In a deviation from the typical subject matter on this blog, I’d like to discuss a philosophical matter of importance to me. It is the notion of a universal set of rules that unify all of academia. This discussion will be very short considering its scope, because that’s the way I think it should be; the connections I make should speak for themselves without over explanation.

First, a confession: before I narrowed my area of study to business, I was fascinated with the idea of a “theory of everything” (TOE), and not just a TOE unifying gravity with the weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces, but a TOE that unifies all disciplines, from the natural sciences to the humanities and beyond.

That was when I came to favor the IPO model as a substantial archetype for every system in the universe. This seldom referenced little idea is actually quite elegant. It defines a system as having input, a processor, output, and sometimes physical storge is mentioned as a 4th component.

Example 1: A squirrel detects a nut and consumes it:

input = Molecules emanating from the nut reach the squirrel’s nose, an organ refined by natural selection to input trace amounts of nutricious stray molecules for processing.

processor = Nerves analyze the shape and variety of the molecules, and activate neurons in the brain. A rush of dopamine prioritizes the pursuit of the nut and triggers a cocktail of instinctual and learned reactions (the mix of this cocktail varies depending on the species).

output = The squirrel moves, beginning a calculated search for the source of the smell.

input = The nut comes into sight.

processor = A huge shot of dopamine surges to the brain which coordinates the visual input of the nut with muscles on the squirrel’s body.

output = The squirrel moves directly towards it.

input = The nut physically enters the squirrel’s body.

processor = The squirrel’s digestive system physically processes the nut.

output = Some of the resources from the nut will be stored for energy later, and some will be physical output in the form of fecal matter.

Example 2: A company under normal operation (discussed here in more detail and relation to proprietism)

input = sales revenue, money from customers

processor = allocation of money by the finance department or top managers to raw materials, budgets, wages and salaries, equipment, interest, or savings

output = money out to vendors

input = raw materials, equipment (those two are traditionally called “capital”), and labor, back from the vendors in exchange for the money

processor = the combination of the input materials into the manufacture of the actual product, with excess saved as inventory

output = the end-product, which could be a good or service, to the customer

input = money back from the customers in exchange of the product

Example 3: Water that comes into contact with chlorine gas (sticking to what I know)

input = chlorine gas (Cl2)

processor = the physical properties of the water (H2O) are the processor, and 1 hydrogen, 1 oxygen and 1 chlorine are gained/retained as a result of this interaction, (typically with chemicals we call it a “reaction”) effectively turning the water in hypochlorus acid (HOCl)

output = 1 hydrogen and 1 chlorine, the output is hydrochloric acid (HCl)

Admittedly there is a difference with the 3rd example of a chemical reaction in that “new” state of the system (H2O) has been so physically altered by the reaction, that it is difficult to even recognize it as the same system, as it is now HOCl. The reason for this stark contrast is that the storage and processor are more easily seperable in the first two examples: a squirrel’s brain and digestive system are clearly processors, while a squirrel’s fat deposits are clearly storage. Similarly, top management at a company is clearly the processor, seperate from the physical company consisting of land, buildings, furniture, people, raw materials, and equipment. A particle or chemical reaction blurs this distinction because the physical properties of these types of systems are themselves the processors, and the interaction left the system physically altered. Upon interacting with chlorine, the water molecule lost some atoms and gained others, and became hypochlorus acid.

Technically, the company and the squirrel were physically altered by the interactions they had as well, just on a less devastating scale. The company learns and changes, if even only slightly, after every business interaction (typically in business we call an interaction a “transaction”) it has. The squirrel too was chemically different after consuming the nut, perhaps her brain even changed to remember the spot where the nut was found for future reference.

The distinction between the first two examples and the third seems even less severe if we introduced a fourth example of an extremely simple life form like a worm detecting a food source. Rather than getting a dopamine rush like the squirrel, the detection of food physically triggers a complex chemical process within the worm, causing its body to physically contract and writhe towards the food. In this example, the worm’s physical layout is a complex orchestra of physical and chemical reactions, so once again, the processor and the system itself are one in the same. We may, in an effort to relate to simple life forms, personify them by saying things like “look, it wants the food,” but no emotions such as desire are actually present. The simple organism is merely a complicated arrangement of chemical reactions that, over time, proved themselves useful to the organism’s genes.

I claim that the IPO model is an ideal scheme upon which to build science of metaphysics, because of its versaility and the way it can define most real and abstract systems. In Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science, Immanuel Kant lays the groundwork for what metaphysics must necessarily do. The IPO model meets Kant’s criteria of being a priori, which means that it is true independent of experience. Any system must necessarily have a processor that analyzes or transforms physical objects or information and reacts to that input in the form of output. Even math is technically an abstract form of the IPO model: if we consider y=f(x), x is the input, the function “f of” is the processor, and y is the output. Defining all systems in the universe as IPO models is not a tautology, because a system is seldom explicitly defined exactly as having only those three characteristics.

