<Draft> Equitable Economics, Vibrant Networks and Human Agency</Draft>

I am a Utilitarian. It is a limited but useful way to see the world. I see communities as networks and people as nodes in those networks. I understand people in terms of their contribution to the vibrancy of the community.

It’s my 54th birthday and I am taking a moment to refresh the framework that informs my actions. This is only a short outline for now.

PLEASE help. Highlight, comment, curse at me, tell me I’m wrong. You can click the links in the right margin for comments from me (and hopefully others :))

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We are told to hate each other

Racism and hatred of Other leads us to limit the success of the global human community. Racism and hatred of Other is actively encouraged by our plutocrats to ensure our pitchforks are not pointed at them. (N. Hanauer, Bruegemann)

• Behavioral economics has been weaponized by the plutocrats to control consumer/citizen behavior and force us into false tribes. (Divide and conquer, this shit is not new.) (D. Kahnaman, R. Thaler, Propublica Machine Bias series and numerous other recent articles on Facebook and other deleterious effects of AI)

No leaders, no heroes, no saviors, there is only all of us

Our goal should be to live in a healthy community. Network health is defined as vibrancy which is a state of balance between (R. Ulanowicz)

• Efficiency which ensures sufficient outputs and
• Resilience which guards against catastrophic failure and enables discovery of new value. (Y. Benchler)
• Discovery of difference across similarity is far better for humans than is clustering into enclaves of similarity.

Vibrant networks are composed of active nodes. Humans are active (consumption and production) when they have agency. A human cannot have agency if they are not free. A node can be known in terms of its contribution to the network, its ability to consume, learn and produce value.

• Equitable application of education focused on student agency is the most critical activity to ensure the long term vibrancy of a network. (P. Freire, J. Dewey, A. Sen, B. Hooks)
• The Protocols of Neighborliness is in contestation with the Protocols of Purity and the most important question is “Who is your neighbor.” (W. Bruegemann, H. Pinter, W. Berry)

Democracy coupled with a free-as-in-freedom-not-as-in-freedom-fries market economy is the closest thing we have to something that works. (J. Emerson, D. Satz)

• Money/Value that moves is a positive attribute of vibrancy. Money that is hoarded reduces vibrancy.
• Wealthy is not worthy. The opposite is true. The poor are better money managers and have greater potential value to the network (J. Morduch Portfolios of the poor and US Financial Diaries, CGAP, JPAL, IPA). The rich tend to want more for themselves and are extractive to the network as a whole. (A. Giridharadas)

Nothing is inevitable. We CAN build the systems we need. BUT there are powerful people who don’t want us to succeed. (A. Lorde — The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house and Poetry is not a Luxury)

In natural and artificial networks, new nodes want to connect to nodes that are already highly connected. This is why the rich get richer. However, we can discourage concentration of wealth by valuing the fitness of a node in addition to its connectedness (See Education, 3a). (Previous post)

• Limiting the power of connectedness by increasing the influence of fitness allows for faster discovery and adoption of new value. (Fitness-Based Generative Models for Power-Law Networks Khanh Nguyen and Duc A. Tran)
• Decentralized infrastructure and fractal (nested and self-similar) organization works against the corruption that is inevitable with command-and-control and so it also works against the concentration of wealth. The hope is that this infrastructure can also work against the historical truth of corruption. (Primavera de Filippi, M. Swan, M. Bauwens, A. Brock)
• Management IS measurement.

The tragedy of the commons is only inevitable if we want it to be. The effective self-organizing management of common pool resources is the most practical anti-capitalist activity we can engage in to save the planet and ourselves. (E. Ostrum)

• An autonomous collective of autonomous collectives of autonomous collectives… (M. Python)