The Contribution Index
A System for Fair Compensation
In a Nutshell:
The Contribution Index is a proposed concept within the Ten-Tier System to effectively calculate salary. It’s a digital accounting system that quantifies a citizen’s personal contributions to society (Contribution Score), ranking them anonymously in the Index to understand the ‘on paper’ value of an individual relative to others. This is calculated by one’s work, responsibilities, roles (e.g. community leadership), innovations, and other productive activities that uphold and develop society.
The primary purpose of the Contribution Index is to find a way to make financial income and rewards as fair as possible, controlling the wealth gap while maintaining worthwhile rewards for those who work hard and contribute meaningfully. As the Ten-Tier System proposes a digital economy, the idea is to scale income rather than redistribute it through taxation, basing personal wealth and economic value on a broader variety of factors than just one’s job or career.
Core Questions:
How can we make society economically fair and functional?
How can we close the wealth gap while still retaining worthwhile rewards for hard work and innovation?
How can we limit the economic power and influence of the individual (therefore mitigating corruption, monopolisation, and political interference), spreading wealth and power more fairly across society?
Is it possible to incentivise general positive and productive behaviour outside of work?
Key Points / Sections:
Discussion: Flattening the Wealth Curve
Explaining the Contribution Index
Scaling vs Redistribution (the eradication of tax)
Recap: the Digital Democratic Platform (DDP)
The Contribution Score: Determining Value of Work
Incentivising Quality Contribution
China’s Social Credit System: Good Tech, Bad Management
The Competence Score Explained
Payday: How we will earn and spend
Deciding What is ‘Fair’
Discussion: Flattening the Wealth Curve
Wealth disparity has existed since the dawn of the dime and likely always will. In a society with buildings to be built and machines to be maintained, the industrious individual can’t be blamed for mining more out of the mountain than a TV Terry who seeks only to indulge in easy pleasures. Try as we might, we can’t design a future purely on principles of love and harmony; we need to consider an economic and industrial reality where agriculture, construction, medicine and transport, to name a few, require the dedication of resources and labour.
Through the explosive developments of a capitalist-industrialist world, empires have been forged that have left some of us in the dirt while others have risen as gods of the new millennium. Our observations of this economic unfairness have rallied a cry for greater equality, calling for the culling of billionairism to make things fairer. But this notion of ‘fairness’ can be approached by many different angles. When we have a planet of varied ages, sizes, abilities, skillsets, mindsets, knowledge, experience, aspirations and drive, it’s only natural to have just as great a selection of different forms and levels of contribution.
This contribution may not necessarily be limited by the boundaries of one’s paid job, although we can keep simple the equation of more work (both quality and quantity) equating to higher earnings. Yet behemoths of industry have made a mockery of any level playing field we might have hoped for. Despite strategy being a core part of the capitalist game, we are no longer playing the innocent game of value provision in a free market. Manipulation, exploitation, and sabotage have been key strategies that, in conjunction with the exponentialisation of online business, have ultimately created a canyon of disparity between elite businessmen and your average hard worker.
Hard work is far from the primary mechanism for success in the modern world—though perhaps it doesn’t need to be when cleverness can move a boulder faster than muscle. Whatever measuring sticks we use, we still ought to consider an economic framework in a future society that put reins on how much money, power, and influence one person can have, while still keeping compelling and worthwhile incentives for someone to dedicate their time, energy, thought, cleverness, heart and soul, to activities that are providing value to greater society.
In this balance, one of the aforementioned words keeps coming back to mind. Fairness. How do we make things fair? With such a blend of talent and personality in the world, we need to acknowledge and appreciate our differences while still appreciating that some people—regardless of whether it is through their born gifts or hard work—will be performing better than others. And not just differently; I do mean better. That’s the simple reality.
After all, if we can’t achieve perfect equality between siblings raised under the same roof, how could we possibly expect to do it in broader society? Inequality may be a curse of society, but it is also a fact of life, contributing—in some ways at least—to the beauty of variety and uniqueness. Complete and universal equality is neither possible nor favourable in designing a functional society; and in conceptualising a new world where people expectedly work to earn their keep, we ought to respect the natural differences between people in ability, effort, and circumstance. However, poverty isn’t a natural phenomenon; it’s a contextual state of living that has been created by us.
We can easily recognise that the extraordinary wealth of some individuals is problematic when their wealth and power come at the cost of everyone else. Life on a poverty-stricken planet seems a cruel joke when we consider the god-like technology and mountains of wealth at our collective disposal, where in one corner of the world people are collecting Lamborghinis for fun, while in another corner people are sifting through garbage for their next meal.
