Transfinancial Economics (TFE) is an evolving project nearing basic completion. It should be said that there has been a degree of interest in it from a number of people with economic backgrounds such as Warren Mosler, Andy Dennis, Stephen Monrad, David Axelrod, Trond Andresen (cybernetics expert), Prem Sikka, and the noted autodidact, and futurist Hazel Henderson. In April 2010, TFE was also a subject discussed at a major scientific conference (the ICEME, or International Conference of Engineering, and Meta-Engineering, Florida, USA).
It is important to add that TFE regards the financial system as a huge global IT system, and recognizes the reality that virtually all money exists as electronic,or digital data transmitted from one bank account to another.This means that the free flow of capital can be tracked, and controlled if necessary.
It must be said that the serious, and full development of TFE will require the help of "open minded" experts notably in the fields of economics, the law, and computer science.Weekend reading for your consideration. Something along these lines is the wave of the future in the digital age aka information age, and the knowledge revolution. Robert Searle presents his vision and a path for getting from here to there.
Please note that the following may be subject to changes, and possible corrections. It is still a "work in progress" project. Also, the Kheper presentation on TFE which crops up on the google search engine is out of date, and not fully authorative. It may be replaced, or deleted fairly soon.
P2P Foundation
Transfinancial Economics
Project by Robert Searle
Here and here are my comments at heteconomist.
- Good work, Robert. My own vision is that a full-on information economy will develop over time that eliminates the social, political and economic structure as we know it. It will be a command economy run by AI in an environment of unlimited essentially free sustainable energy. There is no limitation on money creation, as we know. The limitation is real resources, and the chief limitation wrt real resources is energy. Overcoming that is on the horizon. Solar power is already freely available and unlimited, and the technology for harnessing it already surging forward. Fusion now seems to be a possibility, too. The problem then is heat-dissipation.As far as other resources go, Bucky Fuller addressed this many decades ago with is vision of design science, the foundation of which is doing more with less. He compared the development of land architecture > naval architecture > aircraft architecture > rocket ship architecture, for example.The question is getting from here to there and your proposal takes that into consideration. We need to start implementing the changes we can as it becomes possible and practically speaking, this likely involves a lot more gradualism than ideal owing to vested interests and the prevailing mindset, i.e., the level of collective consciousness.MMT is a just a baby-step in the direction of the economic potential of a globalized humanity. As we enter the digital age and the knowledge revolution the pace of change is picking up speed and promises to accelerate exponentially.Transfinancial Economics advances the debate considerably beyond where it is stuck now by proposing the outlines of a vision for future development and a path for actualizing it. We need to be thinking along these lines, which is just taking advantage of the potential that is already available instead of operating as if we lived in the 19th century, which is where neoclassical economics places us.Click to EditDelete
- BTW, the distinction between a free market economy and a command economy is pretty much a canard based on the (supposed) failure of communism owing to their adoption of command economies. As Keynes pointed out to Hayek in comments on The Road to Serfdom, planning is more efficient than letting nature takes its course. This was before the digital age had dawned. Hayek wrote is “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” around this time, too, basically claiming that free markets could perform economic calculation superior to human capabilities. Even if that claim were true at the time — it wasn’t, but that’s another story — conditions have changed dramatically since then and promise to change even more dramatically going forward.Humanity has not progressed by leaving its development to nature but rather has used human intelligence to shape its future. It’s worked pretty well for us in comparison to other species. Looking to nature to do our calculating for us is looking backward rather than forward, especially now that the means to calculate on a vaster scale have been developed and are still developing quickly with no end in sight. Development in the industrial age was slow and limited in comparison.Compare the development of digital technology to automobile engineering, for example. Cars have gotten a bit faster, a lot more reliable, and a somewhat more fuel efficient over the past century. I was just talking to s.o. today about advances in digital technology. She used to program an IBM mainframe in the Sixties. It’s core was 256k. Compare that to an iPad today.