An Open Letter to Bret Weinstein
Hi Bret,
i'm wrestling with similar ideas to yourself and others of IDW ilk. i'm hoping to further my own understanding, be either validated in my potential insights or corrected, influence your thought a bit assuming i have something to say which you have not yet considered, and have my thinking influenced by you.
In your talk The Personal Responsibility Vortex you say that the central flaw in our global system is the positive feedback loop of wealth-generating power to influence regulation-generating wealth-unbounded by a negative feedback force. i am convinced that that is a serious flaw, but i'm not certain it is the central flaw or perhaps that it is the only central flaw. According to this article in the Bank of England quarterly published 2014:
"Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority — 97% of the amount currently in circulation.(6) And in the modern economy, those bank deposits are mostly created by commercial banks themselves."
That is to say that it is loaned into existence, meaning that the majority of dollars (or digits) floating around are literally created from a promise to pay back more of them. How that ties in with the positive feedback loop you mentioned i don't quite know, except that banks themselves are corporations influencing regulation through lobbies. But i think there is something more fundamental there.
You talk about the evolution of strategies in the market place. Isn't that particular way of generating useable dollars encoding a strategy? i tend to think of that in terms of the fact that human beings are conditionable and thus the systems we find ourselves within tend to dictate to us certain "wrongs" and "rights" since we are rewarded for doing things one way given a system, and punished for doing things differently within that system. Systems encode an "ethics" in their image. To use your parlance i have a few questions about that: does loaning 97% of usable dollars into existence at interest "degrade what belongs to the rest of us", is interest-bearing-debt based currency (IDBC) a "positive feed back loop unbounded by a negative feedback force", what are the "incentive structures" of an IDBC and how does it "structure markets", and does an IDBC cause businesses to evolve in the direction of ruthlessness?
Seems to me that an IDBC is encoding an absolute need for growth at a fundamental level through the mechanism of interest, beyond the fact, which you've stated elsewhere, that
"growth is what winning feels like in evolutionary terms"
and i can see no reason that it must be encoded there. That is, since there is always more debt than dollars to pay it, which is held by actors in markets, then previously unmonetized domains in the world must be monetized, but through no other mechanism than interest-bearing-debt itself. That fact of money being loaned into existence at interest makes me ask: If money can literally be created from a promise to pay back more of it, can't it in fact be created from almost anything? For example, regenerating degraded landscapes, being a provider of basic human needs like in Maslow's hierarchy, doing interesting and potentially useful scientific research. Can't money with which to do useful things be created from any number of human values, or a group of them (so as to avoid a utopian project) besides the promise to pay back more of it? To reverse that last question, isn't the creation of money almost solely through the promise to pay back more of it in fact itself a utopian project? What am i missing?
i've Written a few rough things here and here on this topic. If you ever have time i'd very much love to hear your critiques and just discuss this with you.
My best and most warmly,
The Million Things