But while life may never be perfectly fair, and the new-age socialist idea of ‘enforcing fairness’ rings ironically of tyranny, there are measures we can take to create greater equality of opportunity and greater alignment between societal contribution and compensation.
With the installation of a new global system and the emergence of digital technology, we have the opportunity to create better ways to work, to understand how people are working, and to compensate them accordingly. While it makes sense to reward people more for greater effort and achievement, surely there is a fairer, more intelligent way to close this enormous wealth gap than the crude concept of taxation.
For this, we have devised the Contribution Index.
Explaining the Contribution Index
In simple terms, the Contribution Index is the recording and ranking of each citizen’s contributions to society. Based on a person’s job, societal roles, responsibilities, and activities that are benefitting society in some way, we can calculate someone’s overall salary (see the ‘Spending Credit’ concept in the ‘Digitalisation of Money’ post) that reflects how much they are contributing to the upkeep, culture, and development of society.
Through a closer integration of our societal roles with technology, we can build a digital profile of someone in terms of their contextual utility and competence as well as recording one’s notable activity, determining the economic value of these. This has the potential for quite broad application within society, but the two primary points are:
To quantify someone’s income (spending power) fairly;
To have an understanding of someone’s professional knowledge, experience, qualifications, and skillsets—how they can be most useful to society and be best aligned with a vocation that engages and fulfils them.
While market rates for jobs are dictated on a variety of factors, the wealth distribution of society—both within nations and between them—is rather outrageous. To flatten the curve within a nation, those in favour of socialist capitalism will present the popular ‘solution’ of taxation to shift some gold from the piles of the rich to the pockets of the poor—or into a government budget to be spent on things we citizens usually don’t get to dictate. And this all happens after it’s earned.
After money has already been earned, taking it away again seems almost slightly cruel, and it becomes understandable that people don’t like tax. Rather than this redistribution scheme we call tax, leeching pennies from the public against their will for purposes that may or may not benefit them, wouldn’t it make sense to leave the middleman out of the equation? Wouldn’t it be simpler and better if this taxation scheme didn’t exist, where money designated for societal benefit (what governments are meant to be spending on) is generated and delegated without having to reach into the pockets of the civilian? What if we had a way to decide the optimal use and flow of money in advance, in a way that is fair, balanced, and practical?
Instead of the quantity of one’s earnings being based on how cleverly a person can leverage or exploit a capitalist economy, where your personal economic value is dictated by a market that makes our entertainers rich and our teachers poor, the Ten-Tier System allows a long-overdue intervention. With an economy based on democratic principles, not only can we reassess the inherent value of work and societal contribution, but we can find a way to bring an end to the monstrous imbalances in society once and for all.
Again, the problem is not that there is a difference of wealth between individuals, but that this difference is so large, so uncontrollable, so dangerous and even destructive to society, that something needs to be done. While we may not want to completely eradicate disparity of wealth, we can seek to lessen or even have full control over the proportional increases and exponentiality of wealth generation. When ‘money makes money’, this principle in its extreme is destined to bankrupt and distort society over time, which is exactly what we’re observing.
While no one has to or should be ‘poor’ per se, comparative wealth still seems a necessary factor in a large society that is not yet culturally evolved to be completely altruistic. Even in an advanced society such a thing might be unrealistic, and so we ultimately have to create a system where people will work for their own benefit, and there is motivation to work well. [Post coming soon on fostering a productive culture.]
But consider a world where the proportional increase of salary between people stays static, where the wealth gap is literally controllable.
Imagine a world where a citizen is assigned to a salary based on their overall contributions to society, instead of a salary being decided by a personal agreement with your employer.
Imagine that there are even salary allotments that people fit into—you might think of them as pay brackets—where your contributions relative to everyone else determines your income relative to everyone else.
Imagine that society has a preordained ‘combined salary budget’ for its citizens, where a portion of society’s total wealth is reserved for citizen spending, distributed among workers according to the proportionality of their contributions.
We could have the power—if we wanted—to flip the wealth curve upside down. Hypothetically, we could give a lot of benefit to someone just entering the work force, rewarding their efforts to engage with society, while making a salary jump exponentially harder for those further up the pay ladder. In a highly competitive world that has achieved universal abundance, this could be the reality of our economic future—needing to optimise and maximise our personal contributions to attain the tiniest advantages and perks, rather than allowing the re-emergence of a distinguished elite class that seems undeserving of the sheer enormity of wealth and power at their disposal. In a future governed by the democratic Ten-Tier System, proportionality will be ours to master.