Next, it’s important to discuss that IPO systems in an environment interact with each other. When they do so, the output of one system becomes the input of the next. For example, the squirrel pursuing the nut is interacting with the physical objects around it such as trees and dirt, as well as the molecules emanating from objects which she perceives as odor, and the photons from the sun bouncing off of all objects around the squirrel which she perceives through her eyes. IPO systems are in constant interaction with their entire physical environment.

Interaction is important, because it is what leads to emergent behavior. Complexity theory defines emergence as when a system starts to exhibit behavior and patterns not present in the subsystems or components alone. This is related to the concept of synergy, in which the behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of the behavior of the parts. When emergence occurs, we can say that the component IPO systems are interacting in such a way that they can be identified as a new, higher “system.” Examples would include atoms interacting to create a chemical with it’s own unique properties, chemicals interacting to create an autocatalytic system (like a virus, which can create more copies of itself), other autocatalytic systems working in concert to create complex organisms, complex organisms interacting to create swarms, people interacting to create economies, cultures interacting to create nations, etc.

A future metaphysics could further identify those properties that are present within the component systems’ processors when the group suddenly takes on emergent behavior and creates a higher system. This exploration could be one of computer science, mathematics, complexity theory, chaos theory, information theory, cybernetics, or some other interdisciplinary study. It would need to identify what critical number of systems or ratios of system’s processing powers in relation to one another need to be present in order for the interacting group of systems to spontaneously exhibit unique patterns of behvior, enough to be able to label the group of systems as a system itself. Once we establish rules for emergence, we could unify all fields of study as being unique explorations into various major IPO models.

Math/The Formal Sciences:

The formal sciences include applied math like linear programming and dynamic systems, pure math like algebra and number theory, computer science, logic, statistics, systems science, and others. As stated earlier, the IPO model is represented in the formal sciences in the most pure sense: y=f(x), or output=processor(input). Math is the pure attempt to account for the physical universe in which we live. It does not deal with real objects in our universe; it is an abstract answer to the question “what is reality?”

Physics:

Physics is the direct application of mathematics to the real world. It deals with the behavior of physical objects as small as quarks and as large as galaxies. The processors of the systems studied in physics are the physical systems themselves, much like the chemical reaction example from above. Their physical properties interact with the physical properties of other systems, and we study these interactions through experimentation and observation. These analyses have resulted in the discoveries of strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, gravity, static, friction, and others. Like math, physics seeks to answer the question “what is reality?” but deals with real objects, or at least objects believed to be theoretically real. When the elementary particles studied in physics form atoms, a new set of interaction rules emerges. Physics is a natural science that includes astronomy, particle physics, thermodynamics, astrophysics, geophysics, mechanics, and others, including a whole multitude of different types of physical engineering.

Chemistry:

Chemistry is the study of how atoms, groups of atoms, and mixtures of atoms interact with one another to create chemicals and materials. Since one of the initial examples of an IPO model was a chemical reaction, I only need to reiterate that the physical properties of the atoms themselves are the processors. There again have been extensive studies of these interactions in the form of experimentation and observation, and the analyses have resulted in a unique set of interaction rules which can be predicted with stoichiometry, while the periodic table of the elements serves as a near perfect map of atoms and their properties. When certain chemical compounds interact in such a way as to create autocatalytic reactions, a rudimentary precursor to life commences. Chemistry is a natural science that includes organic chemistry, cosmochemistry, synthetic chemistry, pharmacology, green chemistry, hydrogenation, and others.

Biology:

Biology is the study of living systems, their internal chemistry and their external reactions with one another. This covers the entire web of life from the simple organisms to the most complex environments. The most simple of life form may be a living system with a hard-wired processor, like the worm discussed earlier. It receives some sort of information input, in other words it detects stray molecules, sound waves, or photons, and the sensory input triggers a physical reaction in the organism. Contrast this to organisms with more complex processors that are capable of overriding instinct. For example, a dog’s instinct may tell him to lunge at the food in your hand, but when you pull it away, he overrides this urge. Upon receiving the food after waiting patiently for it, the dog’s processor remembers and overwrites the desire to lunge for the food with a new rule: when owner guy is holding food, hold still and watch him and he will give it to you. Biology is a natural science that includes anatomy, cell biology, zoology, ecology, marine biology, neuroscience, physiology, virology, and others.

Psychology:

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a Russian physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov experimentally proved that very rewriting of the processor discussed above. The classic study involved conditioning dogs by ringing a bell everytime they are fed, and the result was that the dogs soon anticipated the food upon hearing the bell ring, as measured by the amount of saliva the dogs produced. Psychology is the study of that giant processor behind our eyes, it’s memory, and how it processes sensory input, which is why it is inherently dependent on biology. Remember that sensory input can be information from the outside world, something physical, or just the mere act of receiving symbolic information from another being, like hearing your friend say that they baked cookies. In the realm of psychologicy, we have crossed over from the natural sciences to the social sciences. Psychology includes social psychology, environmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, sport psychology, biological psychology, clinical neuropsychology, and others.

