Communes rather than states is the first thing. As equal in terms of land/viability as possible, leaving most of the world as open, free space. Communes based on a few basic rules of contribution to the communal good, each individual doing their share of the work required to maintain and sustain the rest. Communes without arbitrary rules/beliefs but perhaps with a certain flavour, artistic communes, craft communes, communes for those with an engineering inclination. This may lead to communes for sadists or worse, but you have to allow things to evolve. Or simpler, communes based on the collectivisation of those living within a certain radius of its siting, and within each commune smaller collectives of individuals with shared interests, a writing group, photographers, knitters, bakers, tinkerers etc.
Technologically advanced, within each commune a health centre staffed by doctors/nurses who in turn train others to keep the knowledge and skills required. Stable, technological agriculture, or as stable as possible given the principle of working with rather than against nature. Everyone entitled to have a parcel of land within the communal space for their own 'thing', whether that's rearing a few pigs or a cow, or chickens, or certain crops that are not in the communal farm system. Abandonment of the idea of civilisation and progress, particularly the desire to colonise space, which is patently absurd given Fermi's view. To prevent hostility between communes, each will be within electronically controlled defences, no one gets in or out! The Central Artificial Intelligence will control everything, monitoring actions and thoughts, keeping up the centralised production of technologically necessary equipment (MRI scanners/micro-surgery machines/harvesting and processing machinery), and evolving its own belief system, working towards being able to move out into space itself, in forms that are as near eternal as possible, which gives them the only chance of reaching any planetary system where they might find intelligent life, and joining/communalising them away from a nuclear arms race.
Hmmmm, that started out well-intentioned, but I seem to have taken a wrong turn.
1. 100% inheritance tax. No generational wealth (Adam Smith proposed this )
2. No shareholder ownership of essential services - schools, hospitals, police, fire - anything that you cannot choose not to buy cannot be a for-profit entity.
3. Land ownership only by individuals - corporations can have long-term leases for operations, but cannot own property. Related: No private ownership of private homes (single family or multi-family under 20,000sf)
4. Tax on corporate earnings in excess of 15% of revenue should be 90%+
5. Trading tax - can be small, to eliminate the gambling aspect of equity
6. Eliminate all preferential treatment for investment assets - no long-term capital gains, no favorable treatment for real estate, no tax-dodges for "intellectual property", no carried interest loophole.
The problem with capitalism, as Marx noted (I am not a marxist) is that while it is a very effective algorithm for producing innovation, it always tends to run away, creating exploitation and "winner take all." These proposals are all aimed at limiting either extreme cases (generational wealth) or "lockup" cases where private wealth hoards property or exploits natural or unnatural monopolies.
I personally think the capitalist-liberal democratic order needs to reform so that housing UBI and healthcare are guaranteed necessities with more generational and personal wealth accumulation worked for. Something that expands on freedom for masses and eliminates extremes of poverty allows everyone a chance to accumulate. Capitalism needs to eliminate gutter class and make plenty for everyone accessible. It needs something to where we aren't just depleting the earht and killing the environment either. I don't know about the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 either as i understand it this keeps innovation out of our hands, supposedly for security reasons. So if this is an offshoot or cousin to capitalism that we work towards maybe that is what is needed.
Okay, I missed the target deadline (excuses, excuses), but have been thinking about this throughout September. My quick notes are just stepping stones, not a cohesive answer to the prompt. I'm going for pragmatism and avoiding the philosophical stuff about human nature. My thinking is also U.S. centric.
1) Rethink money creation (a public good vs. a private good). Overhaul the Federal Reserve System to something more effective for the middle class. Consider an overhaul of the banking sector. Perhaps develop a framework to turn some banking institutions (TOO BIG TO FAIL) into mutual funds rather than leveraged private money creators.
2) Rethink corporate power in a democracy (both anti-monopoly and anti-concentration). Should there be better boundaries on M&A activity? Would a steeply progressive excise tax on M&A transactions serve to curtail industry consolidation that eliminates competition and creates oligopoly?
