Using the economic model of the Space game to analyze the unsolved problems of the Hubberg tax and UBI

After I clapped my chest and promised to hand in the homework under the call for essays from @有森, I fell into a panic, feeling that I was overthinking things again, and my arms were blocking the car. No matter how superficial your elaboration is, the knowledge you have read always has to be outputted once before it feels internalized, so let’s talk about it without shame.

The first half of this article is theoretical in the real world, focusing on the generation and confirmation of wealth:

• From primal abundance to artificial scarcity
• Awareness creates information, and information becomes wealth through authentication

The second half is put into practice, using the UBI economic model of The SPACE game to do some thought experiments. I hope that the product manager of the game @The Space, even if you don't read the first half, please be sure to pull it back to watch the game analysis! Please! !

• The Space game: From artificial scarcity to artificial abundance?

introduction

My support for Universal Basic Income is based on a simple humanistic value that people who fall into unfortunate situations deserve a chance to get back on their feet instead of slipping into the abyss. Compared with many other social benefits such as unemployment benefits, the concept of UBI is special in that it is committed to unconditional payment. You don't have to keep proving that you're looking for a job, and you don't have to explain where every single dollar of your money goes. You can use whatever you want. Those who appeal to UBI believe that even a small sum of money, if it can be distributed unconditionally to those struggling on the poverty line on a monthly basis, can help them feel a little fortune in the impermanent life, and can be more active and more proactive. Actively improve your life situation. ( McKinsey's analysis of the Finnish experiment ; Stockton , San Francisco , and Compton in California have experiments large and small)

It is not difficult to admit that UBI is effective, the difficult thing is to answer: where does the money come from? The above-mentioned experiments in several cities in California are all funded by charitable donations or government subsidies. Considering the number of poor people in the United States, it is actually difficult to implement them nationwide. Finland is currently the only country that has tested UBI nationwide and conducted a control group data comparison. Although the conclusion is gratifying, Finland is originally a socialist country with high taxes and high welfare. At most, there are some people who have been unemployed for a long time and receive social security, and there are almost no people who are really poor. Therefore, it is difficult for other countries and regions to learn from Finland's experience. I have lived in Finland for a few years myself, and I have received the favor of a country with high taxes, but I have also felt that the economy lacks vitality under the high taxes, and it is difficult for businesses to innovate and immigrants to gain a foothold. Leaving Finland to come to the United States, as an immigrant, I can clearly feel that I have more opportunities and hope in the United States. Therefore, I am skeptical about raising corporate taxes and personal income tax to eliminate poverty, and I am also worried about the current large amount of money printing and national debt issued by the left in the United States.

The premise for us to issue UBI is that the society has surplus wealth and the ability to support a population of this size, otherwise we will return to the nightmare of a people's commune. We can deduce by first principal how wealth is formed.

From primal abundance to artificial scarcity

Come on, think about it. Once, wealth was everywhere: sunshine, air and water, fruit in the woods, game in the grasslands, fish in the streams... When the weather is cold, find a cave to hide. When the dry season arrives, they migrate to places where water plants are more abundant. It is a primordial abundance: although life is short, it feels as if nothing is lacking .

How did we get to where we are today?

If you're unfortunate enough to go bankrupt, to be kicked out by your landlord, to go to sleep in the park, or to take shelter from the rain in a bridge hole, you'll be kicked out. If you don’t have money to eat, you can’t dig up tree roots and turf, and you can’t go to the square to grab a pigeon and bake it on a fire (there are so many fat pigeons!)

You can say, how uncivilized that is! If you have hands and feet, why don't you go to work?

But even the possibility of exchanging "civilized" labor for food is fading away. Today, a homeless man can't walk to the door of a small restaurant and ask the boss, "Can you give me some food? I'll wash your dishes for a day." Because the boss will ask you if you have a work permit, what is your social security number, and what is your social security number? No workers' compensation insurance; we also have to check if you have a criminal record.

Even if you escape from the city and go to the mountains to survive in the wild, you will be caught and cleaned up by the administrator: "This is a national park, and all natural environments are protected by the state; no hunting is allowed! Also, have you applied for a camping permit? "

Even if you get help from a city social worker or charity, learn a few skills like repairing a car, typing on a computer that can make a living in the city, get a letter of introduction and a credit guarantee, get a job, and find a house, you often live In a sense of scarcity , because house prices will keep rising, your skills will soon be replaced by new technologies, and you work 18 hours a day just to pay rent and electricity, and you don’t have more energy to improve yourself or consider career transitions .

