On Sat, 23 Sep 2017, Owen Jacobson wrote: > As for the gerontocracy argument: Money is an inherently gerontocratic > system. > It abstracts value from labor in a way that allows arbitrary allocation.
Ok, I've been mulling this over for the past week or so, and some broad thoughts. I think we should step away from thinking of this in terms of Economies and think of it in terms of Game Design. On the supply side, what we have is classic exponential asset growth. Base assets let you get things which then let your assets grow faster (I'm particularly thinking of the recent Agoraculture here). This can be very fun - the fun part of the grind games is when your properties start *really* producing. But the problem is that it leads to early determination of winners versus losers, and if the game lasts too long, it's a frustrating slog for the losers. In a game with no fixed end (e.g. real life), this is the gerontocracy. It's greatly exacerbated by the fact that distribution of valuable assets is via Auction. Auctions are inherently exponential (a slight lead in your base asset leads to you winning a big valuable asset). Moreover, right now, the auction properties are far too rare, so you have to compete directly with the gerontocracy to buy in. My main reason to hoard right now is to have any chance in an auction. I think the solution is some minimum income, and drastically reducing the buy-in difficulties for auctions (I'd do that through increased land). On the spending side: quite frankly, we don't have enough diversity of things that actually buy game advantage to be worth spending on. We need to add different pathways to accumulation and specialization. There's a few ways to organize adding things to buy. I personally would add permanent political buy-in based on our old Oligarchic system, and simultaneously re-form the Speaker position as we talked about last week. This would be entirely separate from land. (there are other things we could invent to buy, this is one obvious addition). I'd also think about specialized roles (e.g. only allowing Farmers to own land, and you can't easily change whether you're a farmer or not). The total portfolio of things to buy should have a unified game balance and different pathways to riches/success, and not just be a grab bag of random investment instruments (e.g. stamps, bonds, whatever).
