Why do people knock communism? It’s not a bad idea! From each his ability, to each his needs. It works great among my family and friends. We don’t keep tabs on who bought the last round of drinks, nor do we charge each other for rides to the airport. It. Just. Works.

Funny how it always seems to end in disaster when employed at a national level. I think it’s fair to say that communism is a perfectly reasonable economic system; it just hasn’t gotten over some scaling challenges.

Communism, but on the blockchain.

Kidding. Intra-family/friends transactions aren’t really communist — they’re governed by an informal accounting system with reputation as currency.

This was common in elite circles throughout antiquity. The economy of the Roman Republic revolved around amicitia, or mutual serviceability. It’s how the wealthy maintained business interests all over the Mediterranean despite living in a state of quasi-perpetual war. Existimatio, or reputation, dictated whether a person was worthy of receiving beneficia. Reputation was earned by engaging in liberalitas, or generosity, gratia, or gratitude, fides, or trust, and benevolentia, or benevolence.

Anthropologists sometimes refer to this as a moral economy; a system governed by customs and social pressure in the absence of formal regulation.

The number of participants in a reputation-based moral economy tops out at our ability to maintain persistent social relationships, also known as Dunbar’s number.

Or does it?

China’s rolling out a nationwide social credit system that assigns scores based on things like littering and helping old people. A handy app helps citizens identify nearby deadbeats so they can be properly shunned. We may not have the cognitive capacity to remember a nationwide network of amici, but computers do!

The Cultural Revolution and a communist history of encouraging citizens to snitch on neighbors has turned China into an exceptionally low-trust society. The rationale behind social credit is to restore a culture of trust. Seems counterintuitive — a moral economy based on amicitia is predicated on the idea that participants *like* each other, or at least pretend that they do. Information overshare tends to reduce likeability. Nevertheless, the surveillance will continue until morale improves.

See Also:
Koenraad Verboven. The Economy of Friends: Economic aspects of amicitia and patronage in the Late Republic. 2002.

Hi I’m back! Just returned from a trip to next century, and let me tell you, the future is WOKE.

(That’s right, I winter in the future. Global warming means San Francisco will be balmy in January.)

We might think we live in a progressive era, that we’ve come a long way since the Civil Rights movement, but it turns out the 21st century is a veritable dark age as far as social justice is concerned.

First of all, our current treatment of animals is super problematic. In a few years, we’ll embrace lab-grown meat and ban the use of livestock.

Everyone was glad to see the end of factory farms, but we never really thought about what we were gonna do with all those farm animals. See, we didn’t just realize the immorality of killing animals, we realized the immorality of owning animals. It turns out that species is a social construct, and biological taxonomy is a pseudoscience invented by Carl Linnaeus to justify anti-animalism.

In 2028, President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (yeah, sorry) will proclaim the emancipation of 100 million cattle, 75 million pigs, and 10 billion chickens. They’ll all be given equal rights. There were bigots who claimed that farm animals could never be integrated into high society, but California proved them wrong by appointing a horse to the Senate.

But if you thought livestock ownership was problematic, wait’ll you hear about the vegans. By 2048, the SPLC will have deemed them a hate group for committing genocide on entire plant species.

Oh yeah, plants have rights too. Did you know that plants feel pain? OMG, they do. The Open Borders movement will expand to include automatic amnesty for one of the most persecuted groups in the world: weeds. For thousands of years, so-called “weeds” have been beaten with hoes, smothered with mulch, and chemically eradicated with herbicides. We don’t actually use the term “weed” anymore — it’s a pejorative used to disparage plants with different growth habits.

As you can imagine, there was pushback. Some extremists held on to the abhorrent idea that only native flora should be allowed to live in certain areas. Anything else, they claim, is an invasive species. The theory of horticulture will be thoroughly debunked, but nativists will insist that foreign plant species leech resources from the soil and inhibit growth for native grasses. Maybe the native plants should stop being so lazy and shiftless.

Amnesty International will go from exposing sexual harassment on Twitter to scolding gardeners. Funny how human rights organizations always suffer from feature creep.

I couldn’t stick around to see what happens next, as I had to return to work. The future might sound dismal, but on the bright side, It’s okay to punch a vegan.