Scaling vs Redistribution
Instead of a socialist-like redistribution (tax) scheme that in some ways punishes success (the more you earn, the more you’re taxed), the core idea of the Contribution Index is to scale wealth according to the individual’s efforts, innovations, and accomplishments.
In the public sphere, socialism is considered by many to be the only viable alternative to capitalism. On a large societal scale, the social ownership of Socialism and community living of Communism break down, because they depend on the coordination and inherent goodness of the fellow citizen—‘the stranger’—in their actions and propensity to give as much as they take. Applying socialist ideals to a capitalist framework tends to malform society into being ‘State owned’ rather than ‘socially owned’, robbing the citizens of assets and accountability. Even with its more innocent policies, it philosophises a kind of Robin Hood tax to redistribute wealth—taking from the rich to give to the poor. The more you earn, the more that is taken by the State to give to people who haven’t earned as much. To some people this is punishment for being clever, industrious, and well-planned—and reinforcement for the less wealthy individuals that they can receive rewards without effort.
There is a tale often used to analogise socialism. An economics professor at a university demonstrates that equalising grades across the class does not result in universal success, but rather prevents any true kind of success and ultimately leads to widespread dissatisfaction and dysfunction:
After the first class test, where everyone’s marks were equalised, everyone in the class was given the same B grade. Those who usually got Cs and Ds celebrated, elated at the initial results, smug in the fact that they could do minimal work to get a respectable grade. Those who usually got As, however, saw huge unfairness in this. For the next test, they refused to study hard on behalf of the others.
The next test resulted in a flat D grade. Now no one was happy. Arguments broke out and very few people took it on themselves to study for a united grade where they ultimately expected failure. This represented a societal and economic collapse.
So while redistribution of wealth sounds like a simple enough idea to solve the problem of great wealth inequality, in practice it’s highly problematic. But what options have we? Socialism doesn’t necessarily need to be so extreme and uniform in its redistribution, though it seems such a clumsy approach to dealing with the wealth disparity that is plaguing us.
There would be some incomplete truth in the statement that there is a level of jealousy and contempt within this ideology, hating the man (or woman) who does well for himself (or herself). For those who rightly earn their keep, heavier tax could very well be considered unfair, given success often comes off the back of hard work, dedication and sacrifice, usually requiring a cleverly strategised approach to business that should not be forgotten when throwing around statements of privilege and luck. However, the capitalist world is far from being a paragon of fairness, and taking a little off the top of a billionaire’s mountain of gold certainly isn’t going to kill them.
While being a billionaire is quite, quite different to being a millionaire, suppose we can create a world where nobody is entitled to have such enormous personal wealth. This should not be for reasons of punishing extreme success (even if considered to derive from exploitation of workers and loopholes in law or tax), but for limiting the control and influence a single person can have. At extreme levels a person could shape a world as they see fit, and when tied to narcissism or elitism can have dangerous implications for society. The shifting of wealth into one corner can also imbalance society and create a monopolised and generally impoverished society, which we are quickly approaching in much of the Western world.
With a systems overhaul, we can reconfigure the entire economy: how we trade, how we’re paid, the value of things, how we can contribute… It seems the primary currency of society these days is not the dollar, but data. Information is power, and how we use the information at hand is key to the functions of society and even our culture.
Recap: the Digital Democratic Platform (DDP)
As detailed to some degree in the Digital Democracy: Part 1, we could imagine the use of an online construct that might appear and function like a social media platform. While this would be in some ways more formal and more complex than your average social media platform, many of the attractive design features would uphold the kind of engagement we see from the likes of Facebook and Instagram, using AI and personalised algorithms to create a balance between functionality and enjoyability (engagement).
Beyond just democratic voting, a core function of this would be to exist as a live digital CV (curriculum vitae)—an online profile that documents one’s personal qualities, achievements, qualifications, skills, work experience, and may even be able to incorporate things like medical information to allow versatile, universal use in societal affairs. For this particular application (determining salary), we would be seeking to understand someone’s current roles and—for some jobs and activities—variation of performance.
Some ways of understanding an individual—building and maintaining their digital profile—could be automated, while others may require input from the individual or contextual authority (e.g. your employer). Naturally, this would require some way to ensure accuracy and honesty, especially when determining someone’s economic value. The way this is done would likely vary from job to job, situation to situation. But with this information, how is it to be decided how much the individual should be paid?
