The Death of Economics

The field of economics is dying because "economics" as we know it from school and mainstream financial news media is rapidly disintegrating. The field of economics today is a rusting time-capsule filled with supply-and-demand charts, utility functions, and obsolete assumptions that have virtually no meaning or purpose in a world where the supply-side of every transaction is increasingly dominated by A.I. and robotic agents.

An Economics Earthquake. Every time I read an economics book these days I cringe at the increasing number of obsolete assumptions about how economics supposedly works. In Broken Capitalism: This Is How We Fix It, we listed dozens of absurd and false assumptions that students are taught in college economics courses, but those assumptions have been embedded in mainstream economics dogma for decades. What we're talking about here is a much more profound, ongoing earthquake that is shaking the entire belief system called "Economics" to the ground.

What Does it Really Mean When Robots Produce Value? What price should we put on the products that robots produce? If a factory is owned by a single human, should that human receive all the income produced by a labor force comprised entirely of robots? What about 100 automated factories? A whole economy of automated factories? What if the factories are owned by a super-intelligent A.I.-powered robot? Should the humans that consume the robot's production pay the robot in fiat currency? What purpose does fiat currency or any kind of money have for a super-A.I. that does not suffer from hunger, desire or death? What value does anything have in this world?

Traditional Economic Theories Are Losing Credibility. The concept of marginal utility is still useful for modeling certain kinds of human behavior, but it's substantially useless for modeling the behavior of desire-less A.I. Concepts like consumer and producer surplus, dead-weight loss, comparative advantage, and many other core economic principles are becoming less meaningful in any economy that's dominated by A.I. and robotic agents. These changes are challenging the credibility of economic theories that have dominated classrooms and the global economy since David Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817.

The Laws of Physics Still Exist. To be clear, certain fundamental economic principles that are anchored to the laws of physics will not change until cold fusion and/or more efficient renewable energy production is widely available to dramatically reduce the energy cost associated with physical supply chains. Thus, principles like scarcity and supply-and-demand are still useful to discipline our thinking when developing economic systems and policies associated with physical commodities and supply chains.

Oh, no . . . Not Price-Discovery, too! Although some fundamental economic principles are still relevant, the way humans interact with scarcity and supply-and-demand in the 21st Century is rapidly changing. For example, the way free-market price-discovery has always worked throughout human history is fundamentally based on the subjective concept of value, which is a byproduct of human desire and scarcity. Without human desire on both sides of an exchange, the price-discovery mechanism and many other associated economic principles become arbitrary points along a wealth extraction curve that can be manipulated at will by the giant corporations that control the A.I. and robots.

Super-Human Exploitation. As the supply side of global markets becomes increasingly dominated by A.I.-powered entities, the concepts of "price" and "value" will become almost completely arbitrary. The "price" of a product or service will be dictated to markets by a tiny number of the most powerful humans that control the A.I. for their own wealth-extraction and political purposes. This is essentially what corporate cannibals already do today when they're allowed to monopolize markets, but A.I. super-charges their power by enabling them to dominate economic and political systems with super-human productivity. (See The Productivity Scam.)

The Gini Platform Takes These Realities Into Account. At the Gini Foundation, we think about the questions above and many other technical and socioeconomic questions every day as we design the technical and monetary systems for the Gini ecosystem. Unlike any other fiat or cryptocurrency system today, we make sure that the Gini monetary system, Value Streams System and Ecosystem Stability Mechanism take these 21st-Century realities into account.

What Can Replace Obsolete Economic Theories? One of the biggest weaknesses of textbook economics is that it often suffers from a deficit of common sense. We launched the Gini Foundation to build an alternative, cryptographically secure, decentralized monetary system based on common sense; a deep understanding of how the relics, false assumptions and deliberate distortions in the field of economics today are hurting a large majority of humans on Earth; and deep technical and socioeconomic research, which gives us certainty that widespread suffering and inequity will accelerate with the increasing dominance of A.I. if we don't do something about it.

Gini Capitalism for the 21st Century. In the Gini whitepaper, we describe a set of economic principles and systems that we affectionately call "Gini Capitalism". Gini Capitalism can be appreciated by anybody who truly understands how the convergence of A.I. with the ongoing collusion of giant banks, corporate cannibals and politicians is culminating into a global assault on humanity in the months and years to come. Whether the assault manifests as The Terminator remains to be seen, but our technical and socioeconomic research has given us absolute certainty that Weaponized Wealth Concentration and weaponized A.I. are already being deployed to hijack our global economic and political systems.

The Ghettos Are Coming. As the global economy becomes increasingly dominated by the giant banks and corporate cannibals that control the A.I., humanity will be gradually corralled into virtual and physical ghettos. Politicians and corporations will present these ghettos as safe places for the growing population of economic refugees. However, the actual purpose of these ghettos will be to separate the refugees from the rest of the population to prevent the spread of the inevitable revolutionary fervor that will emerge in the coming years.

The Death of Economics Will Ignite Violence. The field of economics is dying in direct proportion to the rise of A.I. As this process unfolds, large human populations will experience deep fear and anxiety. Their fear of change and their fear of being dominated by A.I.-powered corporate and government tyrants will manifest in protests and violence at least as intense as the violent protests in Hong Kong. In fact, the Hong Kong protests and the coming protests by economic refugees around the world are fundamentally about the same thing: human dignity and freedom.

Violence Will Accelerate A.I.-Powered Authoritarianism. For now in the U.S., there is still a pretense of democracy and civil liberty. However, an authoritarian country like China that surveils and dominates its citizens with an ubiquitous A.I.-powered police state is fundamentally no different than the U.S. techno-authoritarian state that surveils and dominates its citizens through a collusive cartel of giant corporations and government intelligence agencies. In both cases, they are destroying our privacy, our economic freedom, our political liberty and our human rights.

Dealing with Change. When things change, the human mind often fights to preserve its previous model of the world, but sticking our heads in the sand is not a solution. As you read this, corporate cannibals are working furiously to replace textbook economics with their own profit-driven autonomous exploitation platforms. As a species and as a human community, we can embrace changes that benefit humanity while rejecting the A.I.-powered tyranny that is coming if we don't take action to protect ourselves.

Ensuring that Change Benefits Humanity. At the Gini Foundation, we are developing a nonprofit alternative to economic tyranny; a nonprofit alternative to debt slavery; a nonprofit alternative to self-serving corporate and government propaganda. We are doing this to ensure that the changes humanity is living through today benefit humanity, not a tiny number of executives and shareholders in for-profit, A.I.-powered cannibalistic corporations.

Thank You. As a nonprofit organization, we don't have the resources of the giant corporate cannibals, but we have a very talented and mission-oriented team and the Gini Platform is growing rapidly. We hope you will join us and be part of this important mission.