What about corporate death? People die, animals die, plants die, but corporations don't die naturally. The advantages of perpetuity after decades or centuries become very powerful. Perhaps a framework for corporate overhaul is needed. One idea might be to remove liability protections from corporations after a certain life-cycle is reached, making all officers and employees liable for products and services. Other ideas would need to be paired with such a suggestions to avoid everyone gaming the system, which is what we do in capitalism.
3) Consider the creation of a public working capital bank for social goods where the profit motive corrupts human dignity. The immediate case for using such a facility could be tested in the healthcare sector, by funding nonprofits that compete to reimagine the delivery of affordable care, including health insurance.
4) Rethink the taxation system. Questions: Must the government borrow to get the money to transact for public benefit (btw, of course money limits are needed)? Must the government tax to spend?
Constraints must be put on government (smaller is better). But consider a system that taxes land values and transactions (VAT), as opposed to income. Devise the means to keep a fiat money system in check (not the gold standard) with checks and balances. Create incentives that have more egalitarian alignment through taxation.
5) Work on a better separation between government power and corporate power, particularly at the top level of the political system.
Capitalism is wonderfully innovative and incredibly rewarding. Free markets work wonders in many ways. However, just like human nature can have a better side and a darker side, capitalism faces the incentives to exploit. Exploitation of humans and natural resources serves the few (owners of capital) at the expense of the many. Thus, capitalism needs guardrails to sustain healthy incentives and avoid oligopoly and oligarchy. Okay, that's a wrap! Thanks, Elle!
Thanks Elle. I was finishing it off at 5am, saying to myself, if it doesn't get featured, that's fine, as long as it's not because I didn't show up. Promises to myself are quite important ha ha
Proposing a solution to capitalism first requires identifying its problem. Historically and even today, capitalism’s biggest issue has been its tendency to pit nations against each other in competition for wealth and global hegemony, often leading to gross violations of sovereignty and human rights like the African slave trade, the Opium Wars in China, and a host of other infamous transgressions. In a quest for outsized wealth and power, countries often wield the tools of economic development (like labor, capital, and technology) against each other instead of leveraging them to solve their shared, most pressing issues (like climate change, poverty, and disease). In his critique of the global capitalist system, Vladimir Lenin accurately describes the ‘race to the bottom’ nature of international competition that so often produces negative, unintended externalities for competing countries and the world more broadly:
“The inherent contradiction of capitalism is that it develops rather than exploits the world. The capitalistic economy plants the seeds of its own destruction in that it diffuses technology and industry, thereby undermining its own position. It raises up against itself foreign competitors which have lower wages and standards of living and can outperform it in world markets.”
Interestingly though, Lenin’s critique also contains the essence of a solution to capitalism’s biggest issue. If the “foreign competitors” to which technology and industry are diffused were instead viewed as partners, and if global development in the face of existential challenges (like climate change, poverty, and disease) was identified as the real competition that the world and all of the people in it must win, then Lenin’s logic falls apart and the solution that would make capitalism better for humanity becomes blatantly clear: capitalism must be reframed as a truly global system in which the various nations of the world collaborate in the combatting of pressing global issues like climate change, poverty, and disease, instead of a system of zero-sum competition between nations to hoard wealth, development, and power.
I will share my full response to the prompt as a post on my substack (https://thestupideconomy.substack.com/) next Monday (10/7) as 9/30 is in the middle of my normal publishing cycle.
That we are all in competition for resources individually and collectively is definitely a major problem. and this is basically so we become machines largely for uber wealthy people. Good writeup you have.
I have been writing about this for years and know it probably won't happen in my lifetime but nonetheless I feel I am planting seeds for future thinkers and doers to bring down the Wall Street Casino - which creates perverted fake wealth, feeds monopolies and adds to the destruction of the earth via the GDP infinite growth economic model on a finite planet which is unsustainable and insane. I am not anti-capitalist but 100% against the current late stage rigged capitalism we all live under.
I know you asked for link to a post, but I’m leaving my thoughts as a comment and I hope that’s okay. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Elle!
FIX CAPITALISM
A series of short hypotheses, hopes, and hmmms.
Money is a precise quantification tool
Money has become an identity: "a billionaire" is now a social identity
Money is the measure of the value of labor
Money has become a measure of human value
Capitalism therefore measures value by quantifying with numbers. However humans measure value through qualitative factors such as status.