The Contribution Score: Determining the Value of Work
The Contribution Index would be like the digital phone book of everyone’s salary. More accurately, it would be the phone book of everyone’s effective contribution to society, called their Contribution Score, which their salary (‘Spending Credit’) is based on. By phone book I’m not meaning it’s something everyone would necessarily have access to, but simply a list of numeric values that would stay dynamic according to live feeds and algorithms. Most likely it would be anonymous—a behind-the-scenes database that may or may not permit the individual to understand their personal wealth and on-paper utility relative to others in society. On top of its uses for scaling and distributing wealth across society (with a selection of other benefits and uses from this data), this could have the advantage of harnessing the competitive nature of humanity to motivate the individual.
A person’s Contribution Score would be calculated from a number of variables that help to paint a picture of an individual’s overall ‘value’ in society. Based on intelligently defined and scaled metrics, each organised activity (e.g. work) would add points to a person’s score to help the algorithm to understand how much a person is due to be paid.
While quantifying someone’s value might sound to some people like a discriminatory system that devalues a human life and relegates someone to their ‘usefulness’ to society, there is some necessity in having metrics of contribution in the workplace. We are not talking about the value of a human life here, but the economic value of someone’s activity. Besides, we already do this with regular salaries and wages.
Of course, not everyone is gifted with a profound ability to contribute meaningfully to society, and of course there are some outliers such as handicapped people who can be given an exception; but for the everyday person who should not expect a free ride through life without some form of work, productivity or contribution to society, we can expand our focus from just clocking hours at the office to incorporating a variety of factors.
A person’s on-paper value in the workplace is represented by their salary—how much a company is willing to pay someone for them to perform their job. There are already a variety of factors within the workplace that might dictate this valuation, such as a person’s experience, qualifications, skillset, hours per week, and position of leadership or management. There can also be aspects of the job itself that may dictate size of compensation, such as health and safety risk, job demand, and comparable positions and benchmarks in the industry.
Core Ideas to Explore in Contribution Economics:
1. Beyond Traditional Labour:
AI helps avoid blind spots in the economy—recognising invisible labour, undervalued contributions, and subtle social maintenance work. The system moves from measuring inputs (e.g. hours worked) or outputs (e.g. profit) to measuring outcomes and resonance.
Recognition and rewarding of non-monetised labour (parenting, caregiving, community work, ecological restoration, mental health efforts, etc.).
The Contribution Index calibrated by inputs from multiple dimensions—effort, impact, consistency, community resonance, etc.
2. Real-Time, Granular Value Mapping:
In the TTS framework, AI isn’t just for automation or surveillance—it’s a real-time analytical and coordination tool. It can observe patterns in human behaviour, social discourse, environmental impact, and more.
AI and digital infrastructure measure the impact and utility of various forms of contribution dynamically—tracking inputs like time spent mentoring, planting trees, debugging code, supporting mental health forums, uploading educational content, etc.
Measures both effort and impact using feedback loops, such as community ratings, statistical benefits (e.g. crime reduction, educational outcomes), environmental improvements, or even biometric wellness indicators if voluntary.
Weighing contextual value—for instance, a teacher in a rural area educating underserved youth might be rated more impactful (per capita) than one in an already-wealthy district.
Micro-credits or universal contribution points could be distributed fairly and publicly, creating a new form of trust economy.
This helps to replace speculative markets with evidence-based economic flows (see below).
3. Modular Participation:
People can contribute where their talents or interests lie—art, code, ideas, teaching, organising, mediation, technical problem-solving, even just feedback and critique—and be rewarded.
Through a digitally enabled nuancing of both understanding and coordinating our societies, we are able to maximise engagement and fulfilment, and consequently optimise contributions. Simultaneously, this will support citizens’ desires for personal development.
4. The Gamification of Civil Contribution:
People are more motivated when they can see their progress, receive social acknowledgment, and experience narrative momentum. But instead of social media dopamine loops, you get meaningful psychological reinforcement for doing things that better your world—from street art to civic mediation.
Progress bars, badges, levels, shared quests—like turning nation-building into a collaborative MMO.
Ties into the DDP and open-source governance: when participation is tracked, visualised, and socially celebrated, people are more likely to engage meaningfully.
Better understanding of an individual’s skills, talents, efforts, and desires follow through to feelings of ‘being seen’. We may even choose to put more weight on micro-qualifications and diversified titling (e.g. leveling up as a “community strategist” or “green architect”).
Gamified dashboards could show a person’s diversified contribution portfolio—e.g. 10% community engagement, 25% innovation work, 15% care work, 50% economic productivity. This may feed into a person’s documented experience that could then stand as weight in their democratic participation.
