Progressive {$everything}

This past Friday we drove from Lexington KY to Durham NC via the West Virginia Turnpike. What had been 3x$3 tolls was now 3x$4 tolls. This disappointed me, as tolls are a regressive tax - one that affects poor people much more than rich people. In the US, since 1913 the progressive income tax has been 1 of the only things countering the natural tendency of capitalism to produce runaway inequality.

A natural next step is a progressive wealth tax. aka capital or Piketty tax. That is why proposals like the Green New Deal include such a tax.

Further afield, I have recently been thinking about promoting (voluntary) progressive tipping. My wife & I got to visit France 6 years ago and both liked the "no tipping" of servers in France. Pay the people a living wage, what a concept!

Meanwhile, back in the United States of Capitalism, even though trickle-down economics is, per Krugman, a "zombie" economic theory - one that is known to be wrong, but that refuses to die - it still has influenced a lot of the US economic system for many decades. So I try to actually practice it via aggressive tipping: 100-33%, $5 minimum tip. All 3 of my daughters worked as servers (my son was a very good dishwasher), and for every 1 who over-tips, I guarantee there are 5 who under-tip.

A progressive tipping policy might look like:

• if you're in the 0-50th %tile financially, you tip 15%;
• 50-60, 20%
• 60-70, 25%
• 70-80, 30%
• 80-90, 40%
• 90-99, 50-100%
• .01%'ers, 500%
• .001%'ers, 1000%

I think this should be a no-brainer for the better-off. But, unless you are in the 0.001%, you probably don't think of yourself as "better-off". Maybe this would be another form of tumbrel insurance for rich folk besides UBI?

Note, someone told me that "tips" stands for "to insure proper service". Whatever. If service isn't great, I don't know what that server is having to deal with, so I support them regardless.

Then I got to thinking, tips are a "cost of goods" - a price. Why not have progressive pricing on everything, on a scale similar to the tipping? The rich are willing to pay big bucks for exclusive/rare/top-shelf products - how about they pay big bucks for everything, and subsidize purchases by the less well off?

Or, maybe even better and easier, expand the really inventive concept put forward by Karl Schroeder in "Stealing Worlds". There Schroeder posits that the emerging dominant cryptocurrency automatically distributes coins from wallets with too much to wallets with too little. This idea reflects one of my mantras: that money is software. How about a cryptocurrency that implements progressive pricing? A progressive cryptocurrency.

What is the range over which this adjustment should run? Why, the range that keeps the world in Kate Raworth's Doughnut, of course! I would guess that the upper limit on income/wealth would be greater than, say, the 9:1 ratio which limits the wages of executives based on the lowest paid workers' wages implemented by the Spanish Mondragon Coop. I suspect we can stay in the doughnut and still have filthy rich people - but maybe not the 182,000:1 wage ratio of Jeff Bezos to a $15/hour worker.

The concept, brought forth by Schroeder, is that, rather than trying to address inequality with band-aids after the fact, we should build more equality directly into the infrastructure. And while we're at it, this gives us a throttle which we can use to get us and keep us in the doughnut.

Hopefully food for thought. What else could you build into a cryptocurrency?

That Didn't Take Long

So after establishing a reading heuristic, no books with "empire" in the title, I nonetheless decided to read "Empress of Forever", by Max Gladstone, 2019, 655 pages. I liked his Craft Sequence, and this book had great reviews.

Bad behavior rewarded! There was 0 feudalism, just an insanely powerful Empress of the Galaxy, who got her job by taking control of The Cloud on earth - which expanded to be The Galactic Cloud - at a very early stage ?!?!?

Very engaging writing, a memorable fellowship established to fight the Empress, including a character who is gray goo. A very good read. Note, the fast majority of characters are female, & I think all the romantic relationships in the book are female-female. A lot of this lately in sci-fi. Male geeks aren't offended, & females are empowered, FTW!

Next up, non-fiction?!?!? "Rising Tide", by John M. Barry, 1998, 653 pages, subtitled "The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America". It was recommended to me several years ago by Michael Boggs of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville. It is: a history of flood control theories from 1870 to 1930; the story of the 1927 Mississippi flood which put 1000s of miles^2 underwater; and the tragic tale of LeRoy Percy, friend of Teddy Roosevelt, boss man of Greenville MI, in the heart of Mississippi delta.

Very informative. I sometimes find it hard to read historical stuff when the real people being followed are total assholes. The main lesson from the book: aristocratic/oligarchic noblesse oblige will fall by the wayside when greed/capitalism dictate. Percy was very progressive in his treatment of blacks - but because economically, he needed their cheap labor. He kicked the klan out in the 1920s as his father had kicked them out after the civil war.

But when it was time for the blacks to be taken off the levy and to safety in the worst of the flooding, Percy undermined his son's decision to evacuate the blacks along with the whites because he was afraid the labor would not return. His son, the county disaster manager, reacted badly to his father's betrayal and his relationship with the now imprisoned blacks became increasingly bad, and a national scandal. Oof!

#3, "This Is How You Lose the Time War", by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, 2019, 136 pages. I enjoyed the other Max Gladstone a lot. This one not so much. I like the title, and it has an interesting plot: (female) time warriors/fixers, 1 from the Red civilization - computers, VR, the cybernetic singularity - and 1 from Blue - bioscience, genetic engineering, Avatar (the movie) type sensibilities - battle each other across the ages, trying to change various events to favor their side. They start corresponding, fall in love, etc. Romeo & Juliet I guess. Somehow it just didn't work for me. It was short though.