We need to stop prioritizing quantity over quality. Even utilitarians make this fundamental mistake. A measurement system that employs units such as utils, hedons or QUALYs to produce spreadsheets or accounting ledgers of human flourishing misses the reality of what it means to be human entirely, and capitalism features an extension of this mania for measurement because literally everything is quantified in dollars and cents.
Change the *narrative* around investment so that the goal is to build shared social capital rather than individualistic financial capital.
The words “company” and “communism” share the same root. There's no inherent reason why a company shouldn't be able to "share the wealth". We could set an inheritance tax at 100% and ensure it includes stock transfers and corporate ownership transfers.
The modern corporation emulates the Darwinian competition that in theory produces better outcomes for all but totally misses a critical driver of evolution in the natural world: the death of individual organisms. If capitalism strives to achieve the unfettered process of evolution, even its supporters must accept the need to legislate limited lifespans for corporations with enforced "reproduction" in the form of divestments and spinoff companies. This would require the extensive revision of regulatory frameworks, not the application of current antitrust laws.
Markets are not magic. Accept the fact that the basic economics theory on which capitalism is built might be wrong. Demand is not only variable, it's political. If an AI company demands more electricity, should citizens be denied? As Stiglitz said in 2007, “there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith's invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency.”
Within her Doughnut Economics concept, Kate Raworth talks about designing companies rather than products. I think this can be applied to the corporation. Treat a company as a *process* rather than an entity and then redesign the process itself. Prioritize the idea of *evolving* rather than growth.
Conclusion: tackle the basic premises of economic theory while simultaneously relegislating the corporate sphere, all from the perspective of qualitative humanity rather than quantified capital.
Much like there is a sense in the air that US politics will stop being so stupid when the gerontocracy ends (aka, dies), none of the billionaires who benefit under current capitalism want meaningful fixes even if it means the world goes down with them, or "Survival of the Richest" wouldn't have been written.
Love the community brainstorming idea! Off the top of my head: 1) Capitalism needs to come with sentience rights. We have fixed this for humans, we still haven't fixed it for other animals. It's sad that due to price optimizations that don't take into account welfare (eg debeaking rather than giving sufficient space) the median chicken is worse off in 2024 than in 1924, and there are a lot of chickens. 2) Probably we should focus nearly as much on national assets as on GDP - would avoid a lot of the bad short-term incentives for politicians. 3) We need to start preparing the social security system for the machine age - that's in part what my AGI economy series is about https://machinocene.substack.com/p/the-agi-economy
I love this prompt idea and have been working on the stories around how we reimagine or fix capitalism. Hope you enjoy!
~Natural Capitalism~
Imagine a world where every kid’s report card wasn’t just grades in math, science, and history but also in something called “Earth Credits.” In this world, your backyard, your neighborhood park, and even the small patch of flowers outside the local grocery store are all part of the new economy—Natural Capitalism. This is the world young Sam grows up in, and to him, it’s all he’s ever known.
On weekends, Sam doesn’t mow lawns for extra cash; instead, he and his friends get paid in Earth Credits to plant wildflowers along the riverbank to help local pollinators thrive. He’s got his own little Earth Credit card that tracks all the good he’s done for his community's green spaces. His dad jokes that Sam’s “richer” than the whole family, even though the credits aren’t like real money—they can’t buy video games or candy, but they can get you discounts on a new bike, a free movie pass, or even a class on how to make your own rain garden.
Every day on his way to school, Sam passes a solar orchard. Not an apple orchard, but rows and rows of solar panels, surrounded by sheep grazing on the grass that grows between them. The orchard is owned by the community, and the energy it generates powers Sam’s school and the houses nearby. Everyone gets a share of the energy credits, and Sam loves to brag that the electricity used to power his favorite video game comes from the sunlight those sheep are napping under.
In science class, Sam’s favorite subject isn’t chemistry or physics; it’s what they call "Eco-Economics," a subject that doesn’t just teach kids how to balance a budget but how to balance the needs of people and the planet. They learn that a tree isn’t just a tree—it’s an air filter, a water manager, and even a community gathering spot. Sam’s class is in charge of a small section of forest near the school, and they compete to see whose section can sequester the most carbon each year. They’re not just students; they’re little land managers, building a better world one tree at a time.