Our common perception is that today's society is richer than primitive society, we live longer, healthier, more abundant material supply, more colorful entertainment... But why today's people are more prone to anxiety, easier Worried that your job will be replaced, your wealth will shrink and depreciate, and your children will lose at the starting line?

What power has turned primordial abundance into artificial scarcity?

Awareness creates information, and information becomes wealth through authentication

The subjective initiative of human beings to transform nature, which is often mentioned in Marx's theory, can be understood as the arrangement of matter by a conscious being by a conscious being. Human activities have changed the information structure in nature.

Information is a description of how matter is assembled, and it has two measurement dimensions: complexity and applicability . Complexity can be measured objectively, for example, a seed contains more complex information than a pebble. But which information is more useful is a subjective judgment.

Suppose a group of land cultivators decides to define a piece of wasteland as farmland, because they feel that farmland is more suitable for them to produce stable wheat. However, the hunters in this field believe that the ecological resources of the wasteland are richer and more diverse and more suitable for their survival. Turning wasteland into farmland will reduce the complexity of information contained in this area and facilitate management. However, compared with farmland and wasteland, which information structure is more applicable, wastelanders and hunters have different judgments.

Then, if the wastelander wants to execute his will, he must make all other substances in this wasteland, including other people, have to readjust their own way of existence under this new definition. If other substances on this land refuse to cooperate, such as water sources that cannot be brought in, the soil is not suitable for wheat growth, the vitality of weeds and locusts is too strong, or the hunters on this land are too strong, and the land cultivators are driven away by force, The land will return to its wasteland state. Only when the other substances in this wasteland are reorganized according to the land definition of the cultivator, the wasteland can be turned into farmland, and the information can be changed.

For the cultivators, the wasteland has become a more suitable farmland for their own survival. It can be said that they have turned this area into their own wealth. However, for hunters, they not only lost the original information environment (tangible assets), but also their accumulated hunting skills, knowledge of identifying animals and plants (intangible assets), etc., which have been accumulated for generations, have lost their use in the farmland economy. , they must also learn how to farm in order to "re-employment" and survive in the new information landscape.

That is to say, whether passively or actively, it is the hunters and native animals and plants here who have accepted the definition of the land by the land cultivators, and the wealth of the cultivators has been generated. The essence of wealth is a kind of information authenticated by others.

This process of redefining matter on this planet has been happening continuously since human beings became aware. The thunder and fire have evolved into the dynamics of the internal combustion engine, so the black liquid surging underground has become the fuel for global competition. There are outposts, armies and bureaucrats set up around you, and issuing passports and visas becomes a business. Even singing, drawing, and complaining on the Internet, these activities that we originally entertained ourselves, have become things that can be used to make a fortune with the advent of modern communication.

Whether you gain wealth or feel needy depends on whether you agree to and participate in these processes of redefining things.

In the article on the property rights of the attention of @Unidentified Flying Rabbit , from the perspective of the Internet economy, it discusses the issue of content producers exploiting the attention of content followers . In fact, as long as we look at the world we live in from a broad information view, we can see that the economic model in the material world has exactly the same problems as the Internet economic model. The existing currency and price mechanisms only price information production, so that those who produce information and can forcefully promote their own ideas get rewards; they do not set prices for information authentication, so that those who are forced to accept and change their own information map can only become The former offering.

Since the current economic model lacks reasonable compensation for information authentication, wealth is bound to accumulate in the hands of the few who can bring the material world to their definition, creating poverty so much that we are now talking about UBI basic income.

Fortunately, there are already brilliant people who have come up with a solution to artificial scarcity, written in the book Radical Market. The solution to man-made scarcity lies in imposing a Haberg tax to break the monopoly of the few on the definition of information. The truth of the book has a very detailed introduction in @Unidentified Flying Rabbit's another masterpiece , True Private Ownership :

The unconditional basic income under Harberger's ownership point of view, the funds for redistribution do not come from the government fiscal taxation under a single name, but from the collection of the sub-values assessed by all the contacts/cognizers of the property based on the property rights. The Harberger tax is a universal, egalitarian (equality before the law) redistribution.

Recognize the labor of the information certifier; the unconditional basic income is to be taken with the Harberger tax.

The Space game: From artificial scarcity to artificial abundance?