5. Fluid and Democratic Resource Allocation:
In the Ten-Tier model, where resource use and ‘contribution’ are analysed and supported through scaled allocation of finance and personnel, resource distribution is partially automated by AI based on contribution scores, environmental context, urgency, and social benefit.
For example, when a local food coop is flagged as fulfilling essential functions but lacks funds, AI can trigger a community funding wave or unlock subsidies.
Citizens can vote or endorse the resource flow, building communal responsibility and intelligent checks-and-balances.
Instead of needing to sell your idea to the market or elite investors, contributions can trigger attention from funding pools, community support, or even AI-flagged initiatives that auto-allocate microgrants or resources.
It’s not just about throwing money at problems—it’s about realigning incentives so resources flow to what actually helps.
6. Philosophical and Social Implications:
Contribution economics shifts the fundamental goal of economic activity—from extraction to regeneration; from competition to collective flourishing. Instead of a profit-focused society, we can aim to reclaim our social, ecological, and psychological health.
People can thrive together, not in opposition. Scarcity-based economics (zero-sum games) give way to abundance-based systems, where the whole grows through mutual contribution.
Shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, where social cohesion, ecological health, and personal well-being are treated as productive outputs.
People start seeing themselves not as “consumers” or “workers” but as co-creators of society. In this collective identity reformation, purpose becomes clearer, alienation reduces, and wellbeing increases.
A moral evolution could take place: A transparent, open-source economy rooted in evidence and ethical alignment invites higher moral standards—we are no longer seduced or coerced into destructive behaviours just to survive or succeed.
Incentivising Quality Contribution
Another core design feature of the Contribution Index and TTS industrial revolution is to align benefit of the self with benefit of society, so that selfish or self-serving behaviour ultimately benefits everyone. We can manufacture a desire for people to be honest and clever without anything being at the expense of others. Where cheap or clandestine tactics can be advantageous in the capitalist world, the Ten-Tier System seeks to reward activity and business development that are recognised as being beneficial for society, which in turn benefits the individual. This means immorality has little to no benefit, and there is little temptation to break the rules or manipulate others for self-gain.
But what about outside of the workplace? We’re not machines just built to work, and life on Earth could expect a variety of activity that benefits both the individual and society at large. If someone is seen to be a helpful citizen, coaching a local soccer team, volunteering at the local soup kitchen, giving up one’s time and energy for the benefit of others… Could it be an idea to recognise such activity and compensate or reward that in some way?
No doubt this would be seen as an incentive that for some people would make productive activity more attractive, while for others the very selflessness of volunteer work is something that in itself is more attractive than monetary compensation. Here, we can account for both, allowing this recording and recognition to be entirely optional and anonymous (unknown to the public). The idea is not that Big Brother needs to know about everything you’re doing, but so that we can use technology to foster fairness and productive activity. We can even consider adding miscellaneous bonuses to one’s Contribution Score, where partaking in certain activities that foster a healthy and social culture (e.g. joining a community activity) could be seen as productive for both yourself and others, and be financially encouraged in some small way.
The original design of the Ten-Tier System envisioned some kind of ‘privilege milestones’ or ‘dynamic privileging system’, where a certain Contribution Score or Competence Score (soon to be explained) would place a person within an income bracket or confidence bracket—where a citizen is considered to be trustworthy and competent—as a means to earn or keep certain privileges. For example, if our future society requires heavy transport restrictions to achieve environmental sustainability, it may mean that we cannot afford to have everyone owning and driving their own private vehicle. If we have to decide who can or cannot have this privilege, it would make sense for it to be earned somehow. Being mindful not to create an elitist culture or an unhealthily competitive aspect to living, there may be some use for such a system in moderating and incentivising select activities. Education is likely to play a part in this construct, using upskilling as a means to improve one’s quality of life, which in turn should foster a culture that produces skilful, educated, active citizens.
The Contribution Index is a key component of the digital economy, allowing for proper recording and measuring of one’s personal contributions to society. This doesn’t just have to be work. It could include involvement in a volunteer activity, leadership or organisational roles, public entertainment or inspiration, beautifying or cleaning your local area, fixing things, initiating things, inventing things, parenting or childcare, or even fulfilling a civil duty such as voting. We can contribute to society in a huge number of ways, and reward for the individual on this premise helps to align self-benefit with societal benefit. In this way there can be an incentive to develop and maintain society, and to help your fellow civilians.
