Difference between revisions of "Meta-Commerce:Summary"
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| − | These 78 questions, encompassing economics, finance and society, map the road to [[ZYen:Long Finance|Long Finance]] and contribute to its overarching goals - '''''to expand frontiers, change systems, deliver services and build communities'''''. | + | These 78 questions, encompassing economics, finance and society, are a first attempt to map the road to [[ZYen:Long Finance|Long Finance]] and contribute to its overarching goals - '''''to expand frontiers, change systems, deliver services and build communities'''''. These questions should be seen as a ''starter set'' which should be expanded, trimmed, combined and reworked. |
== The Questions == | == The Questions == | ||
Latest revision as of 09:13, 4 August 2012
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Meta-Commerce is an intellectual and collaborative attempt to chart the path to the future of finance. It aims to set the critical questions finance is facing. A contemporary version of David Hilbert's 23 questions for mathematics, Meta-Commerce looks to engage thought leaders and shape the research agenda on financial practices and systems in the long term.
These 78 questions, encompassing economics, finance and society, are a first attempt to map the road to Long Finance and contribute to its overarching goals - to expand frontiers, change systems, deliver services and build communities. These questions should be seen as a starter set which should be expanded, trimmed, combined and reworked.
[edit] The Questions
[edit] Long-Term vs. Short-Term
| 1) | Is there long term asset alignment, e.g. pensions and mortgages, or divergence? |
| 2) | The benefits of diversification – how rapidly do these benefits decay with time? |
| 3) | With household savings rates below 2.5% in the USA and below 3% in the UK, large numbers of people seem to have realised that saving is a bad deal in the long-term - the reward for financial prudence is to get shafted by the majority who don’t save - so why save when you just pay more tax and lose utility? |
| 4) | What are the implications of long-term asset valuation e.g. can one be made? Is there an interaction between valuation periods and volatility? |
| 5) | When should you be short-term? |
| 6) | Life expectancy and its implications on financial decisions? |
| 7) | Creating demand for the long-term |
| 8) | Extending the Economist’s Felicity Foresight idea from 1999 to Debbie’s Diversification over 100 years – the time traveller investor |
| 9) | How would anyone know you’d mis-sold a 100 year project? |
| 10) | Is commerce truly not a zero-sum game? |
| 11) | What are secrets of success among the finances of the Vatican? |
| 12) | Family businesses that last - http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_PQJDGRQ |
| 13) | Anything on the Social Discount rate |
[edit] Fiscal vs. Monetary
| 14) | How might we price counter-cyclicality? |
| 15) | What is the discount rate of a politician? |
| 16) | Can/should an economy be made to deliver stable (unspectacular) growth, or should economies be constantly on steroids? |
| 17) | Which is best, multiple currencies, single currencies, other currencies, SDRs, etc? |
| 18) | How does fiscal policy affect liquidity? |
| 19) | What is the difference between consumption and investment? Can we tell them apart? Can the utility of investment approach the utility of consumption? |
| 20) | How do we identify bubbles? Are bubbles formed when returns are delayed? |
| 21) | How do ‘new’ risks, e.g. climate change, asteroids, start to enter the fiscal calculus |
| 22) | How much does Keynesianism depend on Keynesian conditions (e.g. low government expenditure as % of GDP)? |
[edit] Free vs. Regulated
| 23) | Can we treat trade as an intelligent life-form? |
| 24) | Should regulation involve indemnity? |
| 25) | When should things be “bailed out”? |
| 26) | Do the dangers of ‘best practice’ reduce diversity? |
| 27) | What is the value of high velocity trading? |
| 28) | Privatising risk, nationalising reward? |
[edit] Selfish vs. Selfless (Agents vs. Owners)
| 29) | Turnover of investment managers portfolios, i.e. long-term = lower volatility and selling mandate measures that recognise the long-term is inversely correlated to share turnover/investment turnover |
| 30) | Volatility of funds, i.e. long-term = lower volatility; |
| 31) | What does ‘absolute returns’ mean? |
| 32) | Moving from “institutional agents” voting (rather than “institutional investors”) to beneficial shareholders voting; |
| 33) | Does altruistic self-interest exist – can people willfully NOT follow self-interest decisions? |