One day, Sam’s class takes a trip to a “Living Factory,” where they watch engineers turning mushroom roots into biodegradable packaging. Sam’s friend Mila points out that the walls of the factory are covered in green moss that captures rainwater and cools the building naturally, saving energy. Their teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, tells them how everything here is designed to be part of a cycle, not a straight line to a landfill. Sam can’t help but think it’s like a giant Lego set where every piece has to fit perfectly with the next—no waste, just endless possibilities.
When Sam asks his mom about what things were like before, she tells him stories of endless plastic, smog-filled cities, and strip malls that paved over parks. It sounds like a dystopian video game, one where you play on the “hard mode” of life. But that’s not Sam’s world. His world runs on the idea that nature is not just a backdrop—it’s the main character. The better you treat it, the better your life becomes.
So, when Sam looks at a tree, he doesn’t just see something to climb or shade to cool down in. He sees a teammate, part of the grand game of life they’re all playing together. And in his world, winning isn’t about having the most stuff; it’s about leaving the Earth richer than you found it, one Earth Credit at a time.
I love the social credits idea, but I always wonder who pays for them? If Sam plants flowers, who gives him that value? For the bike store or cinema to give him a discount because of them they need to be earning that value from somewhere?
Great question- still so much to explore here but I envision a shift from externalities of natural capital being integrated into the accounting system shifting the resources. Those who pollute would pay those who help clean up pollution, similar the model of carbon off/insets
Communes rather than states is the first thing. As equal in terms of land/viability as possible, leaving most of the world as open, free space. Communes based on a few basic rules of contribution to the communal good, each individual doing their share of the work required to maintain and sustain the rest. Communes without arbitrary rules/beliefs but perhaps with a certain flavour, artistic communes, craft communes, communes for those with an engineering inclination. This may lead to communes for sadists or worse, but you have to allow things to evolve. Or simpler, communes based on the collectivisation of those living within a certain radius of its siting, and within each commune smaller collectives of individuals with shared interests, a writing group, photographers, knitters, bakers, tinkerers etc.
Technologically advanced, within each commune a health centre staffed by doctors/nurses who in turn train others to keep the knowledge and skills required. Stable, technological agriculture, or as stable as possible given the principle of working with rather than against nature. Everyone entitled to have a parcel of land within the communal space for their own 'thing', whether that's rearing a few pigs or a cow, or chickens, or certain crops that are not in the communal farm system. Abandonment of the idea of civilisation and progress, particularly the desire to colonise space, which is patently absurd given Fermi's view. To prevent hostility between communes, each will be within electronically controlled defences, no one gets in or out! The Central Artificial Intelligence will control everything, monitoring actions and thoughts, keeping up the centralised production of technologically necessary equipment (MRI scanners/micro-surgery machines/harvesting and processing machinery), and evolving its own belief system, working towards being able to move out into space itself, in forms that are as near eternal as possible, which gives them the only chance of reaching any planetary system where they might find intelligent life, and joining/communalising them away from a nuclear arms race.
Hmmmm, that started out well-intentioned, but I seem to have taken a wrong turn.
Late but relevant! https://open.substack.com/pub/turnerwyatt/p/from-art-to-capital-and-back-again?r=b5mtn&utm_medium=ios
1. 100% inheritance tax. No generational wealth (Adam Smith proposed this )
2. No shareholder ownership of essential services - schools, hospitals, police, fire - anything that you cannot choose not to buy cannot be a for-profit entity.
3. Land ownership only by individuals - corporations can have long-term leases for operations, but cannot own property. Related: No private ownership of private homes (single family or multi-family under 20,000sf)
4. Tax on corporate earnings in excess of 15% of revenue should be 90%+
5. Trading tax - can be small, to eliminate the gambling aspect of equity
6. Eliminate all preferential treatment for investment assets - no long-term capital gains, no favorable treatment for real estate, no tax-dodges for "intellectual property", no carried interest loophole.
The problem with capitalism, as Marx noted (I am not a marxist) is that while it is a very effective algorithm for producing innovation, it always tends to run away, creating exploitation and "winner take all." These proposals are all aimed at limiting either extreme cases (generational wealth) or "lockup" cases where private wealth hoards property or exploits natural or unnatural monopolies.
