It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.
The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.
The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the "commons" in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).
The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)
In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.
Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to "prime" the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.
However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.
There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.
Status seeking is associated with massive economic inefficiencies (waste production, economic inequality,..). The zero sum game nature of status seeking also puts a toll on individual well being and consequently on suboptimal ways the societies function.
In the political domain, status seeking can lead to wars (as the recent developments illustrate).
The EA community should invest into institutions/research/solutions leading to diverting from status seeking.
The NEO currency is fully convertible and is called Chron. Where do Chrons come from:
you do some work,
get some proof you did the work (link to a github commit page, photo, video recording,...),
create a report in rovas.app and attach the proofs,
rovas.app will send request to two algo-determined users to verify your report,
if your report gets approved, you get 10 Chrons for every hour of your work
Every work report belongs to a project you create. When you are buying somebody's product, you go to that product's project in rovas.app and reward it. You can do it with your Chrons, or with national currency.
You are actively trying to get buyers to pay as much of their money as possible for the stuff you make. When they pay, they do so to the System, which converts the payment to a numeric reward (I call it the Merit reward). The money is destroyed in the process and the seller of the product receives Merits. Individual's Merit score is a reflection of their abilities, or their popularity. It can not be transferred, you can not buy anything for it and everybody can see how an individual's Merits were earned.
You would know that you would earn more for building a car vs chair the same way as in capitalism - by selling them. Market determines the price - no change here from capitalism.
Re. 1 - most people in NEO would choose the task that pays the most - just like in capitalism. The payment in NEO has purely signaling (non-monetary) form, but that does not matter. Also in capitalism only the magnitude of the payment ultimately matters (the signal), not the exchange value it represents (that gets ultimately converted to status - a form of the signal)
The more creative people would also do what they do in capitalism - choose the thing they like to do. Elon Musk types would build Teslas and flamethrowers, other would found My Lackey, or Kozmo.com. Some will succeed, some will fail. We love them all in NEO.
Re. 2. - as I wrote previously, motivation is plentiful in NEO - and of the right kind. The "most people" category I mention in point #1 above are motivated extrinsically, but there is a scale from Extrinsic to Intrinsic and "most people" would be much closer to "I" in NEO than if they worked in capitalism and consequently would be more performant (and happier).
Your objection seem to focus on the most important difference between NEO and capitalism - the autonomy to choose whatever one wants to do. If I understand, you imply that more autonomy leads to slacking. The need for autonomy is however critical condition for the emergence of intrinsic motivation and a large body of literature (keywords: self determination theory) shows superiority of intrinsic over the extrinsic motivation in various domains (creativity, persistence,..) The literature also shows that intrinsically motivated employees produce more valuable economic contributions. Many things in psychology are disputed, but the existence of the two types of motivation and superiority of the intrinsic one is not.
I could list a number of examples that confirm the notion that people in general want to be useful to others, but I think I could not do a better job than the scientists studying motivation. Maybe one example for all. Just look at volunteers, like the FOSS programmers, Wikipedia editors or Openstreetmap mappers. No economic carrots or sticks that would force them supply labor and yet, their output is so valuable that it is being massively appropriated by the commercial sector.
I don't think that is the case and have listed some arguments supporting that view. What makes you think that NEO workers will produce less valuable output?
In NEO (that's how the system is actually called for better or worse), all value-creation mechanisms that we know from the market economy are present, so I am sorry, but I do not think we have identified the DC :-) Try to be more specific - what aspect do you think is different?
Maybe this will help to clarify things - the crucial (hmm, do we have a suspect?) difference from a "normal" market economy, is separation of the for-the-value-creation less important aspect of work reward (the exchange value) from the salient one - the psychological signal.
About the gaming thing. That is not what NEO success or failure actually hinges on. It might be nice if it happens, but if NEO wins, it will be because it is more economically efficient than the alternatives. Apparently the 800 lb gorilla is the capitalist system, which is of course enormously successful. What does NEO bring to the ring? Separation of concerns - economic from the psychological. Capitalism rewards workers with both at the same time (money) and I see that as a source of inefficiency, because people - especially the most creative ones - are gunning for the psychological reward. In money they inadvertently get also exchange value reward, proportional to the signaling one and that causes economic inequality - a source of inefficiency. NEO also rewards the exceptional value creators more than others - with stronger signal - but it leads to inequality that is beneficial (same function as in capitalism). The economic value in NEO is constantly redistributed virtually equally among the workers, eliminating (extreme) inequality.
The Merit rank page is here:
https://rovas.app/users-merit-rank
It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.
The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.
The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the "commons" in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).
The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)
The (Nobel laureate) economist Michael Spence also wrote on this topic last year in Project Syndicate. After reading the article, I realized the Merit reward in Rovas (the application I developed) could be a suitable measure for the social impact of the philanthropists he calls for. A list of Merit holders would then be Matt Levine’s league table.
In Rovas, the Merit assignment has some rules, such as: a person pays into a (FOSS, volunteer, charitable, etc.) project and receives Merits. The project gets funded. However, the Merit score is not yet sought after by donors or philanthropists, and therefore we have a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.
