Sāmatvārtha Part 1 - the Vision and Mission

This is a guest essay by the Twitter handle Moberation. They also run a Substack blog.

The Vision of Sāmatvārtha

“Sāmatva” and “Artha”: Sāmatvārtha. Sāmatva embodies balance, equilibrium, and harmony, while Artha represents not just material wealth but also purpose, meaning, and prosperity. I am no expert in Sanskrit, but this union of words perfectly encapsulates the policy proposals under this series. It is not about certain specific public policy frameworks - though that and the change management thereof is a big part of it - but it is also about a mindset, a set of principles and heuristics, and a better and more rooted vision of Indo-Futurism and Indic/Accelerationism.

Sāmatvārtha is about radically leveraging the multiplier of technology, first-principles thinking, and price-discovery of markets. It is about respecting the freedom of our complex adaptive (eco)systems and preferring simpler heuristics over delusionary micro-management.

It aims to tame the collective action problem and internalize the cost of externalities. It is about turning one’s supposed weaknesses into strengths for leapfrogging into a futuristic Indic Civilizational State. It is about saving India from the charlatans of fabian-socialists as well as the subversion of candy-capitalists. Thus, this set of policy proposals will ultimately aspire to blur the lines between fiscal and monetary, hard-coding economic sustainability by default. But, to avoid disruption, a smooth transition is an equally important part of any reform proposal. Sāmatvārtha is also respectful of the need to balance the motion of change.

A holistic approach towards The Embedded Economy. A balanced approach to growth paradigms - one that embraces fair, sustainable, regenerative, distributive freedom of interactions between our plural ecosystems. It is not about chasing GDP growth blindly, or some monotheistic appeal to ‘equity’; It envisions a more open, prosperous, interoperable, sovereign, federated, modular, inclusive, sustainable, and regenerative future. But How..?

Sāmatvārtha begins by rejecting many proto-notions and false binaries in the economic thinking memetic sphere: degrowth-vs-prosperity, altruism-vs-accelerationism, capitalism-vs-socialism, free-markets-vs-regulations, etc.

Economic policymaking has become a victim of over-abstraction and novation. Coupled with the need for rent-seekers to justify their existence, we get a spaghetti code of conduct. The bureaucrats of the fabian socialists wanted to predict and control how much you would consume, and when. On the other end, the marketing professionals of the candy capitalists want you to never stop consuming anything, even on credit if ‘need’ be! Cronyism is not even needed anymore for failure, and the system trickles down to corruption nonetheless.

Control freak begets power creep, forgetting that one of the best ways to regulate complex adaptive systems is to have simpler heuristics for broad macro-governance, and not centralizing micro-management for every other interaction. This over-abstraction is making us lose sight of what is important!

We over-engineer our policies with utter disregard towards the second-order effects. We pretend to know the unknowns or the market winners, all in vain to tame the complexity.

Either stupidity or malice, only for all of it to leave more loopholes and incentives for the rent-seeker and the corrupt. All of this does nothing else except fueling anti-governance and public-policy sentiments like ‘taxation is theft’, etc. The baggage of the socialist.

We are also frequently consuming just for the sake of it. Shallow progress in lifestyle - often an illusion - to justify the concentration of resources at the top! Trickle-down, at what ecological costs? Society needs to find better goals than reducing the purpose of life to just hedonism - i.e. ‘need to consume more, capture more, exploit more’. The singular focus on GDP is not only justifying consumerism but is also now coming to exploit the care economy in the name of increasing that GDP number. Goodhart’s Law on steroids at the population scale! The subversion of the capitalist.

Between all these memetics of economic, technological and cultural thinking, the deep history of our planet - and maybe our existence - is of many cycles of progress and destruction. To restrict ourselves with notions of the past few centuries as being the end of history is doing a grave injustice to the possibilities of both - progress and destruction.