Sociology:

Sociology is the extensive study of the interactions of groups of humans, and how their processors perceive the world in in relation to each other. In other words, we are still just dealing with IPO systems interacting with each other, only these IPO systems have the sophisticated adaptive processors that are studied extensively in psychology. Sociology is a very diverse social science including social policy, criminology, collective behavior, organizational studies, social change, gender and sexuality studies, cultural and ethnic studies, and others. Anthropology and archeology are traditionally considered social sciences and are certainly related to sociology, but there is also a strong argument to be made that they are related to history.

Sociology is important because it will represent the exact halfway mark on the chart of academic disciplines we are forming. Also, from the systems studied in physics onward, each academic discipline represented a rough chronology of the order in which systems in the universe were created. For example, particles created chemicals, chemicals created organisms, organisms evolved complex processors, then organisms with complex processors interacted with each other to create groups. Sociology is examing groups of humans, and every discipline after sociology will still be studying groups of humans. The chronology breaks down at sociology, so each additional discipline we review moving forward will not necessarily represent the chronological order in which humans achieved or invented these institutions. For example, art did not necessarily come after written language and the emergence of a rudimentary government, rather these are all human institutions that began emerging somewhat simultaneously after the dawn of civilization.

Economics/Business:

Economics, and its important sub-fields, study groups of humans in an organized exchange of resources. These are important resources that humans need as physical or informational inputs. Economics studies these interactions from the most basic, such as simple bartering or game-theory interactions, to the most complex, such as the entire global economic structure. It is tasked with trying to discern what is the most optimal arrangement for economic transactions. Economics is a social science including microeconomics, macroeconomics, international economics, socioeconomics, as well as professional disciplines like business administration, information systems, accounting, finance, and others.

Political-Science/Law:

Some sort of government or head of state seems to inevitably emerge, perhaps out of necesity, once an economic area is defined. A head of state declares laws within a sovereign area and leads the people of that area against conflicts with other rival areas. The intended purpose of the government is to ensure that the economy of the area is running optimally, though we know from history that men of power may not always live up to that function. To translate this into the language of the IPO model, the government becomes the processor of the economy. That could mean reacting to foreign inputs, or managing the internal functions of the economy, or allocating resources as necessary. Political-science is a social science that includes civics, geopolitics, policy studies, public administration, social choice theory, and all fields pertaining to geography and law.

History:

Now we transition from the social sciences to the humanities. History is the study of past events, as recorded by scribes. It tells the story of peoples, heads of states, and cultures, and their interactions over time. Just like the concept central to psychology of a processor with a memory, history is kind of like a nation’s memory. It’s like a repository of a peoples’ past interactions, and it is there, like a memory, to remind us when we should override our instinctual reactions. History is part of the humanities, and it includes world history, and all different area studies of history pertaining to nations, cultures, or regions. As mentioned previously, the highly important fields of anthropology and archeology are related to sociology, but also fit well as disciplines within history.

Literature:

Literature goes a step deeper than history as the people’s repository by capturing narratives and works of fiction. Poetry and prose are snippets of accurate or contrived interactions between humans, and together they collectively tell the human experience. In terms of the IPO model, think of a story as an information input that tells the story of another interaction. For example, The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Suess teaches us that ideological wars in which we engage are petty and wasteful. Whereas Pavlov’s dogs had to actually experience the ringing of bells and food to create the correlation in their brains, The Butter Battle Book has the power to bestow wisdom upon its readers without them having to experience a cold war. To study literature is to seek an answer to the question “what is reality?” by analyzing the human experience. Literature is of the humanities, and it includes poetry, comparative literature, creative writing, literary theory, journalism, screenwriting, and others. I think it is arguable that linguistics is a sub-field, albeit a massive one, of literature.

Art:

Art, like math, is a purely abstract attempt to answer the question “what is reality?” Instead of accounting for the universe directly with abstract models, art is more of a reflection upon the universe. To use Kant’s terminology, math, the formal sciences, and the natural sciences take a rational approach to defining our reality, whereas art and the humanities are empirical, or based on experience. Art is an artist’s reflection on reality designed to invoke a certain emotion or experience in another person. In the terminology of the IPO model, art is an informational input that gets processed a certain way, giving the viewer or patron of the art a certain hint at reality. Like Pablo Picasso so famously said “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Art may include music, dance, film, theater, visual arts, applied arts, and others. Art is of the humanities.

Philosophy:

Philosophy is the ultimate major discipline, and the connector from art to math. We could say that art is a pure and abstract reflection upon reality, math is a pure and abstract accounting system for reality, and philosophy is an abstract reflection upon accounts of reality. Closely tried into the concept of philosophy is religion, which I tentatively suggest could be a sort of abstract attempt to account for reflections made upon reality. Philosophy is both empirical like the humanities, and rational like the formal and natural sciences. If philosophy seems precarious as the connector between art and math, consider how art is a commentary on the nature of existence, and math is a numerical manifestation of logic. Philosophy is regarded as a humanity, and it includes ethics, epistemology, ontology, logic, social philosophy, and of course, metaphysics.