Hence, I thought to look for and manually gather the names of donors and the amounts of their donations, and thus to "prime" the system manually. I assumed that once the league table exists, it would motivate other donors to report their gifts in Rovas themselves.
However, there is a problem with this idea: the data. Philanthropists often want to remain anonymous, and donations—even from those who don’t—are hard to come by. I think this approach can still work, but the system will either not scale well (if the league table needs to be maintained manually), or it will grow slowly as a byproduct of using Rovas as an aid delivery mechanism.
There is another avenue through which the league table could be instituted, as the (hypothetical) effectiveness of this signaling mechanism is not restricted to philanthropists. Every person on the planet pays some kind of tax, which is also a form of redistribution. I think rewarding tax payments with a signaling reward, and allowing citizens to have their Merit scores disclosed, could improve tax collections—possibly dramatically.
Promote ways that suppress status seeking
Great Power Relations, Economic Growth
Status seeking is associated with massive economic inefficiencies (waste production, economic inequality,..). The zero sum game nature of status seeking also puts a toll on individual well being and consequently on suboptimal ways the societies function.
In the political domain, status seeking can lead to wars (as the recent developments illustrate).
The EA community should invest into institutions/research/solutions leading to diverting from status seeking.
The NEO currency is fully convertible and is called Chron. Where do Chrons come from:
Every work report belongs to a project you create. When you are buying somebody's product, you go to that product's project in rovas.app and reward it. You can do it with your Chrons, or with national currency.
You are actively trying to get buyers to pay as much of their money as possible for the stuff you make. When they pay, they do so to the System, which converts the payment to a numeric reward (I call it the Merit reward). The money is destroyed in the process and the seller of the product receives Merits. Individual's Merit score is a reflection of their abilities, or their popularity. It can not be transferred, you can not buy anything for it and everybody can see how an individual's Merits were earned.
You would know that you would earn more for building a car vs chair the same way as in capitalism - by selling them. Market determines the price - no change here from capitalism.
Re. 1 - most people in NEO would choose the task that pays the most - just like in capitalism. The payment in NEO has purely signaling (non-monetary) form, but that does not matter. Also in capitalism only the magnitude of the payment ultimately matters (the signal), not the exchange value it represents (that gets ultimately converted to status - a form of the signal)
The more creative people would also do what they do in capitalism - choose the thing they like to do. Elon Musk types would build Teslas and flamethrowers, other would found My Lackey, or Kozmo.com. Some will succeed, some will fail. We love them all in NEO.
Re. 2. - as I wrote previously, motivation is plentiful in NEO - and of the right kind. The "most people" category I mention in point #1 above are motivated extrinsically, but there is a scale from Extrinsic to Intrinsic and "most people" would be much closer to "I" in NEO than if they worked in capitalism and consequently would be more performant (and happier).
Your objection seem to focus on the most important difference between NEO and capitalism - the autonomy to choose whatever one wants to do. If I understand, you imply that more autonomy leads to slacking. The need for autonomy is however critical condition for the emergence of intrinsic motivation and a large body of literature (keywords: self determination theory) shows superiority of intrinsic over the extrinsic motivation in various domains (creativity, persistence,..) The literature also shows that intrinsically motivated employees produce more valuable economic contributions. Many things in psychology are disputed, but the existence of the two types of motivation and superiority of the intrinsic one is not.
I could list a number of examples that confirm the notion that people in general want to be useful to others, but I think I could not do a better job than the scientists studying motivation. Maybe one example for all. Just look at volunteers, like the FOSS programmers, Wikipedia editors or Openstreetmap mappers. No economic carrots or sticks that would force them supply labor and yet, their output is so valuable that it is being massively appropriated by the commercial sector.
Yes, I will, regardless of your less than firm commitment to helping out in case I am right.
Let's make clear, that we are comparing capitalism as we know it (say the Western type) and a hypothetical situation, when everybody works in NEO.
I don't think that is the case and have listed some arguments supporting that view. What makes you think that NEO workers will produce less valuable output?
In NEO (that's how the system is actually called for better or worse), all value-creation mechanisms that we know from the market economy are present, so I am sorry, but I do not think we have identified the DC :-) Try to be more specific - what aspect do you think is different?
Maybe this will help to clarify things - the crucial (hmm, do we have a suspect?) difference from a "normal" market economy, is separation of the for-the-value-creation less important aspect of work reward (the exchange value) from the salient one - the psychological signal.
About the gaming thing. That is not what NEO success or failure actually hinges on. It might be nice if it happens, but if NEO wins, it will be because it is more economically efficient than the alternatives. Apparently the 800 lb gorilla is the capitalist system, which is of course enormously successful. What does NEO bring to the ring? Separation of concerns - economic from the psychological. Capitalism rewards workers with both at the same time (money) and I see that as a source of inefficiency, because people - especially the most creative ones - are gunning for the psychological reward. In money they inadvertently get also exchange value reward, proportional to the signaling one and that causes economic inequality - a source of inefficiency. NEO also rewards the exceptional value creators more than others - with stronger signal - but it leads to inequality that is beneficial (same function as in capitalism). The economic value in NEO is constantly redistributed virtually equally among the workers, eliminating (extreme) inequality.