The Space ( https://www.thespace.game/ ) game we have been playing during this time is an economic model designed based on the above concept. It uses pixels to represent property that can be traded at any time, and uses the Hubberg tax to represent assets that can be traded at any time. mechanism to issue a basic income to all gamers. This game is suitable for thought experiments because it reduces complex human socio-economic activities to the metaphor of pixel trading. Please come with me to think about the mystery of this!

In this game, the ideals of the Radical Market are more fully presented, but we will find that although the world has become fair, it has not become more interesting or meaningful . If it weren't for the sponsors of @The Space who promised some benefits - the temptation of airdrops, sending NFT or POAP souvenirs, and giving us this kind of nerd to study the ideal society's spiritual encouragement - this game seems to lack a little bit by its own logic Motivation for players to keep playing. Why?

Let's first assume an extremely simple situation: on a blank canvas of 1×2 pixels, the original price is $1 per pixel, and a total of 2 players have an initial capital of $3:

[Situation 1] Player A is the stronger player and buys both pixels. Player B's investment style is relatively conservative, and he is unwilling to end the game. Then according to the rules of the game, player A pays taxes on time, and then receives UBI on time, the tax and income cancel each other out, and the game enters a dynamic balance. The funds of both A and B have not changed. The only change is that the property rights of the two pixels are assigned to A.

[Case 2] A and B each occupy a block of pixels. A is more optimistic about his pixel, so he raises the land price to $2. Then A and B pay tax at the same time, and A will pay more. After the tax comes up, UBI has to be divided equally between A and B, and A will soon realize that raising the price is not good for him. B will also see that if he reduces his land price to 0, he can enjoy A's tax without even having to pay tax.

[Situation 2-1] A and B entered into vicious competition, and both set their respective land prices to 0. Taxes would not come up, and UBI would be out of the question. The system entered a dynamic equilibrium again. As long as there is a difference in the pricing of pixels between A and B, the party with the higher price will suffer, so A and B will eventually reach an agreed price, pay taxes together, and receive UBI together.

[Situation 2-2] A takes advantage of the price reduction of B, and buys B's pixels back at a low price. The system returns to [Scenario 1], the dynamic balance of paying taxes and receiving social security by yourself.

Expanding this simple model, adding more pixel area, adding more players, injecting more starting capital, will eventually return to a state of dynamic balance between tax collection and UBI issuance. The basic income distribution combined with the Hubberg tax can indeed solve the problem of artificial scarcity mentioned above, but this mechanism alone will only lead to dynamic equilibrium. The wealth of our society will not increase, nor will the standard of living, we will simply return to the original abundance again. In fact, physicists have long summed up this truth, which is the second law of thermodynamics:

In an isolated system, the entropy value will continue to increase until the system reaches dynamic equilibrium.

The second law of thermodynamics also provides the answer: if the system is to work continuously, it must be an open system with a constant input of energy.

What's missing from the economic model in The Space? There are no pricing rules for wealth appreciation in this game!

Note: The second round of the game introduces a time limit, so there is a certain game play. Whether your goal is to earn coins or draw pixels, you can have some "value-added" or "win" feeling under the time limit. But it is said that this game is intended to be a long-term bulletin board, so the following analysis is explained from the perspective of infinite game.

Wealth in this game is represented by three assets:

• cash
• number of pixels
• Pixel Quote

[Cash] In order not to cause inflation, the total number of tokens in the game should be limited. So macroscopically speaking, the total cash assets of the Space remain unchanged. Microscopically, there will be differences in the increase and decrease of cash between players; but as the second law of thermodynamics says, if the game is only traded with cash and pixels, it will be dynamic balance in the end, and there will be no more fun to attract players to continue playing the game. play in.

[Number of Pixels] If we treat all pixels indiscriminately, that is, the pricing has nothing to do with the coordinates and colors of the pixels, then whether the game provides 200×200 or 2000×2000 pixels, even if it provides an infinite canvas, in the end It will still return to dynamic balance, and the more pixels, the higher the final entropy value will be, and the canvas will appear completely disordered.

[Pixel Quote] This parameter is actually the most interesting, because quotes are subjective behaviors. Let's analyze it in detail.

At present, no matter what color you paint a pixel with, you can sit on the ground and raise the price and shout at will - the only thing that restricts you is the system tax clearance mechanism. According to the previous analysis, although the price is cool, the premise is that someone is willing to buy it. If everyone is a "rational economic person", they will quickly understand that, according to the principle of dynamic balance, avoiding battlegrounds to occupy a certain number of edge pixels and pricing them as the average price of the whole game is to maintain personal The best way for assets.