| 34) | Mutual destruction – let’s go bust together |
| 35) | Does professionalism matter? Or personal ethics? |
| 36) | What are the pluses and minuses of positional goods? |
| 37) | Can you do much more than one thing, e.g. deliver profit |
| 38) | How do ideas propagate through finance? |
| 39) | Is social cohesion strained by inequality? |
| 40) | Does progress require a society where the few are disproportionately rewarded versus the many? |
| 41) | How do we value human networks? |
| 42) | What are the rules of true trust? |
| 43) | What does long term brokerage mean? |
[edit] Mutual vs. Public Sector vs. Private-Sector
| 44) | Are keiretsu good things, conglomerates, private equity? |
| 45) | How do we price trust? |
| 46) | The equitisation of debt, i.e. the replacement of debt instruments with shared equity ownership, resulting in innovative risk/reward sharing arrangements [Lars Wulf] |
| 47) | What can we learn from the oldest organisations – churches, universities, schools guilds, families (pick up from existing research)? |
| 48) | Are the oldest organisations similar, do they encourage diversity or restrict it? What metrics should be used to evaluate them? |
| 49) | Do successful organisations just have a system that promotes a successful decision-maker for the time? |
| 50) | Do successful organizations promote trust and thus lower transactions costs? |
| 51) | Building the insurer that could never go bust |
| 52) | Building the ultimate mutual |
| 53) | [from Mick James] “One more long-finance anecdote, possibly apocryphal: in land-owning British families it was traditional, when a daughter was born, to plant a grove of willow trees. By the daughter came of marriageable age, the willows were mature enough to be cut down and sold to the makers of cricket bats: the proceeds paid for the wedding.” |
| 54) | Can we create an out-of-the-box mutual investment vehicle that needs no maintenance – automated fund management for the masses? [Frank Dunn] |
| 55) | Regulation, monitoring, supervision, competition; |
| 56) | How do we prevent the moral hazard of governments promising what they need for votes, tyranny of the silent majority? |
| 57) | Are NGOs a sign of failure or a new life form? |
| 58) | What is the effect of taxation on the value of money? |
| 59) | Can we build retirement cohorts? |
[edit] Rational vs. Behavioural
| 60) | Is ‘nudging’ethical |
| 61) | Should we ‘read’ people’s brains? |
| 62) | Is trust an emergent property of large networks? |
| 63) | What can we learn from harsh climates - the finances of the Inuit or Bushmen? |
| 64) | What can we learn from conditions of over-abundance, e.g. economic booms and busts of the potlatch system among the Northwest coast Indians (Tlingit and such)? [John Abbink] |
| 65) | Why does augury sell? |
| 66) | How might money affect our evolution as primates? |
[edit] Sustainability vs. Robustness vs. Resilience
| 67) | Sustainable supply chains – not transaction by transaction, more trust |
| 68) | Assume a 1% improvement in productivity each year – so a genuine increase of 1% per annum in wealth per capita – you then need about 70 years to double your money in real terms. Therefore today’s 20 year old can expect to have doubled his/her savings contribution by the age of 90. Higher returns are the result of inter-generational transfers of wealth, or the growth in population. Population needs to peak during the lifetime of todays 20 year old, or the planet goes to hell. Inter-generational wealth transfers won’t work without population increases as eventually the paying generation revolts. So back to productivity increases as the only real source of wealth increase. Question: Is there another sustainable source of wealth generation? If not, how do we improve the rate of productivity increases in order to create a robust long finance framework? |
| 69) | How can we introduce and measure ‘simplicity’? |
| 70) | How do we internalise externalities? |
| 71) | How do we prevent internalities becoming externalities? |
| 72) | Is there a way to value abundance rather than scarcity? [Tantram] |
[edit] Theory vs. Practice
| 73) | What radical new theories are (a) elegant, (b) coherent, (c) profound? |
| 74) | Valuing the hard to value – what is mark-to-market, do third parties know what they’re doing? |
| 75) | Is finance a good in its own right, a source of information, a self preserving feedback loop, or a parasite? |
| 76) | Rejecta Economica (like Rejecta Mathematica – Economist, 1 August 02009) – what might be learned from discarded economics? |
| 77) | Finance as fashion – X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing |
| 78) | What if one person had all the money? |
