Tetrabucks! Tetrabucks! Tetrabucks!

[Layman Pascal]

Hi. I'm the Layman Pascal. You might remember me from such exciting concepts as: the Metaphysics of Adjacency, integralist vs. integralite, the 2nd Tier questionnaire and the 5 Pillars of Planetary Wisdom-Civilization. Today I would like to introduce you to my latest innovation -- TETRABUCKS!

A tetrabuck is a possible form of integral currency which combines value from all four quadrants. That means that 25% of every dollar and every cent comes from each of the following (a) trade value (b) social approval (c) ecological utility (d) human well-being. Ordinary "orange level" money only reflects the first of these four dimensions of value. Consequently it has no choice but to function in an imbalanced and reductionistic manner. And people have to waste a lot of their time working desperately to protect valuable things which are not represent by dollars. But before we get further into the concept of non-reductionistic currency, let's quickly remind ourselves what money means...

How many chickens is a cow? Tough question. If you and I wish to trade things we need to poetically "feel out" a negotiation which represents our best guess. After a while we probably slip into some regular habits -- like five chickens per cow. Then we can start to do some interesting things. For example, we can carve a large stone disk with a hole in the center. We can inscribe the runes 5chickens-cow on it. Now we have money. Every cluster of tribal humanoids devises their own scheme to create a vibrant cacophony of local "quantities" for trading. Then the priests, bureaucrats and militias serving the city-state oligarchs will have to impose a creative standardization. Gold or some other venerably flexible material will be consecrated by the totalitarian institution which officially controls the nation-folk. A sacred "royal accountant" is put in charge of making tables of correspondences of numbers which are (ostensibly) backed up by the gold in the treasury vaults. Inspired by the new power of arbitrary currency transactions a new caste of modern, metropolitan Financialists appears. They create a diverse web of privately controlled institutions who are authorized to obey the rules which govern the "inventing of money numbers". These "banks" or "loaning hubs" move beyond gold and start using pledge-papers which promise flows of effort and energy. Such pledge-paper dollars have enormous potential to incorporate knowledge of the world and initiate building projects. The idealized trade of arbitrary pledge-dollars could act as an unseen hand which regulates society according to a higher intelligence. Trade itself could spur social progress. Unfortunately this system does not quite work in practice. Its idealized form never arrives. Its very structures inevitably produce a narrowing of wealth into the hands of pledge-dollar traders, mass environmental devastation and chaotic effects on human well-being. The failure of pledge-dollar markets, their ruthless self-preservation attempts, and their staggering blindness to their own systemic errors is called: capitalism. It provokes post-capitalistic attempts to create better and smarter markets -- attempts variously called socialism, communism, anarchism, p2p economics, etc. Such trials have sought to promote values which are excluded by the narrow connection between economic quantification and mere trade value. Thus they have sought to foil reductionistic economies with decommodifications, quality-not-quanity, and "beyond growth" notions. Yet in practice these attempts have proven to be overly idealistic, hard to set up, strongly opposed and vulnerable to every kind of human corruption. The ethical force of post-capitalism has not yet been equaled by the emergence of post-capitalistic structures. In particular the question remains: where should pluralistic and trans-pluralistic economies get their "numbers" from? What quantification engines should be employed and what logic should they use?

New currencies may breed like bit-coins in digital hives but what sort of information about the world is being enfolded into these digits? As integralites we must be very concerned to make sure that new currencies try to encoded value in UR. LR, LL and UL domains. If this could be done then anyone making money would be benefiting the quality of human and ecological life. And all those who are idealistically concerned would have an incentive to engage more dynamically in economic markets.