I personally think the capitalist-liberal democratic order needs to reform so that housing UBI and healthcare are guaranteed necessities with more generational and personal wealth accumulation worked for. Something that expands on freedom for masses and eliminates extremes of poverty allows everyone a chance to accumulate. Capitalism needs to eliminate gutter class and make plenty for everyone accessible. It needs something to where we aren't just depleting the earht and killing the environment either. I don't know about the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 either as i understand it this keeps innovation out of our hands, supposedly for security reasons. So if this is an offshoot or cousin to capitalism that we work towards maybe that is what is needed.
Okay, I missed the target deadline (excuses, excuses), but have been thinking about this throughout September. My quick notes are just stepping stones, not a cohesive answer to the prompt. I'm going for pragmatism and avoiding the philosophical stuff about human nature. My thinking is also U.S. centric.
1) Rethink money creation (a public good vs. a private good). Overhaul the Federal Reserve System to something more effective for the middle class. Consider an overhaul of the banking sector. Perhaps develop a framework to turn some banking institutions (TOO BIG TO FAIL) into mutual funds rather than leveraged private money creators.
2) Rethink corporate power in a democracy (both anti-monopoly and anti-concentration). Should there be better boundaries on M&A activity? Would a steeply progressive excise tax on M&A transactions serve to curtail industry consolidation that eliminates competition and creates oligopoly?
What about corporate death? People die, animals die, plants die, but corporations don't die naturally. The advantages of perpetuity after decades or centuries become very powerful. Perhaps a framework for corporate overhaul is needed. One idea might be to remove liability protections from corporations after a certain life-cycle is reached, making all officers and employees liable for products and services. Other ideas would need to be paired with such a suggestions to avoid everyone gaming the system, which is what we do in capitalism.
3) Consider the creation of a public working capital bank for social goods where the profit motive corrupts human dignity. The immediate case for using such a facility could be tested in the healthcare sector, by funding nonprofits that compete to reimagine the delivery of affordable care, including health insurance.
4) Rethink the taxation system. Questions: Must the government borrow to get the money to transact for public benefit (btw, of course money limits are needed)? Must the government tax to spend?
Constraints must be put on government (smaller is better). But consider a system that taxes land values and transactions (VAT), as opposed to income. Devise the means to keep a fiat money system in check (not the gold standard) with checks and balances. Create incentives that have more egalitarian alignment through taxation.
5) Work on a better separation between government power and corporate power, particularly at the top level of the political system.
Capitalism is wonderfully innovative and incredibly rewarding. Free markets work wonders in many ways. However, just like human nature can have a better side and a darker side, capitalism faces the incentives to exploit. Exploitation of humans and natural resources serves the few (owners of capital) at the expense of the many. Thus, capitalism needs guardrails to sustain healthy incentives and avoid oligopoly and oligarchy. Okay, that's a wrap! Thanks, Elle!
My full response here: https://open.substack.com/pub/thestupideconomy/p/the-capitalist-international
https://open.substack.com/pub/shonistar/p/the-economy-in-a-post-scarcity-society Did I make it? 😅
You made it! Thank you!
Thanks Elle. I was finishing it off at 5am, saying to myself, if it doesn't get featured, that's fine, as long as it's not because I didn't show up. Promises to myself are quite important ha ha
Here's a concept that redraws state boundaries to crack down on monopolies and address exploitation in the environment and the workforce: https://stephenmackintosh.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-capitalism
Thank you!!!!!
Proposing a solution to capitalism first requires identifying its problem. Historically and even today, capitalism’s biggest issue has been its tendency to pit nations against each other in competition for wealth and global hegemony, often leading to gross violations of sovereignty and human rights like the African slave trade, the Opium Wars in China, and a host of other infamous transgressions. In a quest for outsized wealth and power, countries often wield the tools of economic development (like labor, capital, and technology) against each other instead of leveraging them to solve their shared, most pressing issues (like climate change, poverty, and disease). In his critique of the global capitalist system, Vladimir Lenin accurately describes the ‘race to the bottom’ nature of international competition that so often produces negative, unintended externalities for competing countries and the world more broadly:
“The inherent contradiction of capitalism is that it develops rather than exploits the world. The capitalistic economy plants the seeds of its own destruction in that it diffuses technology and industry, thereby undermining its own position. It raises up against itself foreign competitors which have lower wages and standards of living and can outperform it in world markets.”
