Neo Economy: Neo Capitalism, Neo Socialism, Neo Communism

Neo Economy: Neo Capitalism, Neo Socialism, Neo Communism

The potential economic transformation via new technologies.

We read a lot about the impact of new technologies on new material and new services production, that we call innovation. And what about the impact of new technology on our traditional historical human economic models?

As the priest won’t usually disrupt religion, the economist won’t probably disrupt economy. And what about us, do we have the potential to have a new view on economy based on our intuition and new techs?

We can consider, even if it is synthetic, that three main economic theories and definitions could be considered: 

Capitalism: A model based on freedom of money and private property, allowing increasing growth, profit, global wealth

Socialism: One potential definition is the balance between power of money and power of democracy

Communism: One economic system based on private property abolition, and people collective governance

The idea here is not to find the appropriate definition, but to see how each of these models could be reviewed with the potential of our new technologies: digital, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Let’s have a look on capitalism.

Freedom of money today can be extended to the creation of money as demonstrated by bitcoin, ether and others altcoins. Each of us can become a central banker, a knight with its own economic power. 

Private property can be respected but syndicated via crowd initiatives, crowd funding, crowd investing, crowd financing. A taste of financial cooperative which becomes larger and larger via the key leaders like Prosper, Lending Club …

What about Socialism:

The balance between power of money and power of democracy can be deeply modified, via smart money concept, monetarized smart contracts, and e-democracy, direct or representative. The invisible hand of “money” market could be balanced with the invisible hand of “democracy” market giving new dimensions to Adam Smith's theory. 

And Communism :

Always difficult to give an unbiased view on the history of communism. But the key problem in this human experience was at first the human centralized and dictatorial governance… Today we could imagine an e-democracy in a communist economy, parametered by a centralized or decentralised economy based on smart payments and smart money.

What this short article tries to demonstrate, above our personal opinion and psychology, is that the economic world and economic theory have the potential to be totally reviewed with the new technologies, for better we hope, and for worst if this huge world-wide challenge is not well managed. We, people, will be part of this new human exploration, where bankers and banks could have a key role to play.

Peter Lerner

worked at Wenzhou Kean University 2016-2019 as assistant professor

7y

First, communism was never about collective governance. It was about the governance by a ruling Politburo and, most of the time, one man: Stalin, Mao or Kim. Roman Empire was also based on private property and allowed unlimited wealth acquisition but it could hardly be called "capitalistic." That's happens when financial services professionals dwell on history...

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quite interesting. my theory is agile influenced politics. huge problems which we have seen in v cycle was all in ancient parties. huge problems we see in agile we see in the new parties.

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Raphael Douady

Research Professor at University of Paris I: Pantheon-Sorbonne

7y

Yann, goodwill is always to be encouraged! Provided we always remember that Hell is paved with good intentions. This is the best way to avoid it. The first thing is to identify what is new and what isn't. You go to another planet with a completely different ecosystem, but in fact you find out that still have predators and preys. They are not lions and zebras, but they behave the same. Money is money and peoples' attitude towards it won't change. A small population of passionate innovators creating a new currency are like the inventors of Internet - comparable to 1968 Hippies creating communities without the sense of property. But as soon as it was generalized, then it faced exactly the same issues as the usual organisation of societies, needing protection against theft, predatory behavior, etc. So even cryptocurrencies will need physical protection, states and armies, etc. Sad but humans are humans... Best wishes!

Nicolas Stampf

Conseil en Gouvernance, Qualité, Environnement ; coach Lean et Facilitateur (production IT)

7y

Interesting appetizer article. I can see a third economy which you didn't dive into: the P2P economy where people interact directly with one another. It's most often highly a gift economy (I help you without expecting a return in payment). But with the growing access to technologies related to money, new complementary currencies are swiftly approaching a commodity status where each community could create its own money (probably blockchain-based) to ease flow of exchange within itself. I can envision how this might pose a real threat to traditional money operators, especially with a (still at the fringe, though more and more loudly heard) discourse on the negative impact on debt and interest-based money. The current societies, with their current economies, have money raise toward the 1%, leaving the 99% unable to live decently because of a lack of money. Yet, once they'll realize that lack of money doesn't mean lack of skills and knowledge, and that they have access to money creation tools, they'll be able to diverge from the traditional economy and create parallel economies allowing them to thrive and capitalize on their strengths. What will then happen to the traditional economy operators (banks, central banks, and companies financed on classical loans) when people just turn their back to all that stuff?

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