Basically we need the "numbers" which are  being entered into the economy to indicate four simultaneous values: human well-being (UL), social approval (LL), trade value (LR) and the ecological worth of organisms and resources (UR). At the moment we attempt notoriously to gauge the economy according to GDP. That is a huge problem because it does not distinguish between benevolent and malevolent forms of trade. GDP goes up when resources are squandered, when objects become trash, when crises occur and when speculators decrease the relative worth of actual resources. GDP means that we are rewarding ourselves for doing those things. A few alternatives exist. Famously there is a "Happy Planet Index" which evaluates human happiness relative to carbon footprint. That is a great start because it involves personal and ecological value. But it has some real problems. Amish people and South Sea Islanders score the highest on this economic chart. That's nice but "low carbon footprint" also means less creative effect upon the world. These groups are not inventing the internet, going to the moon or curing AIDS. And there is always a risk that religious and racial groups with overestimate their own contentment as a show of fidelity to their group. Clearly we need something more sophisticated. Let's look at each quadrant:

UPPER RIGHT. What is a tree worth? Organisms do not currently get numbers. That seems somehow appropriate and also we think it would be pretty hard to give them numbers. But if a tree has no monetary value then cutting it down and selling the lumber for 5000 credits is a clear profit. But what if the living tree (a lifetime of oxygen production, carbon sequestration, soil integrity, etc.) was actually worth 10,000 credits? Then selling the lumber would be a loss of 5000! No greedy person would cut that tree down without a very good reason.

Where to start? Some "ecological economists" have already started giving a market value to the existing environmental resources of our planet. Every organism is a percentage of the overall value of the ecosystem.

UPPER LEFT. A sleep-deprived, angry, malnourished person lowers the average inner well-being of humanity. But that does not change the $50 in my pocket. Maybe it should. What if it did? What if the average bio-psychological wellness of "a human" -- more abundant states and feelings -- actually effected the value of money? However imperfectly this process might be to start... any start will be an improvement. Under such a system, any "making of money" is correlated directly to an experiential improvement of human feeling.

Where to start? This will necessarily involve some subjective reporting and some neuro-biological data. Body chemistry and brain waves are a good place to start. They are objectively quantifiable and systems like "neurofeedback" and "brain training" already specialize in digitally quantified connections between brainwaves and subjective states.

LOWER LEFT. Is trade value the same as social approval? No. Recent studies show that unpopular companies are not punished in the capitalist marketplace. There is no functional feedback. And having a legion of exuberant Twitter followers does not necessary gain you any cash. Artists, thinkers and entertainers suffering from free digital access to their content would be empowered and liberated if their "approval" were already a form of monetary wealth.

Where to start? Google. Youtube. Facebook. Likes and links. Google's rise to power was based on their notion that "links" are a form of recommendation. Combine this with "likes" and you find that today's largest companies are already banking on the quantification of social popularity for their own benefit. This could be extended to become a general part of the economy built implicitly into the very numbers of our money.

LOWER RIGHT. This is the value established by potential trades. It is already what our economy runs upon.

Imagine that each of these contributes something like 25% of the value of any amount of money. It is complex. It will be work. It will have problems. But our current system has constant problems AND massive proven flaws AND does not take the four quadrants of value into consideration. It is hard to imagine social progress as long as we are running around trying to exploit or rebalance the fact that trade-value is not necessarily linked to social approval, human well-being and ecological utility. And there is no idealistic form of future economy which can operate as long as it does not provide a mechanism for self-serving sociopaths to make things better for everyone. Orange meme is not going away. Red meme is not going away. Immoral, non-empathic psychopaths are not going away. Our only hope is to devise a system in which their desires have good effects for everyone else... and in which the best, brightest and most sensitive people feel that the world market is really something they want to get involved.

So I give you (in admittedly an incomplete form) THE TETRABUCK!

TETRABUCKS 2.0

The value of a dollar is constantly changing. Terms like “inflation” and “currency trading” remind us that numbers in our bank accounts do not have an absolute worth -- but rather they indicate our temporary share of a general economy that is always in flux. While this was true of paper money and even of gold coins, it becomes especially obvious with digital currency. International electronic systems can provide us with real-time updates about the shifting conditions that determine how much our numbers are worth... and where they are coming from.

Many of us long for an old-fashioned sense that the dollars in our pocket are firm and reliable but we will have to get this sense of confidence from somewhere else. Treating money like an “object” makes us easy to manipulate by those people who have their sharp eyes upon the flux. And it also leads us to a selfish view which ignores the ways in which our wealth is constantly dependent upon general circumstances.

Our social credits are abstract units which are stored in various accounts. They may be  bank accounts, savings bonds, gift cards, lines of credit or a $10 bill. Each of these is simply our current share of the total possible credits in the system.