I called this paper a “scheme” and not a theory for a reason: it’s an incomplete reflection. We will truly be enriched when we understand not just that the universe is a mosaic of interacting systems, but the rules underlying that mosaic. We should aspire to be able to tell the entire story of the universe, from quarks to elementary particles to atoms to molecules and the giant planets and stars made of them, from the chemical reactions, autocatalytic compounds, single-celled and multicellular organisms that may occupy some of those planets, from the adaptive brains of some of those multicellular organisms and their groups, from their economic and political institutions to the stories of their entire civilization, from the music of Beethoven to the art of Banksy, and from the musings of Nietzsche to the calculations of Barabasi.

Inspired by the style of my new cohort and fellow blogger Carlos Cruz of Pargmatarianism, I played around with Google search results a little bit. When you do a Google search for the term “information symmetry,” Google assumes you left off a letter and instead shows you results for “information asymmetry.” The elusive Google algorithm must note that there is a critical ratio of results for “information asymmetry” versus results for “information symmetry,” and also that the difference between the two search phrases is one measley little letter “a.” That “a” also happens to be right next to the following letter “s” on the keyboard, perhaps increasing the chances of Google’s interpretation of the missing “a” as a typo. Also, though I doubt that Google’s algorithm cares about this, any web site mentioning “information symmetry” probably also mentions “information asymmetry,” so there’s likely to be redundancy in the search results.

Information asymmetries are probably discussed more often in part because they would be an identifiable feature of a market or business transaction. For example, it is worth noting that the now endangered species of real-estate agents make their living because they have access to information that typical home buyers do not; so there is an information asymmetry: the real-estate agent has a preponderance of information regarding the transaction and the home buyer has limited information regarding the transaction.

However, it is not nearly as noteworthy to point it out when there’s an information symmetry, in which both parties have equal information about the transaction. For example, a seasoned property management company submits a proposal, and three seasoned contractors put in their bid. There may be many aspects and incidents yet unknown that will occur over the course of the project, but those future events are unknown to both the property manager and the contractors. Especially if the property manager and the contractors are experienced, there is not much mystery as to how much labor, materials, and equipment are going to cost the contractors, so we can say that the transaction between the construction company and the winning bidder has symmetrical information.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Internet is destroying information asymmetries everywhere. Financial data is available for publicly traded companies, sites like glass window let you know what a company’s culture is like from the perspective on an insider, sites like wiki leaks continue to expose wrongdoers, and even Google can organize shopping results and tell you how to buy a product cheap, giving you a rough idea of an item’s wholesale value. As the Internet evolves, the cost of information is likely to continue to approach zero, and with it the murkiness surrounding transactions and the products and agents involved in those transactions.

I hope that this transparent trend will one day spread like wildfire in the public sector. In his blog about pragmatarianism, Carlos Cruz imagines a society with two markets: a private market with prices and a public market in which taxpayers choose how to allocate their tax dollars. Tax choice is a topic about which I’ve written before, but emails I’ve exchanged with Mr. Cruz over the past couple of weeks have reinvigorated some of my thoughts regarding it.

Cruz pointed out to me that civic crowdfunding is kind of like watching tax choice play out on a small, local level. It’s a great demonstration of how projects might easily get advertised, organized, and completed if taxpayers had a choice in the allocation of their tax dollars. Take special note of the transparency in civic crowdfunding projects; in a world where the Internet is destroying information asymmetries everywhere, the duel markets of a pragmatarian system would thrive.

One question that Cruz and I discussed regarding pragmatarianism is how efficiently the “public” market would be able to measure the intensity of demand given that there are no prices. My take is that in a world of symmetrical information, very efficiently.

I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist; I’m normally able to stay objective and practical when considering alternative explanations of incidents or policies. My philosophy is that most conspiracy theories can be debunked with a couple of thought experiments (note: I’m speaking primarily of government conspiracies, not copper bracelets and spirit mediums).

First, imagine the alleged beneficiaries of the clandestine scheme. Would they really benefit the most by setting up this scheme and not some other scheme? Next, consider all the parties that would have to keep the conspiracy under wraps. Would they all be able to do so? Would they all have more to gain by keeping the secret than by leaking it? All of them?

Both of those considerations have a common theme: incentive. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the hit book Freakonomics and hosts of Freakonomics Radio, are strong proponents of the principle that incentives drive just about all human behavior, explaining all economic phenomena in the process.

Being skeptical of a conspiracy theory is not so much an exercise in critical thinking. It’s remembering that the parties involved are all individuals with families, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, pets, enemies, dreams, insecurities, opinions, affiliations, hobbies, favorite movies, favorite drinks, problems, and even fantasies. That said, there are two government conspiracies I can say I believe to be true because I can see real people with real motivations behind them. To reiterate points from above, I’m talking about large-scale perpetuations of misinformation to the public by and for the government’s leaders.

