Upgradian Economy
What plan could boost the economy in this modern era? Here's where we'd start.
Please review our other ideas on the economy first — they set up the problems this page is trying to solve.
We won't lay out every detail of the Upgradian Economy here — but we can say it's more than "a concept of a plan." A good showman leaves them wanting more — a line commonly floated around as an Abraham Lincoln quote, though the historical record actually traces it to P.T. Barnum's era of showmanship, not Lincoln's own words.
Direct the Money Supply, Don't Just Expand It
Countries expand the money supply as needed, and always have. In recent years — because of COVID and the 2008 crisis — we saw multiple rounds of Quantitative Easing (QE): QE1, QE2, and talk of QE to Infinity. Later came Quantitative Tightening (QT), an attempt to undo the real or potential trouble QE created. You can be the judge of how well that worked.
Our proposal: when the money supply expands, direct it toward upgrading infrastructure — not toward inflating the stock market or adding fuel to the housing price bubble. See Government-directed liquidity
About Housing
Housing has quietly changed what it even means to own a home:
- Then: A house was a place to live. No one expected its price to climb much.
- Later: A house was still a place to live — but it also looked like a good investment.
- Now: a house is just a speculative investment, and it may not even matter if anyone lives in it.
A person or corporation can own tens of thousands of houses and steadily raise rents until housing costs eat a painful share of a tenant's income.
The fix: lower property taxes for single-home ownership, and raise them — incrementally or exponentially — for anyone who owns more than three homes, whether a person or a corporation.
The obvious objection: "But we want house prices as high as possible, and never falling — people are counting on that for retirement." That tension is exactly what the Shortage Economy page digs into.
About "Work From Home"
Working from home is the way of the future. Plenty has been said about its benefits already — we'll just add a comment about traffic.
Sitting stopped in traffic for hours, every day, going to and from work, is painful and wasteful. The science fiction story "Chronopolis" imagined a fix for gridlocked cities: assign every worker a color code, and stagger commute times by color so the roads never all fill at once.
Remote work is the modern, low-tech version of the same idea — it doesn't need a color code, because it just removes the commute entirely.
About the National Debt
Historically, when countries face a debt crisis, they have three real options:
Poland — under the leadership associated with Lech Wałęsa — put its national debt on hold, and it appears to have worked.
Directed Liquidity is the tool for any of these paths: central banks and governments deciding deliberately where money needs to go, rather than letting it drift toward whatever asset class is already inflating. We have our own ideas about how Directed Liquidity should be used — starting with Part 1, above.
— often credited to Groucho Marx. We don't want to be doom-and-gloom, but situational awareness matters. As the old saying goes, one person's hardship is another person's harvest — and there are people (Warren Buffett, reportedly sitting on a major cash position as of this writing) who are prepared to buy the bargains that come out of any disaster.
Thankfully, the Federal Reserve at least tries to engineer a Soft Landing to ease the pain when asset bubbles burst.
The "Out of Whack" Campaign
We've thought about running an "Out of Whack" campaign — or maybe a "Two Worlds" campaign — to tackle a related problem: how do we upgrade the non-profit world so it can compete with the for-profit, for-suffering world?