How We Plan to Improve the Stock of World Capital

Michael Burnand’s laudable YouTube channel Economics Explained recently posted a Fukuyama-style essay on the inevitability of capitalism. Here he invokes the fundamental logic of economics: Humans have unlimited desires but finite resources: How then, in aggregate, do they decide what to produce and how to produce it?

Capitalism decides the question by most rewarding those who, in one way or another, make the largest or most significant addition to the finite stock of resources. The mechanism of reward is the market, the preferences adhered to and choices made by freely-acting humans. On the basis of the preferences of those with self-determined or self-molded desires, many of which are instinctively endowed, and including the desires of the capitalist, capitalism answers the basic economic question.

Markets exist to distribute economic product, and under capitalism the most important economic product is privately owned capital itself. Capital generally is material which increases or improves the production of other material. An automatic, society-wide distribution of capital occurs when owners of at least a little capital, call them consumers, are afforded access to a share of this other material. Privately held but exchangeable capital incentivizes not only free actors who desire certain things to acquire some of these things for themselves, but free actors who want to to produce innovative transformations of capital. Most tellingly, a market which can be monopolized by a private producer will inevitably transfer significant capital to that producer, but only if that transfer is part of a net increase the society’s reserve of capital.

Improved capital is the crucial idea. A better mousetrap increases the wealth of everybody, of the inventor and of the households, say the farmers, who use it. It even increases the wealth of people who never encounter mice, say people on Mars, because those people will have arrived at their extraterrestrial position thanks to the underlying wealth of the mouse-infested mother society.

We (Alessandra and Carl) expect to attract investment to an improved form of capital, a form which satisfies the desires, because they are universal and instinctive, apparently intrinsic to the cosmos itself. Human beings spontaneously express these desires more or less well, but they do so always and everywhere: “In every living plant or animal cell, in every living organism—material or spiritual—there is an insatiable craving for the attainment of ever-increasing perfection” (Urantia Book, 65: 6.2).

We (A & C) have identified what appears to be the correct and verifiable description of conversation, and the definition says perfect conversations are materially possible. In this way, both the desire for and the ongoing attainment of human perfection can be multiplied and distributed on an economic basis.

Our idea therefore is both conceptually tractable and operationally capitalist. We expect to develop access to the stock of capital intrinsic to human existence itself, capital already in place in the cosmos, to hold on to some of this wealth for ourselves and selected others, and to make use of existing and new methods, AGI for example, which can distribute the new increment equitably.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.

Capablanca.