• Get rid of all money in society.
• Switch to a social commune society.
• There is no "monetary cost" to acquire things. You are entitled to certain things based off of your standing in a social ranking system.
• Social rank is determined by your work and contributions to other people.
• Social rank is based off of a point system. Every year, your social points are evaluated to determine your social standing. The harder and smarter you work and benefit your fellow man, the more points you earn. Doctors, teachers, social workers, scientists, engineers, farmers etc. will be very highly valued.
• Even if you do absolutely nothing your whole life and live on the lowest tier, you still get to eat, survive, have healthcare, etc. It's a modest life, but it's not a bad one.
• There is no such thing as "retirement". You can choose to stop working at any time, your social tier just degrades over time.
• If you commit crimes or break the law, you lose points. The percentage of points you lose depends on the severity of your crime. Negative points mean jail time until the points become non-negative.
• If you are a high tier person, you are treated like a VIP by society and get VIP treatment.

A system like this would destroy the financial industry. A bank would instantly be obsolete. The investment and finance sectors would be gone. Accountants and taxes would be gone. The lifelong pursuit of money would be gone. The greed and incentive structure would be turned towards benefiting your fellow man, so the greediest people would be the most philanthropic people and greatest contributors to the well being of mankind. In this sense, greed would be good. Advancements in AI and automation would be a net benefit for all mankind, enabling more people to work less, and that would be seen as a "good thing" instead of a threat. There would be no such thing as a "starving artist". People in the arts would be free to create their works without concern for money and basic survival needs.

I think this is a viable economic system. But, the viability of it depends on how it can be abused by clever people. The other potential wrinkle to work out is how "value to others" is evaluated in terms of points. If a baker makes me a loaf of bread, that's got some value to it, but if a doctor cures me of a sickness or disease, that's got much more value to me. So, who gets to decide the objective value of things when everything has subjective value? A baker who gives me a loaf of bread would be far more valuable to me if I'm starving to death, vs. a doctor who cures a small cough I had.

Anyways, I think this economic system might be interesting to implement in a game world. Instead of using a capital centric economic system, maybe it would be interesting to experiment with other economic models to see how they work?

24 minutes ago, slayemin said:

• Social rank is determined by your work and contributions to other people.
• Social rank is based off of a point system. Every year, your social points are evaluated to determine your social standing. The harder and smarter you work and benefit your fellow man, the more points you earn. Doctors, teachers, social workers, scientists, engineers, farmers etc. will be very highly valued.

25 minutes ago, slayemin said:

I think this is a viable economic system. But, the viability of it depends on how it can be abused by clever people. The other potential wrinkle to work out is how "value to others" is evaluated in terms of points. If a baker makes me a loaf of bread, that's got some value to it, but if a doctor cures me of a sickness or disease, that's got much more value to me. So, who gets to decide the objective value of things when everything has subjective value? A baker who gives me a loaf of bread would be far more valuable to me if I'm starving to death, vs. a doctor who cures a small cough I had.

Really the biggest question is WHO? WHO decided the value of everything? The biggest issues I see that stem from that are resource allocation. How do we decide who gets what? More, important, WHO  decides?

This is the hardest part of designing any Communist/Post-Capitalist system: who decides? Currently, tons of aggregated people decide on what is in 'demand' and that demand drives more demand for intermediary products, and so on and so forth. One solution I posited in an earlier thread was that an AI or many AIs would make these decisions and result in a very similar society as you have stated here.

5 minutes ago, deltaKshatriya said:

Really the biggest question is WHO? WHO decided the value of everything? The biggest issues I see that stem from that are resource allocation. How do we decide who gets what? More, important, WHO  decides?

This is the hardest part of designing any Communist/Post-Capitalist system: who decides? Currently, tons of aggregated people decide on what is in 'demand' and that demand drives more demand for intermediary products, and so on and so forth. One solution I posited in an earlier thread was that an AI or many AIs would make these decisions and result in a very similar society as you have stated here.

I would tentatively say "politicians" get to make those decisions. But then, the follow up question becomes, "Okay, who gets to be a politician?". I think the current political systems in democratic systems are deeply flawed and tend to devolve into oligarchies and attracts people who are interested in power, rather than attractive benevolent policy makers suited for the task. I am a bit biased here, but I think the people who would be most qualified to be politicians would be disinterested philosophers. Political appointment would be based on a randomized selection from a wide pool of philosopher candidates, and would be limited to terms of about 4 years? And serving a term would probably need to lower their statistical chances of being randomly selected for a sequential term. The worrisome part about a system like this would be that philosophers would be disinclined to become philosophers if it meant that they had a chance of being politicians. But hey, some of the best politicians in history have also been great philosophers, so maybe this is the right general direction to go.