The first conspiracy is best summed up in the paper The Evolution of Tax Withholding by Charlotte Twight. In short, you’ve been tricked into barely caring about paying income tax. For one, most workers have taxes taken out of every pay check by their employers, which was enacted to remove the pain of having to pay one or even four large sums per year. Additionally, employers take out too much tax, effectively turning April 15th into a happy day where you get money back. “Thank you, Government!” These schemes have successfully allowed Washington to slowly and constantly increase your tax burden ten-fold in the second half of the twentieth century, with minimal complaining.

The second conspiracy involves the Republican Party. In a post called The Gold Majority, I speculated that getting a bunch of working and middle-class people to vote against income redistribution, of which they might stand to benefit financially, should be difficult. It’s not, however, if you can convince some of them that income redistribution helps minorities and immigrants more than it helps their own “kind.” Put another way, perhaps the GOP exploits that some modern-day conservatives in the United States are not so much intellectual champions of the free-market economy as they are homophobic and racist.

When I wrote that speculation, I did not know that proof existed in the form of a quote by Lee Atwater, former political advisor to Ronald Reagan. In it, he makes it clear that the Republican strategy in the South was exactly that: to convince working and middle class Caucasian Americans that the free market punishes minorities.

Maybe these conspiracies aren’t as sexy as 9/11 or moon landing theories; they’re certainly neither as elaborate nor entertaining. They are indeed grounded in reality with direct evidence not subject to interpretation. So despite my earlier disclaimer, they actually do have something in common with copper bracelets and spirit mediums. They are deceitful, exploiting loopholes in people’s perceptions to the advantage of the propagators. My advice: ball up the tin foil hat, but never forget that we’re all individuals with incentives.

It’s actually kind of frustrating. Politically and economically, we are so bipolar, so bipartisan, that even the idea of a third-party candidate in any election is almost always laughable. “Why is he even there? Does he really think he has a chance?”

My wife watched the 2014 gubernatorial debate back in October, and it was equal parts farce and tragedy. In republican-dominated Georgia, republican governor Nathan Deal had a simple platform: “I’m a tough old sonuvabitch and Jason Carter is a radical two-faced crunchy liberal.” Jason Carter, the democratic candidate, was running on “I honestly have no idea who I am but I’m not Nathan Deal, who has literally stolen money from impoverished children.” (Note: these are not real quotes, but I think if they were, Georgia would be exactly the same today as it would if they said whatever they actually said.)

Then there was Andrew Hunt, the libertarian candidate. He knew and cited specific figures from Georgia’s financial, industrial, and agricultural conditions. He talked about scaling back bureaucracy, making the police more effective, and improving the education system. Nobody cared. Carter and Deal jabbed each other and Hunt, when allowed to speak, talked about improving Georgia.

I can’t imagine I’m the only person who became frustrated watching it. Actually, I have a hard time imagining anyone not noticing the shit-parade. So why do republican an democrat voters alike not hit the poles and vote for someone like Hunt? Why does everyone laugh at how campaign ads are only about sociopathic the other candidate is, but nobody ever resolves to do something about it? It’s actually not even completely the politicians’ faults: their incentive is to make grand promises to get elected, and upon entering office, the only way they have a chance of appearing effective in such a short term is to spend excessively.

I once discussed tax choice with a friend in a car ride, and his reaction was angry. Neither inquisitive, nor challenging, just angry. He told me that I didn’t understand how bad people really are, and that they’re going to put their taxes in the wrong place. He told me that the last time somebody came up with a radical idea was communism, and obviously that didn’t work. He recommended I watch the movie Divergent to see what happens when you try to change a system.

Why is it that we so readily acknowledge when bureaucracy is broken, but become afraid and aggressive when someone suggests a new idea? Anything that’s not neatly housed in our current mental models are considered extreme or radical. Linda and Morris Tannehill, authors of the book The Market for Liberty put it this way: imagine trying to tell a serf from the Middle Ages how modern society is structured. Would he actually believe that society could work where people are free to choose their vocation? In Beyond Democracy: Why Democracy Does not Lead to Solidarity, authors Frank Karsten and Karel Beckmann point out that an argument against slavery in the southern United States was that slaves would not be able to live on their own, nor would they want to. The same argument was proposed as the feminist movement started to gain attention.

In the book If Mayors Ruled the World by Benjamin Barber, the author pointed out that while leaders of states and nations are busy engaging in ideological gridlock with their parliaments about how to spend your money, mayors take out your trash. As I listened to his well-written book, mostly on my daily commute, the reasonableness of it got me thinking of the phrase “superficial extremism.” Like tax-choice, voluntaryism, and other ideologies, it appears at first to be a ridiculous notion, but as you dig deeper, the ridiculousness of the idea of bands of mayors ruling the world becomes eclipsed by the ridiculousness and clumsiness of our current government structure, which could best be described as a meat on meat on meat on meat on meat on meat on meat sandwich.

