[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Sat May 15 00:39:57 EDT 2021

Glen,
Re *Wow. That reads like good, hard science fiction. In my skim, the only
thing I missed was an adversarial effort, positioning of white, black, and
grey hatted *attacks*. There was plenty of waterfall-like structure for
assessing vulnerability. But I missed the adversarial effort. Is it in
there? If so, take pity on me and toss some clues my way.*

Methinks I understand stuff on a very shallow level and you're the deep
thinkin guy. I see the approach of the Finance 4.0 as focussing very much
on participatory as opposed to adversarial effort, so on a shallow level I
can't toss any clues to you. Instead of answering your specific question
(because I really can't), let me ramble a bit on the proposed Finance 4.0
system.

Finance 4.0 is a spinoff of the European FuturICT 2.0 project and I quote
from https://futurict2.eu/the-project-2/ :

"To manage scarce resources and support endangered people and communities,
powerful global information systems need to be built, based on big data and
artificial intelligence."

The FuturICT 2.0 project is a relatively big effort, the European Union
takes it seriously.

*Now to focus on Finance 4.0*

Two (there are more, but in my view these two represents the very basic
concepts) of the legs of Finance 4.0 are:

* to use agent based modeling (ABM) as a primary tool to understand the
economy and to design tools to manage it, because the the economy is
considered to be a complex system where top-down analytical tools do not
work well

* to consider the human participants not as Homo Economicus as per
conventional economic analyses but as  Homo Socialis.

I'll talk very briefly about each of these.

*Using ABM to understand and design tools for a complex system*
Dirk Helbing has done very successful projects on traffic systems using the
ABM to understand the dynamics of the complex system and then to use these
insights to design efficient control systems for it.. From this he
genaralises on complex systems (with good explanations) as follows:
Two approaches to control a system are top down, central control system,
like the government's control of money ánd bottom up control like in a
swarm of ants.
In traffic systems he found the following:
A selfish bottom up control system outperforms the top down central but
only up to a point. If the system becomes very busy and moves closer to its
saturation point, the selfish bottom up approach breaks down and the top
down  system functions better.

But, if you have a local bottom up approach with local decentralized
optimization considering local neighbors, it does not break down and
outperforms the top down central control system over the whole spectrum.

He argues that there are universal complexity forces at play and the
complex economy will behave in a similar way. He gives good explanations
(including the results of some ABM models) for this argument.

*Second leg is to consider the human participant in the economy as  Homo
Socialis*
Conventional economic theory is based on considering the human participants
as selfish agents Homo Economicus where each wishes to maximise his own
benefits. Helbing argues that humans act more as Homo Socialis, each not
only acting to maximise his own interest, but also considering others.
Again he explains this approach in the document.

A top down approach will work better as a financial control system over the
whole spectrum (like we have now) if humans act like Homo Economicus.

But a bottom up approach could be engineered that outperforms the top down
control system, provided humans act like Homo Socialis. He goes into some
details defending this assumption and of this design of the bottom up
control system with local optimization considering local neighbors. (It's a
complicated system, sort of like an expanded Bitcoin incorporating other
factors that humans value like planting trees or caring for children. )

Just a side-note, he considers Bitcoin to be a bottom up financial control
system designed for where the participants are Homo Economicus. Although he
does not say it explicitly he implies Bitcoin will not outperform the
current central government's financial control system. (Note that I'm
giving his views and it does not necessarily represents my own)

In the words of the father of capitalism Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759)
"How ever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles
in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and renders
their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it"

On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 16:51, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wow. That reads like good, hard science fiction. In my skim, the only
> thing I missed was an adversarial effort, positioning of white, black, and
> grey hatted *attacks*. There was plenty of waterfall-like structure for
> assessing vulnerability. But I missed the adversarial effort. Is it in
> there? If so, take pity on me and toss some clues my way.
>
>
> On 5/13/21 11:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> > Finance 4.0—Towards a Socio-Ecological Finance System
> >
> > A Participatory Framework to Promote Sustainability
> >
> > Download link:
> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71400-0.pdf <
> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71400-0.pdf>
> >
>
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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