(Vas Fiction? Heh, Vasai hierarchies look like a good example of this sort of goal iteration) What we have: - Existing natural resources - A bunch of people who want different things - Layers of industries which either - Change natural resources into a processed resource or - Change processed resources into other processed resources What we want: - Satisfy the infrastructure requirements of the country - Satisfy the people's requirements and wants - Allow steady adjustment of requirements so as to not quench innovation, but - be stable enough to not go into the oscillatory lag cycle - Inform the population of what particular industries need to be expanded when demand increases - Let's consider something called an extended university model, wherein the product apparatus is composed of a number of parts. These are: - An open R&D organization working on the basis of free information exchange. As information is free (zero marginal cost), such a collaboration based system should be possible. Optionally incentives could be given to the idea producers (similar to in the Street Performer Protocol) depending on where on the individualist-communitarian scale the creatures are. - An experiment market given a certain share of the total economic production of the country, where newly designed products are distributed and their popularity judged, and where other organizations act as "portals", informing the public of what is new. - A number of specialists that create broad long term plans focusing on particular areas to further develop, and where the people vote to select the direction they prefer. - A limited feedback computerized planner that handles short term allocation on a massive basis. As the computers get better, the planner can be increasingly more fine-grained. - Multiple producer organizations that specialize in transforming material (raw resources to processed resources or processed to differently so). - A main token economy system on which the planned products are offered. Here the price of each product is normalized to reflect the work required to produce them. As the products become more scarce, the price is gradually adjusted, and this serves as information for both the people (knowing how accurate the plan was) and the planner (knowing how much to adjust the amount of this product produced in the short term while keeping the long term strategy) The purpose of the R&D organization is to both improve old products and create new; or rather, the information that is required to know how to produce the thing in question. This organization has access to quite a bit of various materials to prototype products, and may commission producers to do so, within limits. [TODO: How to decide which products are to be tested, and how much material the organization gets for prototyping. Probably use some sort of trust network or predictor with randomness. Favoritism (or its reverse, e.g Ignaz Philipp in science) seems to be a big problem. Everybody should be able to participate in the experiment market, though the stuff there will probably be quite expensive. ] From here the new products are created to a limited extent and put on the experiment market. This judges its worth, assuming that people have more or less the same amount of tokens. (Note that if not, the richer ones will spend more and therefore skew the "people's judgement of value") The proportionality of the various products' demand on the experiment market is then given to the planner (or maybe just the few most popular; depends on how much we have of stuff to throw around). [TODO: How to get around the relativism problem; that is, if all new products at a certain time are bad, then the least bad will be given priority, even though some older much better products may be more deserving (especially if the least bad requires a lot of resources).] - Established products are handled more easily. The planner gets input from demand, supply, and transformation requirements (what a given industry requires of raw resources to produce one quantity of whatever it is it produces; for end products, this can to some extent be taken from the R&D schematics). The planner then uses some form of solver algorithm (non/linear programming or AI) to design the most efficient resource allocation, considering two sources of information: - current time information, given by token economy feedback and previous long term plans. - future time information, given by the long term plan. (If you use planning entirely, you get a conventional command economy. If you use feedback entirely, you get a sort of "auto-rationing token economy" rather similar to a capitalist system with a very high tax, but without the private investment.) [TODO: Find out a way for the system to figure out what sorts of refinement plants would be useful and what raw and intermediary resources are not being used, to adjust production and possibly give R&D some ideas of what raw materials to use for their next products. Possibly have some sort of scouting interface so that one can discover what natural resources exist and how much is used, anticipating scarcity.] - The purpose of the long term plans is to expand the system, as well as to skew the planner to favor such expansion, or alternately only acknowledge growth and use it to better conditions (by requiring less work) rather than expand. Thus instead of being subordinate to the tightly wound feedback loop of investment and return, the extent and direction of expansion becomes a matter of politics. It should therefore be governed, at least indirectly, by the public. One way of doing this is given earlier in this document. First the population (or randomness, if more equality is desired) chooses a number of specialists and general ideas on what should be prioritized. The advantage of doing so compared to "voting with one's tokens" is that not only moment considerations affect the system, and that coordination is possible to a greater extent. Then the specialists create their long term plans (with constraints given by current plans, so that they can't overemphasize some future good and forget something as important as food, for instance, and with input from the planner suggestions on what areas to expand to fill demand) and the public votes (preferrably with preference voting of some sort). The plan is then implemented. There may be better ways of deciding planning than to give it to specialists or juries, but I cannot think of one. Abstractly, it would probably try to be a more continuous decision method than just [decide specialists], [choose from the choices they give]. In small communities, direct democratic means could be used, but where that is effective the community size is so small that planning isn't needed in the first place.