So here is the outline of the money problem as I originally proposed it. There should be some caveats before I start just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I worked for the Federal Reserve in Washington DC as a flunky for two years after a four year degree at the University of Illinois where I worked my ass off. This was back in 2008-2010. I essentially interviewed at all of the Federal Reserve banks until I found one that would hire me - similar to applying to California universities in some regard. To give you an idea of what the time was like I was interviewing at the Dallas Federal Reserve the day that Bear Stearns went bankrupt. It was like "well we have something to talk about at lunch now, damn". After two years at the Federal Reserve I then moved to New York City and looked around for every possible job I could find before going to Richmond VA and working for a year and a half before quitting in disgust. I'm a lousy fit for high finance, where people are more interested in what you look like and how confident you are then what you have to say (and I'm a total pussy if I go to a fancy looking building with people that dress up and do everything in their power to test my intelligence), and I wasn't any good at Capital One. My job was essentially to balance the budget for their mobile product and if you had to fire people to get the departments under budget then that's what happened - it wasn't ever my decision, but I just didn't like being in that kind of a job. Then, not knowing what to do, I traveled the world for five years, while living off my ability to predict the stock market. Some years I was good, some I was bad, but the risk of making predictions with my own money is nerve racking. I was a few cents short of losing $50,000 on a put I had placed on a stock at one time - I would have had to buy the underlying. Another year I lost $75,000 - which was all that I had earned the previous year. When people call finance gambling, they're not often wrong.

All of that being said, I have an interest in money in the same way that many people do - because it's one of the most powerful sociological levers in history, especially in more recent times. The proposition I make is the following. What if we wanted to know to what extent that GDP growth rate will continue into the future. And by this I mean the overall GDP growth rate of the planet. Historically GDP has grown at 3.5 percent over the last 100 years. The formula for compounded interest is FV=PV*(1+r)^(n*t), which means that the future value of a product (in real terms, so adjusted for inflation), is the present value times the interest rate and compounded by the time and the number of compoundations over that time frame (n). So if we just assume that GDP will compound at the same rate it has historically, then we are left with a dilemma - because we reach the point where we have that the real purchasing power that the world will have will double. The price of one pizza will suddenly buy two, houses will cost half as much and so on.

Examining this further we want to know how we can compute GDP in real terms world wide, which is a worthwhile question to ask. First, we have to start around 1980 or so because that's when China opened up to the world economy and it's a billion people so without that statistic what we are talking about won't be as meaningful. Second, we need to use the formula for GDP which is GDP = C + I + G + (X - M). If we're going to aggregate the total of all GDP then (X - M) drops out as an accounting identity. Then we are left with consumption, investment, and government spending. To the extent that governments lend to each other we can also drop that and then pool government spending and consumption together as "spending" so we are left with spending and investment. In other words, spending today and investment for further spending in the future.

In other words we have a collection of Present Value goods for which we consume today and Future Value Investment, for which the offsetting of consumption today is done (assuming perfect rationality), because it maximizes utility. Let's assume for the moment that we are a benevolent dictator and we are going to organize society in the absolute most ideal way to maximize present utility with the most ideal mix of current world wide consumption and current savings. Is this possible? And the first blush answer is no.

Consumption is done in a variety of ways but we can break consumption up into types, in this case based on what resources we are going to consume (because we want to avoid the exponential growth paradox stated above). You can maximize consumption by consuming more natural resources, by making already existing forms of production more efficient, or by creating new forms of consumption that offset previous ones that are substitutable for older consumption. This is the broadest and simplest categorization that breaks up all consumption into types. Clearly consuming more natural resources or making already existing forms more efficient isn't going to work - unless you can expect that technology will *always* become more efficient at an exponential rate then this isn't possible. Over time then what happens is that substitution for more intangible goods happens over time.

This can be seen since 1970 in the US - as people in many ways have become wealthier the goods that they own have been transitioned into more intangible products. People used to have two cars per family and now many are lucky to have one. Yet everyone has the equivalent of a super computer in their pocket. There are several effects of this. At some level the amount of subsitution for more intangible products will become less meaningful. Seeing a couple of plays in your lifetime may have more meaning that having access on demand to every movie ever made. Your mileage may vary. However, over the long term what will happen is that either GDP will become synthesized to the point where any synthetic GDP growth starts masking growth in shortages in necessary goods or there are outbreaks of violence.

There are a couple of wrinkles to this problem as originally stated and then I'll make some modificatinos from what I've learned since I had proposed it. First, technological growth in synthesized products tends to do strange things to the labor market. Those people who have access to non-synthesized products will be those people who are most likely to succeed in the long term, regardless of anyone that has access to synthesized products (even if society makes them necessary). What will make someone valuable in the labor market will be those people that have access to those goods that can't be automated away (at first order), and (at second order), the people who themselves have access to those goods that can't be automated away. Access to medical care from competent physicians and education from teachers requires a time value investment from other people who themselves require clean food/housing/education and so on. Accessing a computer with social media and an online library is useful and becomes cheaper over time, but in the labor market it doesn't differentiate you from someone that has managed to have access to scarcer resources which are other people.

