The ERE Wheaton Scale

[Jean]

capitalism is the most efficient system to turn ressources into things people want. In such a system, people with capital are making the rules. We are just following those rules.
Biggest threat to my ere have been "head taxes", which in switzerland is mostly compulsory health insurance.
A good way to nerf FIRE would be to increase those head taxes with exemptions for people that aren't often into fire, or taxe wealth in a way that leave wealth storage only accessible to big cap untouched.

[Lemur]

Capitalism is also extremely fast at spreading new information. For example, if a train derails with thousands of units of hot in-demand product X, then prices will be reflected from that event almost immediately. Far more efficient then planned price systems.

Its the negative externalities from this economic system that are always being debated and contested.

[jacob]

To reiterate, apart from spreading the word, I think there's still theoretical work to be done. I really think we need someone credible (a credentialled economist) to tell politicians that mass FIRE will not be the end of the world. Keynes with his offhand musing on 15 hour work week was a good start, but someone needs to develop models on how the transition from here to mass FIRE would impact the economy. Without it, FIRE will be treated like crypto - with extreme suspicion, and tolerated only while it's insignificant enough.

Sure. It's probably only a matter of years (5-10?) before that happens. Keep in mind that academia is subject to its own fads and fashions. Such work might languish for years and proceed to get forgotten and then rediscovered as well. OTOH, it might take the world by storm. It is, however, by no means guaranteed that academic support will lend credibility beyond the demographic that consider academics an authority. How many contemporary economists can the average person or politician name? Not that many (like somewhere between 0 and 1), I think).

(This is why the ERE book contains a full workout of the math in chapter 7. I knew that this was the only way for [professionals] to take it seriously because while they could argue with me (literally living in a van) they couldn't argue with the math. Unfortunately, professionals were/are the only ones capable of actually dealing with math at that level. What's needed is an authority---that people do believe in---to say that the math actually holds.)

[7Wannabe5]

There are a number of scholarly articles on the topic of Green Libertarianism. The notion that all humans should have equal CO2 dumping rights, for example, is debated within this political framework. Obviously, the de facto status quo is that your consumption and dumping rights are pretty much equivalent to your productive capacity give or take for credit and taxation. If your productive capacity is only 1 Jacob/year and nobody else helps pay for your consumption, you will be unable to exceed 1 Jacob spending/dumping/sustainable limits, even if you choose to live under a bridge and spend your entire 1 Jacob on crap from the Dollar Tree.

In the US, the median income for all citizens (including children, retirees, and other non-labor force participants) is around $20,000 per capita, whereas the median income of a worker is closer to $40,000, reflective of the fact that on average each worker is also supporting a non-worker. Therefore, a decent-sized chunk of the U.S. population is already pretty close to burning less than 1 jacob/year, especially if you do PPP global lifestyle adjustment which converts 1 Jacob to approximately $12,000/year if spent in U.S. Obviously, a huge chunk of the global population is also burning resources at a sustainable level per capita.

If the concept of granting each human equal dumping rights is not extended to encompass/correct the reality that if somebody is only earning and/or being given $700/year consumption income they can't possibly dump more than that, then simply cutting off everybody off at around $30,000/capita spending would also be sustainable. IOW, if you wish to do nothing to alter the wealth/income inequality inherent in Capitalism (as exhibited today) then limiting the most productive humans to 1 Jacob dumping rights is counter-productive because inherently redistributive. IOW, consider a situation in which the law of the land was that you were strictly limited to earning $30,000/year max (but with no limit to hourly rate of wage) in order to protect the environment from degradation, because the assumption made is that you will likely spend all that you earn.

OTOH, this also means that it's not mathematically incorrect to take the ethical position that the ENTIRE collapse of the planet can be attributed to ONLY those whose affluent household income/spending is more than around $60,000 or $30,000/capita = top 10% globally, and extending the blame-game down to those subsisting at poverty level in the U.S. is sort of grinchy-pants.