Proprietism plus tax-choice is, to me, superficial extremism. Like all novel suggestions as to how to structure a society, it appears radical; like it’s too different to have any merit whatsoever, yet most of us would generally agree with its facets. We generally agree that individualism is good thing, and that individuals perform their best when they are made responsible for their work. We agree that the corporate structure allows leaders to be rewarded for failure and allows poor performing employees to stay employed for too long. Even the conservative among us can agree that executive pay is excessive and that law enforcement doesn’t need to waste infinite dollars in the pursuit of busting victimless crimes. Even the liberal among us agree that government can be wasteful and that a distribution system better than socialism is out there, somewhere.

Even if not with proprietism, nor with any other idea related to proprietism like tax-choice or ESOPs, I hope we can transcend the bipartisan rhetoric. I hope we can start to appreciate theories and ideas that seem extreme at first rather than reject them because of a fear of the unknown. I hope we can realize that because of our own superstitious nature, preservation of the status quo is what actually has a tendency to get extreme.

A huge motivation of mine in writing about proprietism has been my lifelong and insatiable urge to transcend the bipartisan rhetoric of everyday politics. I am so sick of “left versus right.” Academic rhetoric is quite literally no better. It’s as though every policy, and even the question of society itself, is completely and flawlessly answered within a spectrum that has capitalism on one end and socialism on the other. How do we develop better technology? The market. How do we take care of our sick? The state. How do we grow financially? The market. How do we reduce poverty? The state.

In my research I’ve found more “isms” than I ever thought existed, and a handful have fallen outside the above mentioned spectrum. They include voluntaryism, anarcho-syndicalism and its cousin Libertarian Marxism, and anarcho-primitivism (how I would love to see a politician describe herself as anarcho-primitivist). I even came across the ism I interpret to be the exact antithesis of proprietism: corporatism. Corporatism is like an extreme form of statism where society is organized, guild-style, into giant independent sectors, kind of like Panem in The Hunger Games. In addition, I have discovered two more systems that very much lie outside the box.

The first is the notion of the collaborative commons, whose theoretical spokesperson would have to be Jeremy Rifkin. In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Rifkin holds that as technology improves, the marginal cost of production, that is, the cost to produce one additional unit of a product, approaches zero. He claims that when this happens, “profits dry up,” and the efficiency that capitalism brought is now the very cause of its demise.

I really like the spirit of what Rifkin is getting at; the commons, as observed on the Internet most notably with open-source software, has proved itself to be a highly productive form of organization. I do, however, have an issue with Rifkinian Economics. What he’s saying is that the fixed costs associated with the production of a product will always exist, but the variable costs, those production costs that correlate directly with the number of units produced, will approach zero as the “Internet of things” improves. Even if that is true, it does not logically follow that competition in light of zero variable costs will then cause profit to flatten. Profits are profits: the premium paid for a product in addition to cost that goes to the owner of the operation. Though I understand that profits can get excessive, the theory is that it is the owner’s reward for taking on the risk of the operation. So will the commons one day become a paradigm for information collaboration? Yes. Will it become a political-economic system? I don’t think so. You can run a web site on the commons, but not a chemical plant.

The other political-economic system is Jaron Lanier’s humanistic information economy that he outlined in his fun and important book, Who Owns the Future? Lanier brings up a painful point: as of right now, we can use a variety of free services on the Internet, but we’re paying the price by letting a myriad of servers create algorithms based on our behavior, which in turn allows companies to get better at charging us for the stuff we want. Lanier believes that this could be corrected by creating an infrastructure that allows people to be compensated in micropayments for the value of the information they contributed. I have to credit Lanier for proposing such a bold and original idea.

I hope proprietism can be equally viewed as bold, and outside the capitalism-socialism spectrum. It would embrace free-enterprise and market forces like laissez-faire capitalism, yet seeks for a more even distribution of ownership and wealth. It doesn’t shackle entrepreneurs and hard workers, and the Information Age will allow less room for depraved business practices. Additionally, it relies on the profits from socially-responsible brands for social problems, a technique which is likely to be just as if not more effective than nonprofit entities (see For-profit: the Better Nonprofit. I see both Rifkin’s and Lanier’s ideas as being compatible with, not opposed to, proprietism.

When you commit yourself to researching the future of the political-economy as I have, you will come across a great deal of literature that describes an impending job market bust that will be permanent and irreparable. The implosion will come as automation overtakes nearly all aspects of the supply chain and in every sector of the economy. This naturally leads me to ask: when, in history, has technological innovation left workers permanently unemployed?

Technology has definitely caused historic upheavals in the job market. The 1930s serve as a somewhat recent severe example, and half-jokes about how robots will all take our jobs someday were common back then as they are now. The 1930s actually had plenty in common with the 2010s: despite the loss of disposable income, consumer products like telephones and automobiles became omnipresent while a rising generation forged its identity. Then, it was Greatest Generation, now it’s the Millennials. Needless to say, the robot revolution did not happen, though one could argue that a robot evolution has been occurring since the dawn of the industrial revolution, it stands that the unemployment rate since the Great Depression has bounced around, reaching levels as low as 4%.

