Wondering if radical transparency about (approximate) wealth + legalizing discriminatory pricing would sort of steadily, organically reduce inequality to the extent that would satisfy anyone.
Price discrimination is already all over the place, people just end up doing it in crappy ways, often by artificially crippling the cheaper versions of their products. If they were allowed to just see and use estimates of each customer’s wealth or interests, the incentives to cripple cheap versions would become negative, perhaps more people would get the complete featureset.
Although many forms of discriminatory pricing promote fairness (for instance, charging professional engineers more for CAD software than students), others might promote unfairness (Generally: charging more to people who have access to fewer alternatives?). So I guess a lot of this rests on what structures of conscious capitalism do. Conscious capitalism is whatever thing you get when information about the externalities of production are made clearer. It has not been tried. I imagine it would lead to things like effective altruism, philanthropic clubs that, through natural community processes, create beneficial social accountability pressures for people to live up to their own values, where they can.
I’m not completely sure how strong or lucid they will be.
Wondering if radical transparency about (approximate) wealth + legalizing discriminatory pricing would sort of steadily, organically reduce inequality to the extent that would satisfy anyone.
Price discrimination is already all over the place, people just end up doing it in crappy ways, often by artificially crippling the cheaper versions of their products. If they were allowed to just see and use estimates of each customer’s wealth or interests, the incentives to cripple cheap versions would become negative, perhaps more people would get the complete featureset.
Although many forms of discriminatory pricing promote fairness (for instance, charging professional engineers more for CAD software than students), others might promote unfairness (Generally: charging more to people who have access to fewer alternatives?). So I guess a lot of this rests on what structures of conscious capitalism do. Conscious capitalism is whatever thing you get when information about the externalities of production are made clearer. It has not been tried. I imagine it would lead to things like effective altruism, philanthropic clubs that, through natural community processes, create beneficial social accountability pressures for people to live up to their own values, where they can.
I’m not completely sure how strong or lucid they will be.