My past big ideas mostly resemble yours, so I’ll focus on those of my present:
Most economic hardship results from avoidable wars, situations where players must burn resources to signal their strength of desire or power (will). I define Negotiations as processes that reach similar, or better outcomes as their corresponding war. If a viable negotiation process is devised, its parties will generally agree to try to replace the war with it.
Markets for urban land are currently, as far as I can tell, the most harmful avoidable war in existence. Movements in land price fund little useful work[1] and continuously, increasingly diminish the quality of our cities (and so diminish the lives of those who live in cities, which is a lot of people), but they are currently necessary for allocating scarce, central land to high-valuae uses. So, I’ve been working pretty hard to find an alternate negotiation process for allocating urban land. It’s going okay so far. (But I can’t bear this out alone. Please contact me if you have skills in numerical modelling, behavioural economics, machine learning and philosophy (well mixed), or any experience in industries related to urban planning)
Bidding wars are a fairly large subclass of avoidable wars. The corresponding negotiation, for an auction, would be for the players to try to measure their wills out of band, then for those found to have the least will to commit to abstaining from the auction. (People would stop running auctions if bidders could coordinate well enough to do this, of course, but I’m not sure how bad a world without auctions would be, I think auctions benefit sellers more than they benefit markets as a whole, most of the time. A market that serves both buyer and seller should generally consider switching to Vickrey Auctions, in the least.)
[1] Regarding intensification; my impression so far is that there is nothing especially natural about land price increase as a promoter of density. It doesn’t do the job as fast as we would like it to. The benefits of density go to the commons. Those common benefits of density correlate with the price of the individual dense building, but don’t seem to be measured accurately by it.
Another Big Idea is “Average Utilitarianism is more true than Sum Utilitarianism”, but I’m not sure whether the world is ready to talk about that. I don’t think I’ve digested it fully yet. I’m not sure that rock needs to be turned over...
I also have a big idea about the evolutionary telos of paraphilias, but it’s very hard to talk about.
Oh, this might be important: I studied logic for four years so that I could tell you that there are no fundamental truths, and all math and logic just consists of a machine that we evolved and maintained just because it happened to work. There’s no transcendent beauty at the bottom of it all, it’s all generally kind of ugly even after we’ve cut the ugliest parts away, and there may be better alternatives (consider CDT and FDT for an example of a deposition of seemingly fundamental elegance)
The usual Georgist story is that the problem of allocating land can be solved by taxing away all unimproved value of land (or equivalently by the government owning all land and renting it out to the highest bidder), and that won’t distort the economy, but the people who profit from current land allocation are disproportionately powerful and will block this proposal. Is that related to the problem you’re trying to solve?
Yeah. “Replace the default beneficiaries of avoidable wars with good people who use the money for good things” is a useful civic method to bear in mind but probably far from ideal. Taxation is fine, you need to do it to fund the commons, but avoidable wars seems like a weird place to draw taxes from, which nobody would consciously design? Taxes that would slow down urbanisation (by making the state complicit in increases in urban land price/costs of urban services) sound like a real bad idea.
My proposed method is, roughly, using a sort of reciprocal, egalitarian utilitarianism to figure out a good way to arrange everyone who owns a share in the city (shares will cost about what it costs to construct an apartment. Maybe different entry prices for different apartment classes.. although the cost of larger apartment tickets will have to take into account the commons costs that lower housing density imposes on the labour market), and to grant leases to their desired businesses/services. There shall be many difficulties along the way but I have not hit a wall yet.
Taxes that would slow down urbanisation (by making the state complicit in increases in urban land price/costs of urban services) sound like a real bad idea.
AFAIK the claim is that taxing land value would lead to lower rents overall, not higher. There’s some econ reasoning behind that.
I don’t think this is addressable because of the taboo tradeoffs in current culture around money and class. Some people produce more negative externalities than others in ways our legal system can not address, therefore people sequester themselves via money gating since that is still acceptable in practice even though it is decried explicitly.
What negative externalities are you thinking of. Maybe it’s silly for me to ask you to say, if you’re saying they’re taboo, but I’m looking over all of the elitist taboos and I don’t think any of them really raise much of an issue.
Did I mention that my prototype aggregate utility function only regards adjacency desires that are reciprocated. For instance, if a large but obnoxious fan-base all wanted to be next to a single celebrity author who mostly holds them all in contempt, the system basically ignores those connections. Mathematically, it’s like, the payoff of positioning a and b close together is min(a.desireToBeNear(b), b.desireToBeNear(a)). The default value for desireToBeNear is zero.
P.S. Does the fact that each user desire expression (roughly, the individual utility function) gets evaluated in a complex way that depends on how it relates to the other desire expressions make this not utilitarianism? Does this position that fitting our desires together will be more complex than mere addition have a name?