Why Sāmatvārtha over Effective/Accelerationism/Altruism

Effective Accelerationism (aka e/acc) is a reactionary meme against Effective Altruists (aka EA). Without going much into the noise of half-baked origins of these alleged ‘philosophical’ movements, the key current thing that triggered the recent wave of manifesto wars is advancements in Artificial Intelligence (or Intelligence Amplification per Andrew Karparthy), and how fast or openly should it be pursued.

In a nutshell, the Altruists (EAs) worry about poly-crisis; that humanity is facing multi-pronged risks - some existential per se - which might break their silos and spillover to cause great misery. The Accelerationists (E/ACCs) worry about the stagnation of humanity - which according to them might cause great misery as well.

The E/ACCs attempted to root their meme into a philosophical framework by basing it on the nature of entropy. To advocate for accelerated change, this was an attempt to counter the altruism thesis right at the foundations. While it seemed promising at the beginning, it soon fell into the traps of any American discourse and in regard to EAs - of false, extreme, unnecessary polarization.

Their outright rejection of the concerns shared by degrowth-ers regarding poly-crisis, or the belief that the ‘techno-capital’ machine will solve everything just by ‘accelerating’ everything, is naive at best or sinister at worst.

Post-AI economics will not magically solve the problem of human consensus on the metastories. Both EAs and E/ACCs seem to be victims of Western meta stories, that of selfish genes and thus either requiring over corrections that EAs prefer or blind acceleration that e/acc have started to vouch for!

Accelerationism and Altruism themselves have a very mixed-bag memetic history. Indic futurism therefore needs a better call to action than the singular monotheist manifestos. One which can accommodate the harmonious prosperity this land will strive for, one not based on the meta-narrative of the selfish gene, but that of The Dhārmika Gene. One that is mindful of its deep civilizational itihāsa, The Bhāratāyan. One that is ready to leapfrog to a solar-punk Indic-futurism.

Thinking that only commoditizing consumerism can sustain the economic growth cycle required for technological progress is the mistake that E/ACCs make. This is at odds with degrowth-ers, who want the world humans to consume less because of their ecological impact. But won’t things align if the proposition becomes to use technological accelerationism for de-growing consumerism’s externalities?

You don’t need to sell everyone a large cyber truck to be pro-climate change, and the irony of it should not be lost on supposed American capitalists. A society which roots its economy so deeply in consumerism will only lead to harmful accelerationism. Social media is the biggest example. The digital fentanyl is not just limited to TikTok as they say, but Instagram, YouTube, Tinder and the biggest of them all - Porn. Making this a USA vs China issue, or capitalism vs socialism issue etc. is disingenuous and won’t help anyone.

On the other hand, you also cannot expect India and Africa to live in poverty and lower standards of living because Europeans want to degrow and impose a carbon tax. Irony might be lost to the West, but the global south will not ignore this new age of imperialism and digital colonialism. So degrowth-ers’ affection for the effective/altruists’ control concentration approach will never sit well. They need to fight centralisation, not advocate for it.

It is not paradoxical to be not against markets but against ‘marketing’; be not against growth but against ecological exploitation; be not against profits but against singular profit motive; be not against stakeholder capitalism but against ESG™; be not against consumption but against hedonism; be not against social governance but against state fascism; be not against pluralism but against universalism and intersectionality.

Thus, without falling into the traps of these false debates, can we just simply ensure we don’t repeat the pitfalls of imperialist capitalism, consumeristic hedonism, fascistic socialism, universalist intersectionality, and modernist metaphysics?

The Mission of Sāmatvārtha

The spirit of Sāmatvārtha is to bring certain clarity to our economic thinking which promotes an enterprising civilization while reconciling them with ecological realities. It aims to remove the friction for building, and further collaboration towards continued socio-economic leapfrog of India and Indic Civilizational State. This will be enabled via the profound power of technology and radical clarity of first principles. It envisions a more open, interoperable, sovereign, federated, modular, inclusive, sustainable, regenerative future.