Now this could come at a risk of disingenuous behaviour, and it’s likely we don’t want to feel like all our behaviours are being tracked and monetised, as that also can bring further complication with these ideas of fairness and ‘due reward’, where people may only do a good thing if it adds to their Contribution Score. Some people argue that good behaviour is good behaviour, and a person’s intentions or authenticity shouldn’t matter so long as it has a positive outcome. I would say authenticity is the ideal, and we should strive for the ideal, but we should not go to extreme lengths with this kind of surveillance and ticket-stamping, keeping an expecting hand out for every good little thing we do.
A culture of micro-rewards could be a slippery slope to the disingenuity of a purely gamified society. But if we keep this in mind, we can carefully consider what formal behaviours and activities ought to be incentivised and how. This is quite different to the Black Mirror reality we are seeing in China with their social credit system (SCS).
China’s Social Credit System: Good Tech, Bad Management
China’s social credit system—coming soon a Western country near you—seeks to monitor and understand citizens in their regular non-work life, judging them harshly and punishing them for things like their political views, their lack of adherence to behavioural expectations or small-time laws like jaywalking—essentially seeking to enforce absolute obedience to an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent techno-government. This is dystopia incarnate, and something we should keep a keen mind to avoid.
What are the major differences? First off, the Ten-Tier System is founded on democratic input, so any problematic rules or calibrations can ultimately be over-ruled or recalibrated by the public, and are not dictations imposed by an unelected authoritarian government. Secondly, there is a huge difference between documenting someone’s productive efforts and documenting someone’s social behaviours. The policing of free speech and suppression of individuality are abhorrent marks of an Orwellian government that fears the rebellion of their own citizenry. The philosophy of fascism is ‘coherence through coercion’; and while cooperation is one of the goals of the TTS, we should be able to avoid coercive design features by simply giving greater advantages for positive and productive behaviours, allowing the naturally prevailing competition and reward to stand as sufficient incentive. We should not be seeking to build a society that needs to be policed at all; a mature and well-designed society will be able to make use of critique and disagreement to identify what could be changed or optimised.
I make the intentional habit of reiterating that the ideas within the Ten-Tier System are only conceptual, designed with the allowance to be continuously developed and refined while respecting individuality of culture. However we decide to build a system, though, we would hope to expect that omniscient tracking for every little thing you do is likely not going to be a reality in the future, as it’s both creepily Orwellian and likely to result in toxicity of culture. Even under the guise of security and convenience, it’s not what free people want for their lives, and the installation of such a system is also difficult and expensive. However, we are right now seeing a push to do just that, surveilling and micro-managing through invasive and coercive systems—achieving this through biometric-integrated AI, facial recognition software, RFID chips, smart dust and nano-tech within living humans, 5G technologies (patents already exist), ‘SMART’ cities (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology), and use of ‘SMART’ devices (phones, computers, TVs, electric cars, even robotic vacuum cleaners)—all to be integrated with your digital bank account and your ability to make purchases and access public transport. This is already happening in China and currently being trialled in the Western world. And while the focus of the Ten-Tier System is to focus on its own game, intended to make this kind of monitoring and bullying of citizens redundant, we should be keenly aware of what future could await us if we don’t take matters into our own hands.
Despite the questionable uses and hair-raising possibilities, this seemingly dystopian technology should not be disregarded entirely. There are uses for some of these technologies that, in the right hands, could help to create a more collaborative, more engaged society that makes use of personal information without the risk of exploitation. The better someone is understood, the more accurately they can be acknowledged and compensated for their contributions to society; however, this shouldn’t need to extend to home-life surveillance or a public with a strict penalisation culture. The ultimate point of difference behind the TTS and SCS is not so much the technology, but who is in control of it. We need to be able to trust a system in its design, abilities, and management, and the most obvious way to guarantee the many won’t be manipulated by the few is to put the power in the hands of the many, using democracy as the foundational principle.
So back to the blueprints… How can we understand our citizens in a way that makes use of their talents, experience, and minds, without exploiting them? With information about the individual that is digitally acquired (with their consent and input), what are the possibilities for optimising life in a way that benefits both the individual and society?
The Competence Score Explained
While a Contribution Score might tally the values of activities we’ve done or are doing, we might consider gleaning from a person’s digital profile information that speaks of someone’s potential.
