The pro-social marketplace creates the cooperative logic of the multicellular society. It is essentially a giant sports league in which sports teams, or cells, compete in their ability to create well-being within the planetary boundaries. The pro-social marketplace is built on two new mechanisms: the workshare, which induces cooperation within the cells; and the machine-readable reputation system, which induces cooperation within the marketplace as a whole.

In evolutionary terms, the pro-social marketplace employs between-group selection, where the unit of selection is the cell and the criterion of selection is the reputation of the cell.

But as far as we have come, the design of the pro-social marketplace is only halfway done. We have thus far shown how we employ the powerful evolutionary algorithm of variation, selection and reproduction to our advantage in our quest to maximize human well-being. But what is still missing is a genuinely free and fair marketplace, where these cells can compete on an even playing field.

Despite being constantly told that our economic system is a free market economy, it is actually far from being free. What freedom and fairness require is an even playing field, where the rules are exactly the same for everybody. Only then can it select for the criteria we want it to select for and financially reward the behavior we want to reproduce. Without this feature, the incentive system we have just designed cannot and will not work properly.

As soon as you create a two-tiered system in which different rules apply to different people, competition ceases to be competition and becomes a system of domination. Injustice and partiality of any kind impose an immediate cost on the community. As soon as you allow anybody to put a thumb on the scale, inefficiencies abound. Laws that used to be simple are obscured by loopholes and special provisions. True merit is ignored, and worst of all, losers are crowned winners.

The need for justice, equality and fairness is a built-in feature of not just humans but most mammals. Having evolved within small tribes over millions of years, the way to ensure one’s own survival within a group was to develop a finely tuned sense of fairness. When humans detect injustice, inequality or unfair treatment, their social and psychological well-being is shattered and the harmony of their community fractured.

The individuals being wronged might not be in a position to address that injustice head on, but the seeds of discord have been sown. When justice is not restored, it will turn into resentment, hate and eventually aggression. This, if anything, will lead to the destruction of human well-being.

This is why a fundamental requirement of the pro-social marketplace is impartiality and genuine equality of opportunity. Impartiality is the foundation for equality, fairness and justice. Only when justice is blind, that is to say impartial, is it justice. Impartiality is effective, it is economical and it is optimum. As the laws of nature are all perfectly impartial, why shouldn’t human society strive for the same?

A glaring blind spot of our current market economy is the way our means of exchange–money–skews the playing field to the disadvantage of most of the players. While we often talk about the market as a place where we exchange goods and services, it is actually money that serves as the counterpart to every transaction. This means that what we choose to use as money, and how and for whom it is created, has an enormous impact on every transaction.

It is also important to remember that money is not just our means of exchange–it is simultaneously a store of value. This means that a great part of our well-being is locked behind money. Money, or the lack thereof, shapes the true dimensions of our liberty. The absence of money is like a pair of invisible handcuffs that restrict our movement–a prison nobody but us can see. The absence of money means dwindling options and hard choices, doors closing and denied access.

Simply put: the absence of money means the absence of liberty. Our positive liberty is correlated with money to such an extent that we could claim that money in itself is a form of positive liberty.

The inherent problems of our current monetary system deserve a whole book of their own, but as our mission is not to explore problems but to find solutions, in the next part of the book we focus our energies on designing the best possible monetary system.

Since money is merely information that banks create from thin air, the benefits of money creation should be shared equally between all citizens. This is best accomplished by issuing all money in the form of a universal basic income, or UBI.

Now, UBI is an old idea and various programs have been proposed over the decades. None of them, however, meet all of our criteria. As our goal is to maximize liberty and the well-being it creates, how we design our money and the markets it operates in become key levers in accomplishing this objective. We dedicate the third part of this book to this design process.