Technological bubbles also become strange. Technology that causes synthesized goods to become cheaper (which is what most bubbles do), will end up displacing large amounts of people from the workforce - often those that are closes to the edge of not having access to non-synthesized products. A good example of this is someone that went to art school and therefore had the benefits of education, but then AI makes it so that they lose their job, and further they suffer the dead weight loss of malinvestment in education. At their peak, many of the people that are displaced by a bubble end up inflating the bubble themselves (as "fools rush in") because they have no other choice, which ends up causing a larger later crash. Over time what we should expect then - and what I have seen in my lifetime and what I believe is happening now - is that there are bubbles that are closer together that end up expanding and contracting faster until the business cycle eventually reaches stall speed. At that point society is fractured because from the individual level there is no incentive to work or invest in yourself because the social contract has been broken. I believe we are close to this.

Another magnifying problem is AI itself. Let's suppose that you had an all powerful computer that was able to calculate the time of the market collapse with exacting certitude. Then you would able to buy puts and collect the money on the crash with certainty. That makes it so that whoever has the most powerful computer and believes the above to be true can collect the most possible money on the system collapsing and then use that to buy up all available resources before war or social unrest breaks out.

There are a couple of large caveats. First, communism and other forms of society exist. However, even if everyone lives on the dole it doesn't solve the accounting identity stated above. If you look at the comic above the Blob (the good guy) most likely represents capitalism and the Juggernaut (the bad guy) communism. This may be related to the craziness in San Francisco, but you could simply give people a time limit to live and the poison them when they outlive their usefulness (which is both sad and horrifying - don't do that). The most extreme caveat, and the reason the system perpetuates itself even though it doesn't appear to work mathematically, is that there is no other way to efficiently distribute goods. A hyper intelligent AI (assuming good intentions which is a big if) might be able to do so - a utopian example of AI in this case. Not only the question of who decides on who gets what but on how anything is constructed from primary products would be impossible to determine - and this has been demonstrated by history.

This was meant - in much the way that my language is to be a motivation to be interested in philosophy itself. Since the idea of money and how it affects society has been such a big part of my life for so long, I had thought this would be a sort of zen koan to get people that hadn't considered the implications of what's not taught in an economics class. In the four years of college I went to no one said "there's a gaping hole in the logic of the system itself and no one has any idea how to fix it". You'd think that someone that worked at the Federal Reserve would have thought of this before.

I've been working on my philosophical proposition for five years and moving to San Diego so that I might talk to professors there about the paper I had written was a primary motivation (Peter Danks works on graphical models of philosophical problems). Unfortunately, that didn't work out (no one would talk to me - I'm surprisingly resigned to this already - I assume at that point people were just trying to kill people sick with plague and steal as much shit as possible). The philosophy paper that I'd written was built on the motivation of "if we understand how phenomenology works, then we can make a true artificial general intelligence on the premise that if you don't know how to solve a problem ask someone smarter than yourself". Given advances in technology I believe we'll have AGI as common as laptops in the next five years, but still may be poorer and unhappier than we are now.

A different solution to this problem is to assume (whether this is possible or not, taking the optimistic approach) that it is possible to create a utopian society as quickly as possible. What this means is moving as much capital into lowering the Gini Coefficient (a broad measure of inequality) and building out public utilities, enhancing and lowering the cost of life saving medicines (that and material science research, which is a limiting factor in much of scientific discovery, tend to be what AI are enormously good at - we may have superconducting superconductors within a few years), and other such public goods until money stops being a matter of importance. This I believe would be the "Star Trek" utopian society where people are judged by their competence or other socially meaningful indicators and lack of resources doesn't cause people harm or motivation from a position of want.

I still don't know if I have a good solution to the problem, other than to recognize that it's an old problem and incredibly difficult to solve which is why I was interested in it in the first place (and we should be teaching people to be interested in solving old and difficult problems, rather than punished for not realizing their extent). It wasn't meant to be the main discourse I was aiming at with my philosophy but an introduction to why someone should care about philosophy in the first place in the sense of "this thing for which you thought was important will not exist or be as important in your lifetime" - what does that mean for you? Many religions use the fear of death, which is something everyone goes through one way or the other. I never meant my introduction to be based on fear, but on the basis of "if you were to devote your life to doing as much good as possible or altering society in a meaningful way, is money the way to do so?" Given this, I still believe it's possible, there just needs much more creative thinking in order to how best use resources for the public good.

All that said I could use the shitbag homeless to stop throwing dimes on the ground and then having me gassed in the showers at night.