Roger Hicks wrote: >So, does the Economy proto-proposal do an adequate job of creating and >tapping into scarce commodities?
The only scarce commodity involved is relative clout in collective decisions: voting ability on proposals, and support/objection for dependent actions. The former already has an economy around it, with VCs and mutable VLOP. The latter is a democratic mechanism that I think it is dangerous to mess with. (I also think it's dangerous to make AI>=2 proposals undemocratic.) As for the Proposer's Certificate, there is no naturally scarce commodity there, so restricting the ability to propose is just obnoxious. In addition to the principle of democracy, it is wise to keep the game's most basic processes independent of the currency aspects of the game. Historically, when there is a crisis (typically due to discovery of a long-standing error in recordkeeping), currency holdings are the thing we're least likely to be able to work out. We need to be able to get from a largely-unknown game state to a known game state without doing anything that depends on spending currency. High-AI proposals and actions Without Objection are among the usual tools of crisis recovery, so don't mess with them. The internal mechanisms of the economy (digits, farming, equations, and the licenses controlling them) might well make an interesting subgame. I suggest you plug it all into the existing VC and VLOP system, but not into anything else. However, we recently rejected a proposal for a more complex economy (Agoran Chromodynamics). Your AI is lower, but you should think about what level of complexity would work with the present number of players (which is historically low, if one examines only the active natural persons). Also think about how much recordkeeping your proposal requires. Your proposal will in general be more attractive if it can get its desired internal complexity with less officer work. > That problem was one of the first to come >to mind when I set out to devise a currency/economy, and I think I came up >with a solution that will give currency meaning, use, and a reason to be >exchanged. I think there's a basic problem with making capitalist economies in nomics, and your sentence there suggests what the underlying issue might be: you're doing it the wrong way round. You've set out to construct a capitalist economy, and you're working to find some resource to apply it to. In real life the resources come first, and the economy follows. In the physical world, of scarce physical objects, capitalism is a pretty natural way to model and control resource usage, so that's the kind of economy that occurs. Nomics don't have those sorts of resources, on the whole, which is why capitalism doesn't arise naturally. There are other kinds of economy that better match the way nomic resources work, and they do arise naturally (look up "gift economy"). Just as communism has never been made to work in a real state, despite fervent legislative fiat, you can't impose capitalism on a nomic by fiat and have it work. -zefram
