (that must be replaced every day) isn't about being conspicuous or proving that I'm better than you, it's just the sleeping surface I happen to find gives me the best dreams at night...

[freyley]

heart.

[boojum]

Hee!

I would love to read an (accessible to the interested layperson) analysis of people pretending to not be engaged in social standing activities as a way of upping their standing. The closest I've seen is _Orbital Resonance_, which is fiction about post-apocalyptic twelve-year-olds in space -- fun, but not heavy on evidence or analysis.

[lindseykuper]

The timebank (why is it called that?) sounds a little like how little Maya and Lindsey handled the notional money in our My Little Ponies' society. We didn't want to bother with currency, so we just had a notebook at the bank with everyone's balance written in it, and from time to time we'd shift money from one account to another, keeping the total balance constant.

But when I run with those rules in an economy where the buyer doesn't stop when he hits $0, I get a situation where the buyer never stops buying and the seller never stops selling Any exchange-for-currency is available at any time, which leads me to wonder why anyone's bothering to do any accounting at all.Bounds on term sizes. In relational programming, where, for instance, you want to find all integer values of X, Y, and Z that satisfy the relation X + Y = Z, you have to somehow put a cap on the growth of one or more of those terms if you don't want an infinite loop. In the case of the timebank, could you just cut a person off from spending if they drop below a

[keturn]

It's called a "timebank" because the unit of exchange is hours. If you copy-edit Will's dissertation for an hour, you get one time dollar. You exchange it with me for one hour of finding and tuning up a bike for you to ride during your next visit. I exchange it with the acupuncturist down the street and she puts some metal needles in me for an hour, etc.

As for the threshold, if it's static, it seems like you're still using a fixed, centrally-issued money supply, just one where the chairman decides to issue $N to everyone once in their life. If it's dynamic, well, that makes things much more interesting. Also, complicated.

[lindseykuper]

So, are all kinds of work worth one time-dollar per hour? I could see that system being abused. Say Paul and I are both willing to mow your lawn. Mowing your lawn takes about two hours, regardless of who does it, so it should cost you two time-dollars. But because I want your business, I pull you aside and whisper that I'm only going to charge you one time-dollar for it. I start doing this for everyone, and soon I have all the lawn-mowing business. I make half of what it should be worth according to the system, but I don't care, because everyone goes to me.

I like the idea of the bank, but I'm just not sure how much time should have to do with it. If I get better and better at making hats to the point where it takes me only an hour to make a hat that used to take five hours to make, should I only get one time-dollar in exchange for the hat? And what's to keep me from telling everyone that it did take five hours? Or ten hours, for that matter

differences in efficiency

[keturn]

Huh! That's essentially the opposite of the concern I hear most frequently, which is "I want to charge more for my brain-surgery skill", not "what if scabs undercut my market."

I don't know. I'm not even sure if it's a problem yet. Although it is, now that I think about it, a slightly different expression of a relative-efficiencies problem I was thinking of earlier:

Say you and I both mow lawns. But you're lots better at mowing lawns than I am -- you can mow three lawns in the time it takes me to do one. So, you get all the lawn mowing business. Until peak mowing season hits and you run out of capacity for more jobs, at which point I pick up your overflow business.

So you're mowing lawns, and I'm mowing lawns, we're both doing good honest work and getting paid for it. Yeah, I'm getting paid more per-lawn than you, but there's still a limit to how many hours are in a day, so we're making about the same wages per day and together we're meeting the world's lawn-mowing needs.

Except the people who are paying me are spending

[freyley]

Wwell, your thought-problem (that people will spend infinitely) is probably stopped by a social understanding of the likelihood of cheaters. If I see someone with a large negative balance, I'm much more unlikely to offer them a service. Someone with a high positive balance, much more likely.

But I think the only helpful thing I have is that some folks in academia seem to call this community economics.

the deadbeat-meter

[keturn]

Oh, so you won't take my money because I'm a cheater? My money isn't as good as anyone else's?

So here my account balance isn't so much of a amount-of-tradeable-assets, it's more of a deadbeat-meter. It seems like we're almost talking about a reputation system here. And you were the one who was talking to me about the "my personal worth as a human being is determined by my bank account" problem, which is certainly the direction I start to go with this...

although, maybe "I am my bank account" is only a problem because it encourages hoarding, and if you change the metric to be something like Transactions / (k + ABS(Balance)), (where k is some constant to prevent dividing by zero for balanced accounts), you exchange the hoarding characteristic for an entirely new set of behavior.

Re: the deadbeat-meter

[freyley]

If I give you hours, and you're a cheater, I'm enabling a cheater. I'm pretty hardwired not to do that. Of course, your large negative balance isn't a guarantee that you're a cheater, but it's the best hint the numbers give.

This is functionally the same, not of taking your money, but of loaning you money, if I think you're already in debt. Or of taking an IOU from you if you're already in debt. Both of those most people would avoid doing.

Okay, so your metric is basically this: high numbers means that you've had lots of transactions, and/or your give/receive is relatively close to balance. low numbers means you've either had few transactions, or you almost entirely give or receive services.

So you're punishing the altruistic.

I'm at least far more interested by this metric than the old one.