Evolution of Freedom
Part III: Positive Liberty - Chapter 28
Solar Energy
Organizing our economy from the fundamental perspective of natural science will help us create a better functioning society. By utilizing the same organizing principles as life itself, such an economy can create harmony between us and our biosphere. Natural science is already the language of biological evolution and our technological progress. In the future, it should also form the foundation of our economic and political systems.
When we create a new monetary system, one of the most profound questions is what should our money be based on? What is the fundamental value we use to trade our goods and services with?
As we know, many things of value can acquire the function of money, but some are better than others. What we are looking for is the absolute best type of value that can become the basis of a solid and sustainable monetary system. In our quest, we should rely primarily on what natural science has to teach us about the nature of our reality and combine it with the empirical understanding gleaned from history and anthropology. This is what allows us to better adapt to our environment, which is what evolutionary progress is all about.
As we study metabolic imperatives within the contexts of our political and economic system, we should notice a major impediment to human well-being. The life force that animates us comes from sunlight. But as animals, we cannot access this energy directly. Only plants capable of photosynthesis can. To access the Sun’s energy, we need to grow food and breed livestock. This requires land.
In nature, every plant and animal is self-sufficient. They procure their energy directly from their environment. If they cannot, they will become energy for a species higher up the food chain or a decomposer. The way our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived wasn’t that different as they also lived directly off the land. Since transitioning to farming, however, all land has been effectively privatized, and unless you personally own land, you have no direct legal access to the energy contained in sunlight. This means that by privatizing land ownership we have effectively also privatized the life force that keeps our species alive.
What makes this arrangement possible is a uniquely human practice that you won’t find anywhere else in nature: exchange. Exchange operates differently from the way solar energy flows in nature. Exchange entails a direct swap of two things deemed equal in value. Such swaps never happen in nature. To get to eat a rabbit and the solar energy it contains, a fox doesn’t have to offer anybody anything in return. Transactions in nature are one-sided. What makes it all work is that within the ecosystem, the flow of energy remains circular.
Since transitioning to agriculture, the pressure to specialize made humans lose both their self-sufficiency and their symbiotic relationship with nature, and forced them to trade for their basic necessities. The problem with bartering is that, for it to be successful, not only do I have to want something that you offer, but you would have to want something that I have to offer at the same time, and this rarely happens. Money solves this double coincidence of wants problem by acting as the means of exchange in every transaction.
If we don’t own agricultural or pastoral land–and most of us don’t–we use money to access the Sun’s energy. This means that to access our planet’s life force in the form of agricultural products, we need money. In our economy, money thus takes the function of the life force.
This brings us to our eleventh hypothesis:
When we create a new monetary system, one of the most profound questions is what should our money be based on? What is the fundamental value we use to trade our goods and services with?
As we know, many things of value can acquire the function of money, but some are better than others. What we are looking for is the absolute best type of value that can become the basis of a solid and sustainable monetary system. In our quest, we should rely primarily on what natural science has to teach us about the nature of our reality and combine it with the empirical understanding gleaned from history and anthropology. This is what allows us to better adapt to our environment, which is what evolutionary progress is all about.
As we study metabolic imperatives within the contexts of our political and economic system, we should notice a major impediment to human well-being. The life force that animates us comes from sunlight. But as animals, we cannot access this energy directly. Only plants capable of photosynthesis can. To access the Sun’s energy, we need to grow food and breed livestock. This requires land.
In nature, every plant and animal is self-sufficient. They procure their energy directly from their environment. If they cannot, they will become energy for a species higher up the food chain or a decomposer. The way our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived wasn’t that different as they also lived directly off the land. Since transitioning to farming, however, all land has been effectively privatized, and unless you personally own land, you have no direct legal access to the energy contained in sunlight. This means that by privatizing land ownership we have effectively also privatized the life force that keeps our species alive.
What makes this arrangement possible is a uniquely human practice that you won’t find anywhere else in nature: exchange. Exchange operates differently from the way solar energy flows in nature. Exchange entails a direct swap of two things deemed equal in value. Such swaps never happen in nature. To get to eat a rabbit and the solar energy it contains, a fox doesn’t have to offer anybody anything in return. Transactions in nature are one-sided. What makes it all work is that within the ecosystem, the flow of energy remains circular.
