April 26, 2022
More:
Accounting, Collateral, credit, Dick Bryan, Hayek, Marke mechanism, Marx, Performance, Profit, value
What Counts and Who’s Counting: Potentials of Non-Capitalist Markets
Dick Bryan on counting differently and its consequences on credit, collateral and expression of value. In the current capitalist economies, the question of what constitutes ‘Value’ is directly tied to the question of what counts. The principal counting criterion is profitability: the more profitable a production process (what we call a performance) is, the more it registers on a profit-based counting system and more Value it is deemed to create. That’s just as true of Marx’s labor values as it is of neoclassical economic market values. But not everything created in current society complies with this capitalist rule. There are many socially valuable outputs that aren’t profitable, and aren’t counted systematically, but they keep being produced. In the conventional wisdom, their provision must be understood as a consequence of at least one of the following: philanthropy, subsidy or irrationality; or they are just dismissed as ‘non-economic’, and hence unworthy of measurement. They are framed as innately unsustainable, and so survive only via private and public ‘generosity’.
January 3, 2021
A New Economic Grammar: Designing Social Derivatives with Economic Space Agency
A podcast with Akseli Virtanen (@econaut6), one of the founders of the Economic Space Agency (@ecospaceagency), an organization for exploring protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. Akseli previously founded the decentralized hedge fund Robin Hood Cooperative and has been referred as The Andy Warhol of Finance. During the interview we talk about how ECSA is exploring the creation of post-capitalist economic media through the creation of a new “economic grammar”, how we can co-opt financial jargon to imagine a post-capitalist future (like social derivatives), and the irony of using the work of Friedrich Hayek on economic calculation to show that capitalism sucks. If you’re interested in the social and political possibilities of the blockchain space, it’s absolutely imperative that you keep up with the work of ECSA.
October 2019
Crypto-Political Economy. Transcending Hayek and his digital disciples
Is cryptoeconomy just a refinement and acceleration of a capitalist economy or can it create a new understanding of Economy? This article explains how it could be either or, indeed both, by introducing the chapter “Crypto-Political Economy” of our upcoming white paper.
“The technology permits both capitalist and social versions to be designed centrally or in a distributed way. In both cases, there are clear cost and speed advantages of cryptoeconomic platforms because of the absence of need for central clearing houses, and we see large corporations and states adopting the technology for fast, low cost and accurate record keeping.”