So how can a red pixel be more expensive than a yellow pixel?

Suppose there is an interesting book with 200,000 words, and you are willing to pay 60 yuan to buy it. Then I will split this book into individual characters and sell it to you. Are you willing to pay 0.0003 yuan to buy one of the characters? (I do not want to!)

An author puts together many words to produce information that is valuable to you. It's not the words that you're willing to pay for, but the message that the words together convey. In the same way, the value of a painting does not lie in the price of its single pixel.

Pixels are valuable because they can express a lot of information when aggregated. The information is valuable because the above information means childhood memories to me, and it means to game companies that they can use the fewest bits to convey the most fun in the age of limited technology, so I and game companies are willing to pay. But for others, the above information may be just a bunch of pixels, and there is no reason to pay for it.

This is what I have argued over and over again: awareness creates information, and information is authenticated and becomes wealth.

Under the condition that [cash] and [number of pixels] are both constant, the value creation in this game must rely on the player's awareness: first, players must create interesting images, and then players must be willing to bid to buy them, forming a In the supply-demand market, players are willing to trade in the market, and the game of taxation and UBI can continue to be played.

Let's talk about a possible idea:

Once a recognizable pattern appears on the canvas, the creator can circle that set of pixels and price them as integrated information.

For example I bought 5 pixels and painted a flower. It doesn't make sense for me to claim property rights to any of the pixels individually, I need property rights to the entire flower. I can say, this flower is worth $7, who would buy it?

If another player doesn't buy it at this time, but runs around me and creates again, turning my little flower into a big flower:

Then the player can price the whole big flower at 29 pixels. The big flower has to be priced above $7, and if someone buys it, I get that $7. If the player insists on setting the price lower than the original price of my small flower, he must first buy my small flower pixel before re-price the big flower.

This example shows how to mine information from a pile of undifferentiated pixels, assign values to it, and enter a market transaction. This is the starting point for us to move from raw abundance (40,000 pixels to casual occupation) to artificial abundance (40,000 pixels to become meaningful and valuable information).

The ad for the third round of the Space test has arrived:

The Space product is in the process of continuous iterative revision, and a series of new functions will be launched in the third round of testing. We will open the third round of testing channels at 20:00 on May 12 (East Eighth District) , which is expected to last for 48 hours .

Given that the game rules of this round of testing are still to rely on time limits and team confrontation to increase the playability of the game, I plan to...watch it 😂 (the last time I also played bankruptcy)

It is very difficult to simulate the economy and society by buying and selling pixels, and there are also discussions on Discord where the future of the game is going to be. The current way out seems to be to make the canvas NFT, but NFT also faces the problems of pricing and supply and demand. I still want to continue to explore the topic of value creation in the Space. This time, the space is limited and I will not go into more in-depth game fantasy design . Hope to have the opportunity to make a proposal some time later.

Epilogue

Finally share a video, the crystal structure fed by entropy:

We used to think of entropy as a disordered state governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Yet we often find that information (an ordered state, such as a crystal structure) can emerge in high-entropy systems. This contradiction has puzzled physicists for many years. After the development of informatics, the entropy value in the original thermodynamics has a deeper meaning. The entropy value actually represents the probability of what information the system is in, that is, the uncertainty of the system state , and the information represents the order structure of the system. Entropy and order are two distinct properties of a system with no causal relationship between them.

Thinking about this truth helps to understand why a wasteland looks chaotic, but contains more information. Wasteland actually has its own order of ecological balance, and it is very complex, but the human beings in the farming society cannot understand the deeper order. At that time, we could only manage the order of farmland because the information structure of farmland was simple. However, to maintain the low-entropy state of the farmland system requires a large amount of external energy input and work. This is why a single-crop farmland economy is not sustainable.

Whether it is Marx's human transformation of nature, the productive relationship of means of production, or Adam Smith's balance of supply and demand, the invisible hand, they only focus on the relationship between matter (natural resources and labor) and energy (wealth). Informatics has opened up new horizons in recent decades. The vast majority of our life and production activities now take place at the level of digital information, and the speed of information processing has been greatly improved. We can observe the rapid iteration and reproduction of information, and can use the model of the network economy to deduce the direction of the material world.

Therefore, I believe that the changes in the computer network world will spill over into the physical world. Observing the convergence and appreciation of information in the online world will also help us to go back and understand and improve the wealth creation process in the material world.