16 minutes ago, Oberon_Command said:

Who will enforce this? What is the algorithm used to compute a person's ranking? How vulnerable is it to blackmail and bribery? What guarantee do we have that someone wouldn't manipulate others for the sake of a higher ranking, or subvert the system entirely?

I have many questions and am not at all convinced that this is workable.

"Who will enforce this?"
I don't know. It would need to be a part of an established legal system, with checks and balances, accountability, and policing.

"What is the algorithm used to compute a person's ranking?"
I don't know yet. I haven't developed one. The approach would be to identify professions which serve the best interests of mankind and take a lot of effort to acquire, and then rate those highest (ie, doctors, teachers, farmers). Once we've identified the things which contribute the most to the overall well being of mankind, we can come up with an algorithm which helps best model that desired ranking of value. Whatever algorithm is developed, it should also be transparent to everyone so that they understand how it works.

"How vulnerable is it to blackmail and bribery?"
I don't know. I think it's important to note that the whole entire incentive structure for blackmail and bribery would be fundamentally changed if currency is obsolete. So, the real question is, "Would blackmail and bribery still exist? If yes, in what form and for what objectives?". Ostensibly, it would probably be used by clever people to increase their societal ranking without putting in the requisite effort. This could be counter acted by making it illegal, punished by a deduction of points, possibly dropping them to a lower tier. The point award system would probably need to be a transparent system so people can see how and why someone is at the tier they're at (which creates accountability and incentive by example at the same time). The motive for trying to exploit the system for personal gain would need to be considered and accounted for, such a way that the difficulty is high, the risk is high, and the reward is low. If it can be designed this way, nobody would bother trying to game the system. If you make compliance the easiest path to follow, that's how people would behave to "game" the system.

"I have many questions and am not at all convinced that this is workable."
I'm kicking the tires on this idea to test its viability and vectors for abuse. It's different. It could work if its engineered correctly. It needs to be tested. At this stage, I'm just developing the concept and trying to identify my blind spots and oversights. Any feedback on trouble spots is welcome

7 hours ago, slayemin said:

the real question is, "Would blackmail and bribery still exist? If yes, in what form and for what objectives?". Ostensibly, it would probably be used by clever people to increase their societal ranking without putting in the requisite effort

Or, perhaps to subvert the system entirely. Your ranking doesn't matter if you're able to access greater benefits anyway.  People cheating the system might simply coast through life on the lowest ranking, but use nefarious means to access goods and services intended only for the highest ranks.

If we're talking about the real world here, really the biggest problem you face is that you start with the assumption that the "means of production" are now publicly/socially owned. Which means...what? That you have made a revolution to seize them from their current private owners? Or are we assuming that the current owners see your idealized blueprint, realize it's the most rational/moral scheme, and give up their property willingly? Somehow I don't think it's gonna happen...

But anyway, let's assume some kind of revolution has taken place in a country and now the means of production of wealth *are* socially owned. I really see 2 options here:

1) Improbable : The majority of the population of this country(or countries) agrees social ownership is the way forward and is left alone - both from internal and external enemies. In that case, I don't see much use of such idealized schemas such as yours - the organization and questions about who and how decides the resource allocation will be figured out by the workers democratically, and it may vary from place to place. We don't really know what it would be like, and we don't need to. It's not like capitalism was designed by some professors in Florence in the 16th century and was put into implementation.

There will be failures and there will be setbacks and trial-and-errors, but since there is no strong opposition either from inside or outside to the institution of social onwership, there's no rush, we can make errors. By that I don't mean the workers will do random things until something works - of course much thought will be put into this and many economic literature will be written that analyzes the situation, finds errors, proposes solutions, etc(always inside the boundaries of socially-owned means of production).

2) Most Probable : There *is* strong internal and external opposition from remaining capitalists that will try to wreck the new economy because it hurts their interests. In which case workers have very little time or space to "experiment" with their organization. The country will probably fall-back to some kind of ad-hoc bureaucratic central planning, with all the pros and cons that come with that. This system will be reformed from time to time in order to make it more efficient, but really since the economy is "under siege", there are many limitations to what you can actually do.

Still, ideas/schemas like yours exist(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics), but my opinion is that, like I said, don't have much to do with the real world. As a "proof of concept", they might be useful though.