My past big ideas mostly resemble yours, so I’ll focus on those of my present:
Most economic hardship results from avoidable wars, situations where players must burn resources to signal their strength of desire or power (will). I define Negotiations as processes that reach similar, or better outcomes as their corresponding war. If a viable negotiation process is devised, its parties will generally agree to try to replace the war with it.
Markets for urban land are currently, as far as I can tell, the most harmful avoidable war in existence. Movements in land price fund little useful work[1] and continuously, increasingly diminish the quality of our cities (and so diminish the lives of those who live in cities, which is a lot of people), but they are currently necessary for allocating scarce, central land to high-valuae uses. So, I’ve been working pretty hard to find an alternate negotiation process for allocating urban land. It’s going okay so far. (But I can’t bear this out alone. Please contact me if you have skills in numerical modelling, behavioural economics, machine learning and philosophy (well mixed), or any experience in industries related to urban planning)
Bidding wars are a fairly large subclass of avoidable wars. The corresponding negotiation, for an auction, would be for the players to try to measure their wills out of band, then for those found to have the least will to commit to abstaining from the auction. (People would stop running auctions if bidders could coordinate well enough to do this, of course, but I’m not sure how bad a world without auctions would be, I think auctions benefit sellers more than they benefit markets as a whole, most of the time. A market that serves both buyer and seller should generally consider switching to Vickrey Auctions, in the least.)
[1] Regarding intensification; my impression so far is that there is nothing especially natural about land price increase as a promoter of density. It doesn’t do the job as fast as we would like it to. The benefits of density go to the commons. Those common benefits of density correlate with the price of the individual dense building, but don’t seem to be measured accurately by it.
Another Big Idea is “Average Utilitarianism is more true than Sum Utilitarianism”, but I’m not sure whether the world is ready to talk about that. I don’t think I’ve digested it fully yet. I’m not sure that rock needs to be turned over...
I also have a big idea about the evolutionary telos of paraphilias, but it’s very hard to talk about.
Oh, this might be important: I studied logic for four years so that I could tell you that there are no fundamental truths, and all math and logic just consists of a machine that we evolved and maintained just because it happened to work. There’s no transcendent beauty at the bottom of it all, it’s all generally kind of ugly even after we’ve cut the ugliest parts away, and there may be better alternatives (consider CDT and FDT for an example of a deposition of seemingly fundamental elegance)
The usual Georgist story is that the problem of allocating land can be solved by taxing away all unimproved value of land (or equivalently by the government owning all land and renting it out to the highest bidder), and that won’t distort the economy, but the people who profit from current land allocation are disproportionately powerful and will block this proposal. Is that related to the problem you’re trying to solve?
Yeah. “Replace the default beneficiaries of avoidable wars with good people who use the money for good things” is a useful civic method to bear in mind but probably far from ideal. Taxation is fine, you need to do it to fund the commons, but avoidable wars seems like a weird place to draw taxes from, which nobody would consciously design? Taxes that would slow down urbanisation (by making the state complicit in increases in urban land price/costs of urban services) sound like a real bad idea.
My proposed method is, roughly, using a sort of reciprocal, egalitarian utilitarianism to figure out a good way to arrange everyone who owns a share in the city (shares will cost about what it costs to construct an apartment. Maybe different entry prices for different apartment classes.. although the cost of larger apartment tickets will have to take into account the commons costs that lower housing density imposes on the labour market), and to grant leases to their desired businesses/services. There shall be many difficulties along the way but I have not hit a wall yet.
AFAIK the claim is that taxing land value would lead to lower rents overall, not higher. There’s some econ reasoning behind that.
I don’t think this is addressable because of the taboo tradeoffs in current culture around money and class. Some people produce more negative externalities than others in ways our legal system can not address, therefore people sequester themselves via money gating since that is still acceptable in practice even though it is decried explicitly.
What negative externalities are you thinking of. Maybe it’s silly for me to ask you to say, if you’re saying they’re taboo, but I’m looking over all of the elitist taboos and I don’t think any of them really raise much of an issue.
Did I mention that my prototype aggregate utility function only regards adjacency desires that are reciprocated. For instance, if a large but obnoxious fan-base all wanted to be next to a single celebrity author who mostly holds them all in contempt, the system basically ignores those connections. Mathematically, it’s like, the payoff of positioning a and b close together is min(a.desireToBeNear(b), b.desireToBeNear(a)). The default value for desireToBeNear is zero.
P.S. Does the fact that each user desire expression (roughly, the individual utility function) gets evaluated in a complex way that depends on how it relates to the other desire expressions make this not utilitarianism? Does this position that fitting our desires together will be more complex than mere addition have a name?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90107856/urban-poverty-has-a-sound-and-its-loud
feedback loop: both contribute to the other.