In the conversations on the Ten-Tier System’s management system, we propose using a weighted voting system to delegate decision-making power and responsibility. This works by understanding the contextual knowledge and expertise of an individual that is documented in their digital profile. The primary idea behind this is that we are using relevant expertise and perception to navigate societal problems. However, we might also consider a way to understand a person’s general competence and trustworthiness in society. This might have practical uses and even stand as a point of consideration in legal situations (e.g. as part of character profiling or a background check), though it could also play a possible part in motivating an individual, comparing their on-paper potential with their contributions and achievements.
Where a person does not have a specific qualification or experience that is sought after by an employer, a respectable Competence Score could stand as a metric that might help predict how useful or valuable a person is likely to be in a new situation.
There is also the potential to use one’s Competence Score or Contribution Score as a way to incentivise upskilling and productive activity. If certain activities, roles, or assets are considered to be privileges limited to a certain few (e.g. to reduce environmental impact), it could make sense for some privileges to be earned or require a certain level of confidence in the individual.
As we will talk about in conversations on contextual privileging and gamification of education (new post coming soon), we can create a society that engages consistently with its citizens to foster a culture of learning and responsibility, where we encourage citizens to continuously accumulate skills, knowledge, and micro-qualifications.
Payday: So when everyone’s work and contributions are accounted for, what happens?
Simple answer: you get paid. Or to keep things broad for now, you accumulate greater spending ability.
According to the proposed Dual Currency concept, we would accumulate wealth by having increased spending ability, currently referred to as ‘Spending Credit’ (name to be changed). This is likely to exist in a similar way to the banking system where you can stockpile wealth for later use, although it’s possible we may choose to opt for something closer to a spending allowance system to limit the power of an individual, thus mitigating societal corruption.
Different modes of contribution may be weighted differently, given a numeric value that contributes to one’s overall Contribution Score. Now it would make sense to have a lifetime score as well as a periodic score, be that daily, weekly, monthly, annually, or otherwise. Perhaps all of the above. A person’s placement on the Index ultimately dictates their income or spending ability, and if a person contributes a lot only six months of the year, that could in theory get them a similar annual placement as someone who contributes only a little but is consistent over the year. There may be perks for consistency, but there may also be perks for flexibility.
The globe’s resources would also be accounted for in a way that gives us an overall number of what we can spend, and in this way the Contribution Index is to be integrated heavily with our digitalised economy. Of course, it would be impossible to have a perfect stock-take of all the world’s resources, and we never have and likely never will be able to so precisely determine our exact environmental ‘budget’ in terms of raw materials. However, we can know enough to moderate our usage and expenditure within the population so that we don’t deplete resources. Some valuation may be arbitrary or to do with specific non-tangible factors that raise or lower the value of the theoretical dollar and how much is distributed to each individual, business, project, or area of society. As is the case with modern economics, items in surplus could be made cheap while items in demand that are rare, expensive, difficult or timely to produce may be made more expensive—which can obviously fluctuate by season.
The specifics of the system I’m sure would benefit from a variety of designers, as we would also want to consider retirement, parenthood, and perhaps some sort of allowance for children and those studying full-time. Conversations on an economic revolution also provide an interesting forum to discuss art and how those creating music, books, and other forms of artwork and entertainment may be judged according to their value. This, I think, would not be so hard, as our increasingly digitalised world has already conceptualised rating systems and valuation by demand.
Read more about the Dual Currency concept in the Digitalisation of Money post.
So What is ‘Fair’?
[We’re diving deeper into the philosophy here, which is less about the proposed system and really just some added thoughts and consideration that underpins the conversation.]
When we talk about fairness in society, different people have different viewpoints. This can be a philosophical matter of sorts, but in regard to the Contribution Index and creating economic fairness, the approach we are taking here is aligning one’s contributions with their rewards or earnings.
What constitutes value? How can we put a number on how important one person’s work is compared with another?
Top-league sports stars, actors, and musicians may be at the top of their profession, but should these entertainers be so much richer than the rest of us? These people have become elite citizens in their own right, and are sometimes earning tens or hundreds of million dollars per year. You could say this is simply because the entertainment biz is what everyone’s spending their money on, and a piece of that pie is worth its weight in gold. To some, this is an egregious and quite typical example of disproportionality in wage, especially considering a janitor or mechanic, for example, whose job may in many ways be more tiresome or technical than someone who sings and dances for a living.
Now I mean no disrespect to the great talents, as the arts themselves are named so because of the highly refined performance required, often under great pressure and with years of dedication under the surface of what might look easier than it is. And while only a select few at the top of their game achieve this extraordinary fame and wealth, the point of using the arts as an example of economic unfairness is largely to demonstrate a few specific differences.
