The Mutual Patronage Society

[faendryl]

I had the thought earlier that the latest book by Steven Brust was so-so, and it was a relatively expensive hardback, but I was happy to have bought it anyway both because I did still enjoy it and I'm glad to be supporting one of my favorite authors. The idea that we like to 'support' people whose work we like is interesting to me. What if we

Comments

[neveryou]

Would an inverse relationship of assignment value on the number of people we support double penalize? I mean, assuming you have a finite set of resources to allocate...

It does seem very similar to money, but perhaps with the omission of middlemen (I don't know many middlemen, but I think they all have mustaches).

[faendryl]

I don't entirely follow...as I conceive it, your resources wouldn't be a finite set, exactly - or at least, not a known, predetermined one - they would be dynamically allocated based on the amount other people were assigning to you! I guess it would be different to the degree that you would not be assigning *amounts* to people, but rather assigning *derivatives* (in perhaps both the mathematic and market senses), perhaps for certain periods of time. So you wouldn't pay n dollars for a pack of cigs, you'd give 1% interest in you for x hours, say. I predict that one consequence of such a system would be people getting much better at math.

Although I think it all works much better for fame than it does for money. Some guy wrote a book kinda about that and published it for free on the web...the name escapes me.

[neveryou]

So, this is like .. a page rank of people?

[faendryl]

Hey, yeah. Hadn't thought of that. Also, page rank=p-rank=prank.