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Wagers as payment for software completion

aj replied to my note on free software economics.

(Wouldn't it be nice if there were some higher-level metadata about threads across blogs rather tha just A HREFs?)

His wager model is similar to Jim Bell's Assassination Politics. You can factor Assassination Politics into several fairly separate parts:

1. Blinded cryptographic wagers are a good way to arrange payment between n customers and an agent completing a particular task, without needing to know the other's identity.

2. (a) The US government is corrupt, and (b) an appropriate response is to assassinate various government employees, officeholders, or appointees.

You can usefully consider the wager algorithm if you disagree with the second point.

Imagine for a moment that as ordinary citizens were watching the evening news, they see an act by a government employee or officeholder that they feel violates their rights, abuses the public's trust, or misuses the powers that they feel should be limited. A person whose actions are so abusive or improper that the citizenry shouldn't have to tolerate it.

What if they could go to their computers, type in the miscreant's name, and select a dollar amount: The amount they, themselves, would be willing to pay to anyone who "predicts" that officeholder's death. That donation would be sent, encrypted and anonymously, to a central registry organization, and be totaled, with the total amount available within seconds to any interested individual. If only 0.1% of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head.

It seems like that would give TV station owners even more power than they presently have.

posted Tue 28 Oct 2003 in /issues/economics | link

aj wrote more on this, which will get a reply eventually.

posted Tue 28 Oct 2003 in /issues/economics | link

Linux and the race to the bottom

One fairly silly argument sometimes advanced against Linux is that by reducing towards zero the cost of getting a good operating system, it is somehow communist or anti-capitalist. This argument's typically put by people who think capitalism is an extremely good thing.

There certainly is a "race to the bottom" here — bottom price that is. Software features which were once very expensive can now be had at little cost, and without giving up freedoms like being able to modify the system or retaining control of your own data.

But this is a good capitalist system in action: it's *meant* to be hard for companies to make money, and particularly so if they don't continue to innovate. It's a good thing that prices keep falling, and that you can now get for negligible cost the things that used to be expensive.

Linux is just a bit of creative destruction, or destructive creation, in action.

posted Fri 17 Oct 2003 in /issues/economics | link

Past Plenty

Maciej and John have been talking about why modern people work so much, and whether they would be happier without agriculture or industry.

Why do modern societies work so much? Well, the answer is mostly darwinian. The people alive today are not the descendants of the happy, sane, or self-actualized people of a hundred years ago. You are the great-great-grandchild of somebody who managed to make their mangy, lice-ridden children survive to breed.

In other words, stable systems are not necessarily the ones that make their participants most happy.

It seems fairly well established that when English colonists landed in Australia, they were much less happy and health than the indigenous people they found there. But who won? For all their malnourishment and chronic disease, the British had firearms, rough discipline, and resistance to smallpox and measles.

Maciej looks at the overall good effects of food cultivation, and I certainly won't deny them. It's also good to think about the step-by-step system effects of one tribe from a continent of hunter-gatherers experimenting with food cultivation. I suggest that a few things will tend to happen:

• The individuals become less healthy, though having a less diverse diet and being more subject to famine or nutrient deficiency.
• They can possibly support more people per unit area, and therefore more people in a single tribe.
• Food production can become a specialist task, allowing people to become specialists in government or war.
• They are better able to accumulate food storage (grain silos, smoked fish, etc), and therefore to mount expeditions.
• Fixed captial assets (fields, stock, etc) biases the group towards fight rather than flight, and encourages military development.

I think these effects tend to give the tribe a long-term competitive advantage over its neighbours. In the long term, the technology-using tribes will conquer or convert their neighbours, even if that makes everyone less happy on average. People do not generally have the choice of: “would I rather be a serf, or a nomad?”. They have the experience of being pushed off the map or enslaved by an expanding cultivation society.

If it makes you happy to turn away from modern life and live in the bush for an hour or a week or a year then it's wonderful that you have the choice. Doubtless it is better for you, spiritually and physically, than to spend a day in an office.

My friend Robin enjoys extended outdoor expeditions. At the moment I think she is on a one-month canoe trip north of the Arctic circle. On a previous trip, in the far north-west of Australia, thousands of miles from a city, in one of the most remote regions of the world, somebody was hurt and had to wait as much as 24 hours to be flown to a world-class hospital. Surely they have the best of both worlds.

I have been reading bits of Food in History (Tannahill):

In Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, a worker might earn anything from 25p to £2 (62 cents to $5) a week. In 1840-41, 25p bought neither more not less than six four-pound loaves — just enough to feed a typical family of two adults and three children. It left nothing to pay the rent, nothing for tea, nothing for that little piece of bacon which was the poor man's substitute for meat.

A “good meal” meant something hot, filling, and quickly cooked — tea and boiled potatoes more often than not, since potatoes cost only about 5p or 12.5c, for twenty pounds. The man of the house might have a piece of pie or a sausafe from a cofee stall at midday, and at the weekend the whole family sat down to a Sunday dinner of broth, stew and pudding. It was a poverty-line diet, but a great man people lived on it — and a great many iede because of it.

Vaguely apropos to this, Stephane and I were driving through western Sydney today, around Eastern Creek. I have to say all the new tract housing is a little depressing in some way. That way is possible part snobiness, but also a wonder whether the sum of happiness is really increased by just having more and more people. I'd rather see growth focus on more-per-person, or even better-per-person, than over production.

John also talks about the fact that humans seem really unable to deal with long-term consequences, and environmental impact is probably the most serious of these. I wonder if (first-world) humans gained 300-year lifespans through technology they would start worrying about what the world would be like in a hundred years? I would like to think so, but I would not bet on it. On the other hand, changing technology makes it hard to imagine what life will be like in 50 years. One might semi-seriously gamble on, say, sunbathing now in the hope that there will be a cure for melanoma in a decade. Perhaps people will blithely burn fossil fuels, assuming that some solution will turn up.

posted Fri 11 Jul 2003 in /issues/economics | link

Bastiat's Petition

alekd reminded me of "A Petition From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting." by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850).

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation.

posted Thu 3 Jul 2003 in /issues/economics | link

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