First off, some of the more lucrative entertainment jobs are ones that are highly enjoyable. These are careers of love and passion that would be done even without a paycheque, while a janitor may be unlikely to go around cleaning public toilets because of a love for porcelain. When a person who earns millions for a play-like activity stands side by side with a person who feels forced into unfulfilling labour so they can afford their next meal, it’s only natural to see some unfairness in this. At the same time, one skillset may be much more unique and developed than the other in a way that is extraordinarily difficult to replicate, while almost anyone can learn to scrub with minimal training. And if one learns to scrub and mop in the optimum way, at the very top of the global loo-cleaning game, there is still a cap in fame and fortune for one’s janitorial career. In this way we take a focus on the uniqueness and development of skill that might constitute greater value; but if we switch out the janitor for perhaps an electrician, we might expect a raise in technical know-how and an added element of danger that might balance the equation somewhat.
An actor or a musician may still work hard in their own right, but it seems the ‘entertainer’ figure, historically, has gone from a kind of servant of society to something just short of a god. Now there is a kind of logic for someone with influence and renown to afford a life and image that can be publicly respected, but we might see that the ultimate tragedy of this scenario is the direction of the financial rivers, which seem to overflow in places like Hollywood and sport through cultural idolatry. This is a much-loved phenomenon that is hard to detach from, but we must recognise the unhealthy obsession we are reinforcing, and the sickness of culture within some of these establishments that is leading the whole world into a dysfunctional state.
The essence is popularism, and art is a great example to work with. If something is loved by the people, it makes some sense for their support to be measured in money, the attracted winnings funding the maintenance and development. These industries in turn generate billions of dollars, some of which is taxed so it can then be recycled in some way for other purposes by a government that is supposed to benefit the people. But there is something broken in this system, a lack of parental control and omniscient guidance. Who gets to decide when too much is too much, or stop to reassess things if corruption and unhealthy culture are emerging?
When we’re implementing a system that’s designed to align contribution with reward, we should likely need some principles to go by. It would likely be fair for a role to be paid more if it is more dangerous, more technical, less desirable, less common, or requires more responsibility (e.g. a pilot or train driver). This might help to give us an indication of how valuable a job or a worker really is to society, or the conditions or sacrifice required of the person.
Through the digital democratic platform (DDP), the public may have the ability to fine-tune this, voting on what they perceive to be adjustments that make society more fair. But making adjustments based purely on this perception could even be a false premise. In some ways we might seek to make more profound changes that could influence culture or the greater operations of society. As one quick example, we might consider the teaching profession. It could quite fairly be stated in a general sense that teachers are generally underpaid. This doesn’t mean necessarily that they are being paid less than the value of their work, although that too is true much of the time. A different take on this would consider the role of teaching to be something that should be placed as one of the highest privileges of society and one of its most critical roles: raising and educating the next generation, shaping their minds and equipping them for many aspects of the life ahead… This is no small task. In offering someone a mediocre wage to do this, surely we can only expect mediocre results, and in a crude sense we are all too likely to attract some mediocre people. This is not an attack on our good teachers, but a broader commentary on the job market and our culture at large.
George Carlin makes the point that the true owners of society don’t want a well-informed populace capable of critical thinking, because clever and autonomous individuals are difficult to manipulate and aren’t so dependent on government. The more sceptical of us even squint an eye at the entertainment industry as an example of Bread & Circuses, where a distracted, indulgent, hedonist citizenry is too comfortable and shallow-minded to revolt.
This is a situation where much more is needed than a simple recalibration of wage. Here, we might recognise an intentional sabotage of society, a purposeful deformity of culture to ensure that unfairness and poor prioritisation remain as features of the human circus, rather than as points to be optimised.
In the battle for fairness, then, we should not look to lobbyists and government to make right the faults of humanity, but supplant the very institutions and reigning individuals that benefit from these kinds of inequality. Unfairness and exploitation are not just happenstance; they have always been the intention of these ultracapitalists.
Without dwelling further on the dark underbelly of capitalism, and to bring our thoughts back into the light, let’s finish by turning our focus back to the future—the proposed Ten-Tier System. By installing our own communications and management structures, we can make the current government redundant, allowing us the People to have these conversations—about fairness and what ought to be done to balance things out. Our algorithms and democratic policies will be powerful tools in this, but ultimately it is on us to step into a mindset of accountability to drive a functional democracy. The fight against unfairness will not just be the reallocation of money and destruction of any remaining systemic discrimination, but largely in our own minds—in the inner transformation from victim mentality and backseat obedience, to being a sharp-minded populace hungry for optimised living.
Thank you for reading.