Since transitioning to agriculture, the pressure to specialize made humans lose both their self-sufficiency and their symbiotic relationship with nature, and forced them to trade for their basic necessities. The problem with bartering is that, for it to be successful, not only do I have to want something that you offer, but you would have to want something that I have to offer at the same time, and this rarely happens. Money solves this double coincidence of wants problem by acting as the means of exchange in every transaction.
If we don’t own agricultural or pastoral land–and most of us don’t–we use money to access the Sun’s energy. This means that to access our planet’s life force in the form of agricultural products, we need money. In our economy, money thus takes the function of the life force.
This brings us to our eleventh hypothesis:
11. Money serves the same function in our economy as sunlight does in nature. The design of our monetary system should therefore simulate the way the Sun’s energy flows through our ecosystem.
We should not seek to simulate the properties of solar energy on the surface of the Sun, but as the energy that flows through our ecosystem in the form of ATP inside living organisms. From the perspective of biological evolution, ATP serves the same function in our body as money serves in our society.
Solar energy is considered to be a “renewable energy” in the sense that the Sun will rise every day and provide us with its light and heat for millions of years to come. In the strict sense, no form of energy is renewable, of course. Eventually, the Sun will run out of hydrogen. Yet, from a human perspective, the Sun indeed appears as a renewable source of energy based on two cycles we experience: the daily cycle and the yearly cycle. These planetary rotations, one around the Earth’s axis and the other around the Sun itself, set off cyclical local events in nature that predictably repeat themselves. While the Sun emits energy continuously, the way our planet captures it makes the supply cyclical to us.
Where agricultural products and human productivity represent solar energy in its physical form, our currency should represent it in a virtual form. When we peg our currency to solar energy, we will essentially exchange physical solar energy (goods and services) for virtual solar energy (money). The purpose of the virtual solar energy is to direct the physical solar energy where it is most needed.
Generally, on one side of the exchange are the physical manifestations of energy/matter, the goods and services, and on the other is money, which is human-created information. Since money has replaced the Sun’s energy as the life force in our society, there are at least three ways our future money should simulate its properties based the following hypotheses:
Solar energy is considered to be a “renewable energy” in the sense that the Sun will rise every day and provide us with its light and heat for millions of years to come. In the strict sense, no form of energy is renewable, of course. Eventually, the Sun will run out of hydrogen. Yet, from a human perspective, the Sun indeed appears as a renewable source of energy based on two cycles we experience: the daily cycle and the yearly cycle. These planetary rotations, one around the Earth’s axis and the other around the Sun itself, set off cyclical local events in nature that predictably repeat themselves. While the Sun emits energy continuously, the way our planet captures it makes the supply cyclical to us.
Where agricultural products and human productivity represent solar energy in its physical form, our currency should represent it in a virtual form. When we peg our currency to solar energy, we will essentially exchange physical solar energy (goods and services) for virtual solar energy (money). The purpose of the virtual solar energy is to direct the physical solar energy where it is most needed.
Generally, on one side of the exchange are the physical manifestations of energy/matter, the goods and services, and on the other is money, which is human-created information. Since money has replaced the Sun’s energy as the life force in our society, there are at least three ways our future money should simulate its properties based the following hypotheses:
12. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed. We should therefore make sure that our money supply, which is what we use to allocate energy/matter, remains stable.
13. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when we transform energy from one state to another, or from one body to another, part of the energy is lost to entropy. To simulate entropy in our monetary system, we have to extract part of the money from circulation with every transaction.
14. To simulate the metabolic flow of the Sun’s energy within our ecosystem, we should take as much money out of the system at one end as we put in at the other. By balancing the universal basic income that we put in with entropic transaction fees that siphon the money out, we can keep the money supply stable.
13. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when we transform energy from one state to another, or from one body to another, part of the energy is lost to entropy. To simulate entropy in our monetary system, we have to extract part of the money from circulation with every transaction.
14. To simulate the metabolic flow of the Sun’s energy within our ecosystem, we should take as much money out of the system at one end as we put in at the other. By balancing the universal basic income that we put in with entropic transaction fees that siphon the money out, we can keep the money supply stable.
To compensate for the unequal distribution of physical sunlight and all other energy/matter, I propose that the virtual sunlight, our future currency, is shared equally with all citizens as a universal basic income following in a weekly cycle, which is ideal for economic planning.
Wherever we shine our virtual sunlight by spending our UBI, goods and services will grow. By choosing one vendor or variety over another, we are performing the selection function of cultural evolution. As a result, one business will reproduce the good or service in question and grow while another business will wither. Making these choices entails a great responsibility since we want the good providers to flourish and the bad providers to decline. Whenever we enable the bad to grow, it is our responsibility, because it was us who shone our light on it.