How is are these numbers determined? They are currently determined by trade agreements. Your salary is a trade agreement -- numbers for service. The price of a hamburger depends upon trade agreements... or “what the market will bear”. It has been asserted by ideological capitalists that this is a nearly perfect system. They claim is that the number of credits people are willing to promise to exchange for anything IS a number which already includes all human concerns within it. However there is a constantly slew of studies indicating that in most cases this does not really happen. The idealized market place does not exist. Our world is filled with people complaining that human, ecological and social values are not adequately represented by the relative “wealth status” which is the output of the Economy.

From an integral POV we would say that where wealth (w) simply equals promised exchange value (xv) there is a reductionistic “flatland economy”.

Integral Theory does not invent the values which it describes. Quadrants, levels and lines are  being continually asserted by all sorts of people from every angle. Integralism consists of the attempt to stabilize these existing, interactive forms of value within the basic system map. That is the innoculation against reductionism. Therefore it should be apparent that the basic integrative move in economics is likewise attempt a conscious stabilization of the basic complementary value-spheres within the basic representational unit of the economy... the currency.

An all-quadrant currency is the simplest kind of integrative economic seed. This is what I call “tetrabucks”. It means that we define the amount and worth of the numbers as as relative share of FOUR interlinked economic value-spheres: exchange, ecology, human feeling & social approval. W = xv+ev+hv +sv.

xv is simply determined using our current market mechanisms. We hope to improve these mechanisms, eliminate parasite distortions, etc. but “tetrabucks” can be implemented prior to the success of such endeavors.

ev is a measure of the total functional utility of bio-material resources which make up the biosphere. The purchasing power of our credits must be tied to the relative abundance of life-positive environment conditions. And the simplest way to start doing this is to  begin the mandatory inclusion of the pre-processed value of ecological resources within basic economic calculation. Within the calculations which determine the value of one’s money itself.

hv must be an objective measure of human inner well-being. The experience of “inner richness” requires at least a token representation within the real economy. This can be done initially by resort to our current best notion of the body chemistry and neuro-electronic patterns associated with “flourishing”. But in order to make in generally benevolent this number must be derived as the average well-being of all those who are participating in providing their subjective condition.

sv is a degree of interpersonal edification. It is a combination of at least the “how much” and “how intensely” of standard social indicators of affinity/popularity AND some equivalent measure of quantity and intensity as a measure of informed interest in the quality, suggestiveness and structural coherence  of any person, product or service. Again, the benevolent switch to four-value currency does not have to wait until the many problems of fairly evaluating social approval are taken into account. They may actually be more quickly addressed once they become serious economic players.

It should also be noted, as common sense indicates, that the “owner” of a product or service is legally entitled to the credits which correspond to the popularity of their creations. Thus a miserable author of a beloved classic has more social wealth (and therefore more REAL wealth) than his personality would suggest. And conversely, a popularly used product which everyone finds off-putting or reprehensible should suffer direct negative feedback without resort to hypothetical future “market mechanisms”

Our goal must be threefold:

1. Seed and promote the idea of a minimally all-quadrant economy

2. Experimentally implement versions of the idea

3. Improve and expand the adequacy of these versions.

[Balder]

The focus on intangibles (as new tangibles) in the following blog edges closes to the spirit of your tetrabucks idea (though doesn't seem to fold as much complexity in):  The NWO in Block Chain Protocol

[Layman Pascal]

Yes, I think "bitcoin" and its fellows are a strong part of the Green revolution in economics. The logic of electronic currency differs from the Orange logic of paper currency and begins to see that it can enfold various new concerns within the very structure of the tool. However in order to become a truly Green currency it would have to be arranged such that its production of numbers enfolds the basic Green complaints about the orange economy -- specifically its failure to grasp interiority and ecology. Yet only an integral stabilization of the primary value fields could suffice to satisfy these Green needs. Therefore an integral currency (any type of TETRABUCKS) has to specify that these innovations in the production of the currency do not merely elude conventional restraints on trade but implicitly enfold quantified versions of the fundamental epistemological domains.

[Balder]

Pascalakirti, I think you might find this interesting: Integral Accounting.  It seems somewhat similar to what I was suggesting above with the notion of tetra-accounting, tetra-books, or tetra-valuation.  I learned about it today from a friend, who says he uses this approach in his own professional endeavors.