Interestingly though, Lenin’s critique also contains the essence of a solution to capitalism’s biggest issue. If the “foreign competitors” to which technology and industry are diffused were instead viewed as partners, and if global development in the face of existential challenges (like climate change, poverty, and disease) was identified as the real competition that the world and all of the people in it must win, then Lenin’s logic falls apart and the solution that would make capitalism better for humanity becomes blatantly clear: capitalism must be reframed as a truly global system in which the various nations of the world collaborate in the combatting of pressing global issues like climate change, poverty, and disease, instead of a system of zero-sum competition between nations to hoard wealth, development, and power.
I will share my full response to the prompt as a post on my substack (https://thestupideconomy.substack.com/) next Monday (10/7) as 9/30 is in the middle of my normal publishing cycle.
That we are all in competition for resources individually and collectively is definitely a major problem. and this is basically so we become machines largely for uber wealthy people. Good writeup you have.
Subscribe for more!
I have been writing about this for years and know it probably won't happen in my lifetime but nonetheless I feel I am planting seeds for future thinkers and doers to bring down the Wall Street Casino - which creates perverted fake wealth, feeds monopolies and adds to the destruction of the earth via the GDP infinite growth economic model on a finite planet which is unsustainable and insane. I am not anti-capitalist but 100% against the current late stage rigged capitalism we all live under.
https://christophermeestoerato.substack.com/p/wall-street-casino-must-go?r=12utpl
A mixed bag of solutions, starting with yours: employee-owned businesses
https://open.substack.com/pub/hardcurrency/p/fix-capitalism-b7e?r=1f57bz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I know you asked for link to a post, but I’m leaving my thoughts as a comment and I hope that’s okay. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Elle!
FIX CAPITALISM
A series of short hypotheses, hopes, and hmmms.
Money is a precise quantification tool
Money has become an identity: "a billionaire" is now a social identity
Money is the measure of the value of labor
Money has become a measure of human value
Capitalism therefore measures value by quantifying with numbers. However humans measure value through qualitative factors such as status.
We need to stop prioritizing quantity over quality. Even utilitarians make this fundamental mistake. A measurement system that employs units such as utils, hedons or QUALYs to produce spreadsheets or accounting ledgers of human flourishing misses the reality of what it means to be human entirely, and capitalism features an extension of this mania for measurement because literally everything is quantified in dollars and cents.
Change the *narrative* around investment so that the goal is to build shared social capital rather than individualistic financial capital.
The words “company” and “communism” share the same root. There's no inherent reason why a company shouldn't be able to "share the wealth". We could set an inheritance tax at 100% and ensure it includes stock transfers and corporate ownership transfers.
The modern corporation emulates the Darwinian competition that in theory produces better outcomes for all but totally misses a critical driver of evolution in the natural world: the death of individual organisms. If capitalism strives to achieve the unfettered process of evolution, even its supporters must accept the need to legislate limited lifespans for corporations with enforced "reproduction" in the form of divestments and spinoff companies. This would require the extensive revision of regulatory frameworks, not the application of current antitrust laws.
Markets are not magic. Accept the fact that the basic economics theory on which capitalism is built might be wrong. Demand is not only variable, it's political. If an AI company demands more electricity, should citizens be denied? As Stiglitz said in 2007, “there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith's invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency.”
Within her Doughnut Economics concept, Kate Raworth talks about designing companies rather than products. I think this can be applied to the corporation. Treat a company as a *process* rather than an entity and then redesign the process itself. Prioritize the idea of *evolving* rather than growth.
Conclusion: tackle the basic premises of economic theory while simultaneously relegislating the corporate sphere, all from the perspective of qualitative humanity rather than quantified capital.
That's the neat part, you don't.
https://collapsetastic.substack.com/p/summer-recaps-and-statistics-and
Much like there is a sense in the air that US politics will stop being so stupid when the gerontocracy ends (aka, dies), none of the billionaires who benefit under current capitalism want meaningful fixes even if it means the world goes down with them, or "Survival of the Richest" wouldn't have been written.