[7Wannabe5]

Another model in which investment in the stock market can be regarded as neutral would be based on Donella Meadows' system description of a corporation. The overt mission statement of a corporation is pretty much just bull-shit, because a corporation can't survive (for very long) without profits. However, profits are really just the short-term goal of a corporation, and its ultimate purpose is domination of the market. Therefore, the nth degree ideal of a corporation would be to be selling Nothing to Everybody. Therefore, the marketing department, which is most often imagined as the true source of evil in the fables of frugality may actually be regarded as the most ecologically responsible department of the corporation. For example, it can take a product made of sugar and water that only does 10 cents worth of damage to ecological systems in terms of B2B spending and fluff it up with dreams to the extent that it sells for $2 in the marketplace and returns $1 to investors.

Another example would be Conventionally Frugal Husband at WL4/5 vs.Conventionally Spendthrift Wife at WL0. She goes to the mall and spends $500 on a designer purse. He goes to Home Depot and spends $500 on materials to DIY a backyard shed. Her spending was actually less resource intensive than his spending. IOW, the more one's focus is on getting material value per $ spent, the more resource intensive spending per $ will tend to become. This holds true up to the point where non-material quality of life becomes more integrated at WL6/7. For example, if all the material goods you needed were sourced for free from dumpsters or sustainably from nature, then you might spend the 1 jacob per year you passively receive in dividends on supporting the (non-resource intensive) Arts. Marketing is obviously just a commercialized form of art.

[Jean]

someone has to do the 2dollars worth of impact at some point, to make the money to buy the product.

[ducknald_don]

I suppose you could make a distinction between corporations that are just coming to the market to raise capital and established companies where that process has completed. Investing in an IPO is clearly providing capital to encourage a new business (whether good or bad) but buying established stocks feels slightly more abstract. The business already exists, it isn't coming back to the market to raise more capital, all it does is produce profit. If those profits aren't going to you then there is an inexhaustible queue of people to take your place.

[7Wannabe5]

someone has to do the 2dollars worth of impact at some point, to make the money to buy the product.

Yes, but eventually it comes down to the material reality that humans have to eat and keep themselves warm. For example, extremely poor subsistence farmers and hunters are also capable of doing extreme ecological damage depending on population level and practices.

A McMansion is like a terrible marital sexual compromise that satisfies neither material value nor aesthetic pleasure. If the 60% of spending in affluent societies that is towards positional goods could be achieved through ideas and art, rather than bricks and steel, then it would be less resource intensive.

[7Wannabe5]

@ducknald_don:

Yes, but this is taking the naive conservative perspective that established businesses are efficient solid producers of needful goods (as opposed to bloated monopolistic whales) while new businesses are likely to be only bringing shiny gin-crackery to market. The majority of businesses in the U.S. are small. Small can be inefficient, but it can also be nimble. Also, large established corporations are almost always engaged in exploring new ventures and markets. Does it really matter whether an investor pays for new venturing at the point of IPO vs. as dividends not paid due to reinvestment towards hope of greater future profits/dividends?

[ducknald_don]

My point wasn't really about what they continue to do but whether you are indirectly encouraging it by investing in them. If I buy shares in Google tomorrow the money doesn't go to Google itself but rather some other participant in the market. These companies aren't using my investment to build new datacenters or solar farms to power them. If I don't buy those shares they still exist and are earning dividends or gains for someone else.

[Jin+Guice]

Ok but what if:

I've read repeatedly that Hunter-Gatherer societies only require 15-20 hours to meet their baseline needs and they also stop "working" (a concept they actually lack, so we are inventing what is work and what is not for them...) once baseline needs are met. Supposedly agriculture provides some sort of desirable stability, though maybe it was just an experiment that raised the population and was then undoable?

I have no fucking idea if any of this is actually true. But for sake of argument, and since it is congruent with Keynes, assume that it takes H-G societies 15 hours to meet their basic needs.

After we ascended/ succumb to agricultural societies, these societies imparted their own cost. They also allowed greater hierarchies to develop, allowing the few to profit from the many. Again relying on what I have read, agriculture + social hierarchy lead the average person to "need" to work many more than 15 hours a week to meet their baseline needs. The perception of baseline needs also changed as social circles and interactions with strangers expanded and cultures developed.