Silicon Valley sage Jaron Lanier holds that this time, the job bust will be for real. Even more apocalyptic-minded are Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age. I think that the current economic downturn has everything to do with technology, but I cannot commit to the idea of it being permanent.

I have no empirical evidence to support this feeling, but here’s why I think I’m right: most people most of the time will find a way to make it. To believe that automation will permanently displace workers is to believe that every human was born to do one thing; to serve a single purpose like a cog in a machine (pardon the cliché). It is to believe that a human can let an automaton rob him of his pride. It is to view all workmanship as products that can be substituted, and that human ingenuity, innovation, and even productivity are nonexistent except as talents possessed by an extreme minority.

Now that I’ve made my views on the possibility of large-scale permanent unemployment clear, let me drop the bomb. Major and permanent job displacement due to technology is actually possible under one condition: a welfare state. Shocker? If an entire portion of the population is provided income and a basic standard of living while being unemployed, that portion will grow steadily forever as the life of a worker continues to be only slightly better than the life of an unemployed person.

So maybe the doomsayers are correct: if we keep redistributing income to unemployed people, technology will replace them all. What would that society look like? One class the lazy majority, another wealthy owners? Who’s the slave in that scenario?

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor.” We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

-Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and micro-finance pioneer

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that life before society was stuck in a “war of all against all;” man’s natural state was selfish and chaotic. The advent of government was marked by an understood agreement to a social contract, by which men gave up their savage desires in order to cooperate with the group, under the pretense of the group gaining more resources with less effort per man than any one member of the group could have leveraged on his own. Karl Marx had an almost opposite perspective: he felt that communism was a return to man’s original state, in which property did not exist and men shared resources in harmony based on need.

We now know that the truth is, of course, somewhere between the two. Humans have for their entire history lived together in social bands, but perhaps not as primitive communists. Hierarchies kept order, and bad behavior was punished. Bands may have distributed resources based on work, rank, or need.

Bands rarely exceeded 150 members, which happens to be the number of people we are roughly able to keep track of to this day. You might have 500 Facebook friends, but 150 is about how many people you could accidentally run into and share a beer with, sans awkwardness. For the average person, this may be about 100 people with whom they work on regular basis, and 50 non work-related friends and family members.

In a band (or tribe as well), you didn’t have a resume, but you did have a reputation. You didn’t have Google nor old Facebook pictures, but gossip occasionally kept your past alive. Everyone knew who you were, and what your “thing” was. Your “thing” was who you are, how you treated others, how you hunted or worked, your idiosyncrasies, and more. In a word, in a primitive band you would have had a “brand.”

The quote above captures it well. Becoming labor was overall a good thing: agricultural and industrial societies do a much better job feeding everyone than hunter-gatherer societies. However, and here’s where I am speculating, some degree of self-respect and individuality may have been lost when people started no longer having a “thing,” and instead started doing the same thing as three dozen other people. In general, vast institutions and their hierarchies made us feel like anonymous cogs rather than our own “entrepreneurs.” Perhaps this is also where being “labor” versus being an “owner” started to mean vastly different things in terms of how much property you own and what quality of life you enjoy. So proprietism is therefore kind of like the paleo-diet version of a form of organization. Everyone owns a little piece and everyone is responsible for their “thing.” Most of all, everyone has a “thing.”

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

-Lawrence Pearsall Jacks from “Education through Recreation”

It was about a year ago that I first made posts relating proprietism to the new era of personal branding in which we live, where lifestyle-design and DIY are paradigms and social media allows us to constantly show others who we are. I’d now like to revisit the topic; here’s an update in the growing realm of self-branding: Sally Hogshead, a leading personal branding expert, published How The World Sees You in 2014. The book involves taking a short test designed to uncover the way others see you, and then placing yourself into one type, out of no less than 49 possible types. Sally then helps you create your own personalized “anthem” based on this type, which helps you pinpoint your brand. Mine was the “trendsetter,” and I provide “cutting-edge thought leadership.” Fun stuff. Also this year, Brenda Bence has written a self-branding how-to guide entitled Master the Brand called You.

The point I’d like to make here is that your brand, perhaps “cutting-edge” in my case, is who you are no matter what you’re doing. For example: at work, I dress well (thanks to my wife), and strive to keep a very tight-knit team-oriented atmosphere, while watching our shipping budget and approaching challenges with pragmatism. During lunch and over the weekend, I ride a sturdy but not overpriced bicycle whether or not I’m experiencing joint pain. My coworkers know this, and it adds to my brand of hard-work, leading from the front, and practicality in regards to money. I am in a band, and which adds to my image of being edgy and creative. Some even know that I write a blog, which maintains the idea that I am industrious and contemplative. While I can make a distinction between work and play (as there are many things at work I still have to do, not to mention my commute), I see the gap closing. Every day I gain constant real-world experience leading a team of individuals, each with their own unique brand (developed to varying extents), through harsh economic times.