India has not yet recovered from the era of Fabian Socialism. We still find ways to outperform Nehruvian economists in their socialism by masquerading it behind some extra wrappers. Instead of authoritatively planned consumption and production, we should strive for simpler, interoperable, open heuristics for human coordination and consensus. Thus, it is imperative for us as a society to acknowledge and respect the uncertainty and might of our complex adaptive (eco)systems. 1991 merely marked the beginning of the beginning, forced upon us by circumstances. We are still in the process of refactoring how we operate as a society. As Sanjeev Sanyal says, there are quite many structural as well as process reforms that are waiting to be addressed. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) is formulating some of them, but can we attribute these reforms solely to political will, or can there be more to it?

In one of his books, Ajay Shah (@ajay_shah) pointed out how it is not always political will that translates to policy; sometimes, robust technocratic platforms can eventually manifest the political will. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. We, the Indians of this Amrit Kaal - as a fraternity of citizens, builders, mediators, etc. - need to help our policymakers and economists with such profound technocratic solutions. And we have a highly successful precedent for doing precisely that - #IndiaStack! So, it is not an unrealistic goal.

The 2020s are witnessing a significant convergence of scalable technologies, with rapid advancements in trustless data management, interoperable protocols, artificial intelligence, robotics and more. Consequently, Indic Futurism must encompass research mediation, policy advocacy, and the development of technocratic solutions, all aligned with the future envisioned above. To bring to life this collective vision of a solarpunk Indic-futurism, our goal is to accelerate civilizational progress while nourishing nature and ecology, instead of just exploiting it.

Tenets for a Solar-punk Indic/accelerationism

To avoid the mistakes of over-abstraction in economic thinking and whatever-tf happened in 1971, and further enrich theIndic/accelerationism narrative with sustainability, the approach is to define our broad objective followed by a holistic basket of opportunity cost signals to achieve those objectives. In an ideal world, the significance that GDP enjoys as a metric would instead be enshrined upon such a basket of more holistic metrics - a clarion call to align public as well as private capacity building towards these ‘north stars’.

One such potential basket is listed below, with a subtle playful retrofitting into India’s G20 2023 theme. The aim is to keep improving on these metrics in harmony as soon and sustainably as possible:

• Nominal GDP per capita // to Accelerate (One Earth)
• Gini’s coefficient // to Include (One Family)
• Doughnut metrics extension // to Sustain (One Future)

Ultimately, money is nothing but an accounting system for social IOUs. All the economic policies - be it fiscal or monetary - thus do not exist in their silo. A policy is not bad in itself, how it interplays with existing boundary conditions and the meta-psychological incentives will decide if it will end up being bad or not. Therefore, while GDP per capita will tell us about the average prosperity, Gini’s coefficient will ensure the averages are not too skewed in favor of power concentration. Doughnut metrics help us internalize the cost of externalities. All three together ensure prosperity, inclusivity and sustainability in simple clear-cut abstractions to apply even simpler taxation - aka fees to operate the civilization without primordial violence and private property operations.

Coming to the aspirational tenets for Samatvartha, below is a list of objectives and their sub-goals:

1. Improve Governance to mitigate

• Corruption and Rent Seeking
• Complexity and Incoherency
• Jugaad and Bad Quality Control

2. Accelerate Civilization

• Sustainably and Ecologically
• Openly and Inclusively
• Culturally and Technologically

3. Enshrine Civility by ensuring

• Trust and Safety
• Contract Enforcement
• Timely Delivery of Justice

4. Universalize Opportunities (not outcomes) via

• Open Education and Skill Development
• Digital and Public Infrastructure
• Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Capacity Building

With these in mind, our focus for Sāmatvārtha will be on providing simple policy prescriptions for Taxation, Welfare and Urbanism to address the three proxies of GDP growth, Gini’s coefficient, and Doughnut Metrics. This will be followed by a new-age approach to blending the fiscal and monetary policy of the nation - of monetary localism - while taking advantage of the technological progress to deploy much simpler policy heuristics on the nation.