2023-05-12 11:54:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Here’s a calculation / research I’d like to see done. What follows is very macro and hand wavy but hopefully you’ll see what I’m trying to understand. I want to get a better sense for how close to capacity the money system is running in relation to the most essential thing for humans: food.
We have the technology to make food on an enormous scale, there’s more than enough for everyone, but money isn’t making it to lots and lots of people, and so neither is food. Many people are starving and thirsty, and that’s unacceptable.
Economic conditions are causing people and institutions to hoard making the situation worse. Forget for a second the exact mechanism that money gets into the hands of people, imagine that’s solvable. Forget all the difficult social issues, just focus on the numbers. The question that needs answering broadly speaking is how much money liquidity is needed in the system to feed every single person per day/month/year?
Base it on current prices in your location in regular shops people use. Don’t get overly complicated, it’s just an estimate, it doesn’t need to be super optimised. Just price out 3 healthy microwave meals per person per day. You just want to have the minimum worst case. Is that amount, larger or smaller than current total money iquidity? Is it even possible? Remember to multiply by the total population of earth, I guess that's currently around 7 billion.
It should then be obvious how much people and institutions can hoard before starvation shortages occur. The only way to make things sustainable is to manage this pool of money. In many ways money is like water, it’s not a coincidence it’s called liquidity. It’s a resource we all share.
I suspect that the total money is way way way more than the required liquidity to feed everyone. How we have things organised currently clearly isn’t working very well. There are a few people standing around the money spigots and they aren’t letting the water get to people that desperately need it.
When you know the answers to these questions, then it should be easier to figure out how to get that money into the hands of people, whether it’s jobs, UBI or something else, first figure out what’s possible, set targets and make a solution that fits.
When hunger is solved, many of the world’s problems start to disappear as they are often self inflicted, because hunger is used as a weapon of control, but really it’s a massive escalating humanity foot gun that will at some point affect us all.
Bonus question: how do you ensure evil people don't take such an estimate and re-engineer the money system so there is always not quite enough to feed everyone?