While many folks prefer a work/life seperation, I believe that embracing the wholeness of it all makes work much more stimulating and fun. Your “brand,” is where it all starts. Everything you do, work or play, adds to your brand. This business paradigm, popularized in 1997 by Tom Peters, is experiencing a resurgence right now in the business world. In my opinion, it is a paradigm that is going to stick around, perhaps permanently, as more and more workers become independent. So if you haven’t already, get started. My advice: start with your favorite fun activities, and ask yourself what they say about how you approach your work. A well-branded worker can purvey value much more quickly and clearly than one who isn’t.

I recently finished reading volume one of The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. The author takes you through the early history of many civilizations, pinpointing the critical characteristics of institutions that may have affected the success or failure of a society even today. The common motif is that a written rule of law and checks and balances to an authority’s power often allow for a corruption-free society to flourish. Also, Fukuyama agrees with Nicholas Wade, author of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes Race and Human History that a population’s behavior in society may reflect the institution-type in which their ancestors lived.

After finishing the first volume, I adopted a new view on history: civilization is the story of the development of human institutions. The Wikipedia definition of an institution is “any structure or mechanism of social order governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given community,” such as constitutions, religions, and organizations. Fukuyama states that by definition, an institution creates rules that reduce human freedoms, but in doing so permit the institution to have more efficient collective action. Human history therefore contains within it a survival-of-the-fittest style contest between institutions and their version of what Thomas Hobbes called the social contract.

The next logical question is, where is the evolution of institutions going? The world around the year 200 BC might have suggested that centralized governments are the strongest institutions, and they will naturally grow until the world is comprised of only a few or even one incredibly powerful institution. At the time, Rome dominated Europe and the Qin dynasty dominated Asia. However, history has now given us repeated examples of mega-institutions fracturing: Europe after Rome, the Soviet Union in the late 20th century, Christianity today, Islam today, Gran Colombia, just to name a handful from this long list.

The United States is very institutionalized. It’s made up of a federal government, state governments, counties, districts, cities, businesses, agencies, educational systems, membership organizations, and more, each with their own laws. Its “I’ll sue you” culture has saturated government and businesses alike in rules and procedures, something I discussed in this post. In many cases, our institutions violate the very purpose of an institution as stated above: to permit efficient collective action.

So can it swing back the other way? Can the United States become less like a precarious pile of wrought-iron institutions and more like the strong web Spider-Man would have to make to prevent the falling institutions from crushing innocent people? In another post, I explored the institutional detachment of millennials. Though the data can’t predict a trend such as “the US is becoming less institutionalized,” I have hope that this survey at least has some prophetic power.

The reason why is central to proprietism: technology. The more perfect our information systems become, and they appear to still be conforming to Moore’s law, the less we will have to subject others to procedures, and the more we will be able to make flexible, real-time decisions (I touched upon this topic here). Humans have an innate predisposition to make and follow rules, and rules exist to counteract that urge we sometimes get when nobody is looking to gain at the expense of somebody else. Cyberspace calls for a different level of accountability. Someone may not always be looking, but your actions may be forever captured in zeros and ones, waiting to be recalled if necessary. Sound scary? It shouldn’t. Big brother’s not going to be watching your every move, and some even argue that transparency can be leveraged. Human society will always function with a small degree of rule breakage; what matters is the rationale behind the it.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and VP of PayPal, has adopted an unorthodox approach to employment. In the traditional relationship, an employee is hired and more or less guaranteed employment for life, given that he or she doesn’t severely under perform or do anything nutso.

Hoffman’s approach, the tour of duty, is a different take: an employee is hired for a 2 to 4 year period, much like a contract. At the end of the tour of duty, an employee is either hired on for another tour, promoted to a different role, or, if he under-performs, his tour of duty is not renewed. The 2 to 4 year designation reflects a typical project life-cycle.

“Oh great, so in other words, it’ll be easier now for companies to fire or layoff employees.” It will be easy now to great rid of under-performers, yes, but it’s not a surprise anymore. Employees will know from their reviews whether or not they’re performing poorly, and they will know when their “contract” ends, so they will have plenty of time to prepare. Right now, terminating a poor performer in the government or in corporate America is a cumbersome and difficult process.

“Oh great, so in other words, no more company loyalty.” Superstars whose contracts are constantly renewed will have plenty of loyalty. The employees who don’t have loyalty because the idea of a tour of duty threatens them probably wouldn’t have much loyalty under a normal employment arrangement either. Those who are confident in their ability to deliver at least adequate performance have nothing to worry about. Those who hide behind rules and dodge responsibility would need to simply step it up.

The concept of a tour of duty is a very proprietist approach to work. In today’s working world, loyalty to your company is not epidemic when two-thirds of the entire workforce answer that they are actively seeking or thinking of seeking another job. What matters is not loyalty to a particular organization or institution, but commitment to your job and the folks who make up your network.