The place we shine this light from is where the goods and services will be consumed. Virtual solar energy helps physical solar energy flow where it is needed. It compensates for the energy/matter expended on the creation of the goods and services.
What we are designing here is entirely new. Whenever you craft something that has never been tried before, knowing what has and hasn’t worked in the past should guide our way. If we look back through history and try to identify the best monetary system from all the imperfect monetary systems that have ever been tried, a few systems stand out. Both market money and promissory notes could, in their day, provide tremendous liquidity for the marketplace at no external costs.
Market money was an informal monetary system used by traders at European marketplaces during the late Middle Ages, where reputable trader could issue their own temporary currency, which was backed by the goods and services they were selling that day. With that self-created money, the shoemaker could make purchases from the other vendors, who could then redeem the currency for shoes or trade the currency to somebody who needed shoes. As soon as the shoes were redeemed, the newly issued currency would be taken out of circulation. It was simple, fair and very practical.
In the 1700s, English businesses had a similar way of creating their own currency in the form of promissory notes. A promissory note is essentially a loan backed by the business, which promises to pay a certain amount of money plus interest (say five percent) when the note has matured. A business could pay its suppliers with a promissory note, and the supplier could cash this immediately at the bank for face value or wait for the note to mature, when they could also collect the interest.
Market money and promissory notes, which were both later made illegal, could create tremendous liquidity for their particular marketplace without any third-party costs. A defining characteristic of both forms of currency was that almost anybody could issue them, and their value was ultimately backed up by the productivity of the individual or the business that issued them.
Historical precedent strongly suggests that our currency should originate from multiple points of origin, as happens with a UBI, and be backed up by human productivity. What makes human productivity such an attractive standard for our currency is that, like gold, human productivity is finite, but unlike gold, it is also regenerative. This means that every one of us can work more hours tomorrow, yet each of us has the exact same amount of hours in a week to do so and no more. What makes human productivity possible is, of course, the Sun’s energy.
Wherever we shine our virtual sunlight by spending our UBI, goods and services will grow. By choosing one vendor or variety over another, we are performing the selection function of cultural evolution. As a result, one business will reproduce the good or service in question and grow while another business will wither. Making these choices entails a great responsibility since we want the good providers to flourish and the bad providers to decline. Whenever we enable the bad to grow, it is our responsibility, because it was us who shone our light on it.
The place we shine this light from is where the goods and services will be consumed. Virtual solar energy helps physical solar energy flow where it is needed. It compensates for the energy/matter expended on the creation of the goods and services.
What we are designing here is entirely new. Whenever you craft something that has never been tried before, knowing what has and hasn’t worked in the past should guide our way. If we look back through history and try to identify the best monetary system from all the imperfect monetary systems that have ever been tried, a few systems stand out. Both market money and promissory notes could, in their day, provide tremendous liquidity for the marketplace at no external costs.
Market money was an informal monetary system used by traders at European marketplaces during the late Middle Ages, where reputable trader could issue their own temporary currency, which was backed by the goods and services they were selling that day. With that self-created money, the shoemaker could make purchases from the other vendors, who could then redeem the currency for shoes or trade the currency to somebody who needed shoes. As soon as the shoes were redeemed, the newly issued currency would be taken out of circulation. It was simple, fair and very practical.
In the 1700s, English businesses had a similar way of creating their own currency in the form of promissory notes. A promissory note is essentially a loan backed by the business, which promises to pay a certain amount of money plus interest (say five percent) when the note has matured. A business could pay its suppliers with a promissory note, and the supplier could cash this immediately at the bank for face value or wait for the note to mature, when they could also collect the interest.
Market money and promissory notes, which were both later made illegal, could create tremendous liquidity for their particular marketplace without any third-party costs. A defining characteristic of both forms of currency was that almost anybody could issue them, and their value was ultimately backed up by the productivity of the individual or the business that issued them.
Historical precedent strongly suggests that our currency should originate from multiple points of origin, as happens with a UBI, and be backed up by human productivity. What makes human productivity such an attractive standard for our currency is that, like gold, human productivity is finite, but unlike gold, it is also regenerative. This means that every one of us can work more hours tomorrow, yet each of us has the exact same amount of hours in a week to do so and no more. What makes human productivity possible is, of course, the Sun’s energy.
