> I'd miss is the ability to save up your high income for a few years so that you could compensate for a low income the next few years
I was thinking that people could work part-time and earn 50% of standard income. Median household income is around $50k right now, so this is a decent standard of living.
> if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to
A two-person household where both members worked full time would be making 3.6x the current median household income, which is way more than they need. This surplus could be used as investment capital, where it would be distributed and decentralized, so it would be much easier to do Kickstarter-style funding. If we accept $75k at the point where money stops having an impact on happiness, individuals would have 20% above that line to play with for those kinds of things. Essentially, the stack ranking converts your surplus productivity into status for you, and distributed evenly to your friends and neighbors, who have the power to return it to you if they think your project is socially or economically valuable.
Some good points though, especially the part about profit as an index of what makes people happy. The problem with our current system is that this is only true if your profits come from people who make less than $75k. 40% of consumer spending is driven by people in the top 10% ($82,500 annual income), so it's fair to say that that spending is misallocated and doesn't contribute to overall happiness.
I was thinking that people could work part-time and earn 50% of standard income. Median household income is around $50k right now, so this is a decent standard of living.
> if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to
A two-person household where both members worked full time would be making 3.6x the current median household income, which is way more than they need. This surplus could be used as investment capital, where it would be distributed and decentralized, so it would be much easier to do Kickstarter-style funding. If we accept $75k at the point where money stops having an impact on happiness, individuals would have 20% above that line to play with for those kinds of things. Essentially, the stack ranking converts your surplus productivity into status for you, and distributed evenly to your friends and neighbors, who have the power to return it to you if they think your project is socially or economically valuable.
Some good points though, especially the part about profit as an index of what makes people happy. The problem with our current system is that this is only true if your profits come from people who make less than $75k. 40% of consumer spending is driven by people in the top 10% ($82,500 annual income), so it's fair to say that that spending is misallocated and doesn't contribute to overall happiness.