Financing utopia

Worker-owned institutions

• Ryan Hayes, Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy’s Exploitation.

• C&C fairbnb a co-operative AirBnB.

• Chris Dillow on worker-owned firms

• David Ellerman’s worker-owned firms linkdump

• Platform cooperativism

  …the emergence of worker-owned apps, where they own and run the market­place themselves. It’s a trend that could save the gig economy from itself.

• The Mystery of the Kibbutz. Abramitzky (2018) is summarized in Grok in Fullness, based on an econtalk. Interesting ideas about what works and doesn’t work in private socialist communes like kibbutzim. (FWIW it sounds like the kibbutzim are remarkably effective given how dated their mechanism design is.)

• Also GrokInFullness: Why Worker Ownership of the Firm Is (Usually) a Bad Idea, which makes some good arguments about (certain kinds of) worker ownership being bad.

• CommunityWealth.org has a particular agenda (pro worker-autonomy); Various fun reading lists there with a given slant; for example, on co-operatives. They run layperson’s blog about such things.

• Interesting illustration of the way things differ depending on who owns whom: the wobblies write about worker exploitation at consumer-owned cooperatives.

• Brett Heinz How To Build Socialist Institutions

  Because of its Cold War connotations, most Americans think of socialism solely as inefficient and bureaucratic public ownership through a powerful central government. But actual public ownership need not be either centralized or wasteful.

• Bob’s Red Mill is employee-owned

Georgism

Well, this is a thing, apparently: r/Georgism

Georgism (otherwise known as geoism) is an economic philosophy holding that the economic value derived from land, including natural resources and natural opportunities, should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people own the value that they create themselves.

Most Georgists support:

• A broad-based land value taxation scheme, either to mostly or entirely replace existing harmful taxes on income, consumption, and corporations.
• The social redistribution of this revenue either directly, through a Citizens' Dividend, or indirectly, through government programs, to citizens.
• Some (but not all) forms of market intervention by the state.
• The abolition of tariffs, quotas, patents, and other barriers to trade and commerce.

The Georgist paradigm crosses the left-right political divide. This means that there are statist, anarchist, progressive, and conservative Georgists.

so I suppose this impinges upon intellectual property as well as real estate pollution.

Other financey things

Indie VC (now defunct)

We’ve worked with the team at Cooley to create an investment instrument that has elements of both debt and equity. Debt in that we will not be purchasing equity initially, but, unlike debt, there is no maturity date, no collateralization of assets and no recourse if it’s never paid back. The equity element will only become a factor if the participating company chooses to raise a round of financing or sell out to an acquiring company. We don’t have a clever acronym or name for this instrument yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something great.

This instrument gives us a lot more flexibility to work with different types of companies than the Delaware C-Corps most commonly funded by VCs. It also facilitates the two elements of the indie.vc terms that were most important to us and to founders: cash distributions and contingent equity conversion.

equitise: Equity crowdfunding for private companies in Australia/NZ. I kind of like that this exists but also… why would you rationally take on the higher risk of non-listed firms? There are other operators locally in IPOs at least.

Lend for Good:

A platform through which the crowd can lend money to growing businesses that are delivering impact. […]

• Impact SMEs post deals for the capital they need to the crowd.

• Lenders in the crowd choose the deals they support because of the business, the terms and the impact.

• Borrowers chase their business and impact goals, and repay their lenders an agreed interest rate after an agreed time frame.

Blockchain precarity

Taylor Pearson, Blockchain man mashes up utopian freelance precarious market-ism with tech trends, but shies short of calling it a manifesto because it is notionally about how people will talk about our micropayment future, not what will actually happen.

The Balkanization that began in the late 20th century with the fracturing of post-colonial Africa and post-USSR Eastern Europe will continue through the 21st century. The city-state will become the organizing unit of global society.

Much like the Catholic Church today, Nation-States will continue to play a meaningful, but secondary role. […]

Instead of a paycheck, The Blockchain Man’s income will be a large number of micropayments from past projects. The tokens from different projects will appreciate or depreciate based on the success of the project (and perhaps pay dividends). […]

Where the Organization Man’s world was defined by The Organization, The Blockchain Man’s world will be defined by markets.

Even something as simple as commuting will be market driven.

What happens when you mash blockchains, Uber and Self-driving cars together? The self-owning car.

A car that pays for its lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. It is a corporation. The car exists as an autonomous financial entity, potentially with no human ownership.

References