Read on Twitter
So I fully admit that my opinion on shorting stocks has changed completely after reading the opinions of others (i.e.: the usual left-wing market anarchists that have awoken me from my dogmatic slumber), and it makes sense to me that banning shorting is a bad idea since it--
--functions as a mechanism for detecting bullshit. Which doesn't mean I or anyone that I read is against what the wallstreetbets subreddit is doing right now, especially since this sort of betting happens all the time with institutional investors but, apparently, only they--
--get to have this sort of fun (which should go to show the general culture of entitlement the rich have, something that's as economically suicidal as it is unethical). I mean, shorting thanks to insider trading or just trying to destroy a stock for vindictive reasons is bad--
--but that shit's symptomatic of the wider problems of centralized wealth under capitalism.
I think now would be a good time to think about alternatives to the stock market and see if institutions like that couldn't try to outcompete the clusterfuck of bets on performance--
I think now would be a good time to think about alternatives to the stock market and see if institutions like that couldn't try to outcompete the clusterfuck of bets on performance--
--and value...but that's not me saying I have any ideas. I don't.
I mean, reading some of the literature from the prediction markets circuit, there's some evidence that reputation matters more than financial incentives, which I think makes sense. It's sort of like that study--
I mean, reading some of the literature from the prediction markets circuit, there's some evidence that reputation matters more than financial incentives, which I think makes sense. It's sort of like that study--
--where this school switched from a system where parents with tardy children had to speak to the teachers to a system where they paid a fine, and lateness went through the roof: putting a monetary price on a bet might simplify things too much relative to a reputation-based--
--system, and this study found an interesting result where egalitarian, communicating social networks outperform other types of organizations for "wisdom of the crowds", including isolated ones: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/E5070
So maybe having a reputation-based market for ownership shares and bets on performance might be a step in the right direction: it'd be interesting to theorize how communicative, reputation-based alternatives to a stock market would interact with worker cooperatives too. Maybe--
--that'd be a mechanism for integrating the cooperative more into the broader economy and help make them act as producer/consumer cooperatives with networked voting mechanisms on key, economy-wide issues. Maybe. I dunno. I'm trying to actually come up with alternatives for once.
William Gillis has a good article that talks about how transparency needs to be hard-fought and that problems like secrecy and impediments to information transfer aren't problems that are just gonna disappear (they cure could be worse than the disease in some cases), so maybe--
--a reputation-based alternative to a stock-market, since I think it can handle information better and has more capabilities for navigating complexity than using a single numerical metric to evaluate performance, could out-compete a regular stock market in a freed market economy.
If there's a diversity of ways of evaluating performance and value and all that, then each type can supplement and overlap with one another: but a reputation-based one can force the other methods to behave more ethically and create major pressure to keep the kind of shit that's--
--coming to light at bay, or at least mitigate it's effects. But, again, I dunno: I'm spit-balling here.
(Gillis's article is here, by-the-way: https://c4ss.org/content/53019 )
(Gillis's article is here, by-the-way: https://c4ss.org/content/53019 )