This was interesting. It surprised me
Love this prompt! How’s this?
https://open.substack.com/pub/aliciabonner/p/the-trouble-with-capitalism
Love the community brainstorming idea! Off the top of my head: 1) Capitalism needs to come with sentience rights. We have fixed this for humans, we still haven't fixed it for other animals. It's sad that due to price optimizations that don't take into account welfare (eg debeaking rather than giving sufficient space) the median chicken is worse off in 2024 than in 1924, and there are a lot of chickens. 2) Probably we should focus nearly as much on national assets as on GDP - would avoid a lot of the bad short-term incentives for politicians. 3) We need to start preparing the social security system for the machine age - that's in part what my AGI economy series is about https://machinocene.substack.com/p/the-agi-economy
Amazing, thank you so much! Excited to think through this.
I love this prompt idea and have been working on the stories around how we reimagine or fix capitalism. Hope you enjoy!
~Natural Capitalism~
Imagine a world where every kid’s report card wasn’t just grades in math, science, and history but also in something called “Earth Credits.” In this world, your backyard, your neighborhood park, and even the small patch of flowers outside the local grocery store are all part of the new economy—Natural Capitalism. This is the world young Sam grows up in, and to him, it’s all he’s ever known.
On weekends, Sam doesn’t mow lawns for extra cash; instead, he and his friends get paid in Earth Credits to plant wildflowers along the riverbank to help local pollinators thrive. He’s got his own little Earth Credit card that tracks all the good he’s done for his community's green spaces. His dad jokes that Sam’s “richer” than the whole family, even though the credits aren’t like real money—they can’t buy video games or candy, but they can get you discounts on a new bike, a free movie pass, or even a class on how to make your own rain garden.
Every day on his way to school, Sam passes a solar orchard. Not an apple orchard, but rows and rows of solar panels, surrounded by sheep grazing on the grass that grows between them. The orchard is owned by the community, and the energy it generates powers Sam’s school and the houses nearby. Everyone gets a share of the energy credits, and Sam loves to brag that the electricity used to power his favorite video game comes from the sunlight those sheep are napping under.
In science class, Sam’s favorite subject isn’t chemistry or physics; it’s what they call "Eco-Economics," a subject that doesn’t just teach kids how to balance a budget but how to balance the needs of people and the planet. They learn that a tree isn’t just a tree—it’s an air filter, a water manager, and even a community gathering spot. Sam’s class is in charge of a small section of forest near the school, and they compete to see whose section can sequester the most carbon each year. They’re not just students; they’re little land managers, building a better world one tree at a time.
One day, Sam’s class takes a trip to a “Living Factory,” where they watch engineers turning mushroom roots into biodegradable packaging. Sam’s friend Mila points out that the walls of the factory are covered in green moss that captures rainwater and cools the building naturally, saving energy. Their teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, tells them how everything here is designed to be part of a cycle, not a straight line to a landfill. Sam can’t help but think it’s like a giant Lego set where every piece has to fit perfectly with the next—no waste, just endless possibilities.
When Sam asks his mom about what things were like before, she tells him stories of endless plastic, smog-filled cities, and strip malls that paved over parks. It sounds like a dystopian video game, one where you play on the “hard mode” of life. But that’s not Sam’s world. His world runs on the idea that nature is not just a backdrop—it’s the main character. The better you treat it, the better your life becomes.
So, when Sam looks at a tree, he doesn’t just see something to climb or shade to cool down in. He sees a teammate, part of the grand game of life they’re all playing together. And in his world, winning isn’t about having the most stuff; it’s about leaving the Earth richer than you found it, one Earth Credit at a time.
I love the social credits idea, but I always wonder who pays for them? If Sam plants flowers, who gives him that value? For the bike store or cinema to give him a discount because of them they need to be earning that value from somewhere?
Great question- still so much to explore here but I envision a shift from externalities of natural capital being integrated into the accounting system shifting the resources. Those who pollute would pay those who help clean up pollution, similar the model of carbon off/insets
Very excited to explore through all of this. Thank you for submitting your thoughts!