Living under agrarian societies seems like it mostly sucked, but maybe not? Our current collective dicks are rock hard for 1) romanticizing the past and 2) romanticizing industrialism and technology. Like a good modern boi I am mixing and matching my anthropological seductresses to fulfill the desires of my own historical narrative.

So to recap: H-G society fucking slaps. Agriculture is either or both a bunch of slavery and longer working hours, or stability and tons of killer feudal holidays.

Then comes industrialization. Since this is recent and we love it so much, it seems most believable to me that the start of industrialization fucking sucked for everyone but the factory owners. It seems like it was mostly children getting their fingers cut-off while working 16 hour days behind locked factory doors. This gives rise to a new class of elites, the industrial-capitalists. While working conditions are perhaps not more favorable, this slowly leads to more freedoms as industrial-capitalists can made rather than born, especially in the beginning when a capitalist power vacuum exists and a struggle exists between industrialist/ secular-humanists and religious, divine-right-of-kings monarchists.

Slowly cheap energy/ machines/ democracy/ capitalism all started contributing to more stuff for people in industrialized nations. They also contributed to increased power in industrialized nations, which allowed them to continue the agriculturally established imperialist extraction of precious natural resources and cheap labor from less powerful nations.

As industrialization slowly meets the baseline material needs of people and the agriculturally invented societal needs of people, it starts running into a problem. We have become too good at making shit and just constructed a power-thirsty new elite who's power is entirely based on the process of extraction-making-selling shit to people. Out of some combination of coincidence or necessity, industrialists invent a bunch of pretty useful stuff that makes day-to-day living easier. Through some combination of coincidence or necessity, each technological leap forward is eventually integrated into society as a need less than a generation after its inception.

Industrial capitalism is still too fucking good at making shit though. It is unable or unwilling to expand markets to the rest of the world quickly enough to sell its wares, so, out of necessity consumerism, or using repressed needs to manipulate people to buy things they don't actually need is invented. This spreads like wildfire through industrialized nations.

What Keynes noticed is that if we snap-shot whatever the fuck "the good lyfe" is in 1931, which I'm assuming is having just a little bit more than the average person had in 1931... or probably a little bit more than they had in Q1-3 1929... and then use growth to meet those same needs in 2031, we could each work very little. GDP per capita has grown between 5-6x from1929 to today, so we should all be working 8 hour weeks. Of course this doesn't take into account that the newest technological wonders of 1929 are very cheap today...


I think what Keynes was projecting and what FIRE noticed is that we live in the very rare moment in history where we can have our cake and eat it too. Where we can actually meet our baseline needs, our societal needs and our newly introduced technological needs, if we can only get out from the brainwashing of our consumerist needs (and frankly we can meet some, but not all of these too). The dragon we are told we have been chasing for 10,000 years (or forever if you are a "nasty, brutish and short" type ) is finally ours to hold, if only for a brief moment, before it destroys us.

[Slevin]

@J+G Sort of, but one of the problems is that I can't get a "thing of 1929 standards" in 2024, i.e. the standard basket of goods of 1929 standards are illegal in many places. This is true with transportation, housing, energy, and food (the big four in terms of costs for most people).

There's also a lot of insinuation that the 1930s basket of goods was a good basket, but there's a hell of a lot of pain in there too. Lack of indoor plumbing, Air quality, child mortality, food safety standards (fun fact, formaldehyde was a common milk additive at the time). Sort of one of the great and interesting tasks of a renaissance man in 2024 is to sort through the good increases from the bad increases, and find the best plausible and attainable (won't get you thrown in jail for using, or obliterate the planet) basket of goods. In praise of industrialization, 2024 is a weird time, but I don't think anybody is that mad that we have finally started the age of abundant clean energy with solar / wind / geothermal.

I.e. The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

[Jin+Guice]

@Slevin: Yes I agree there are problems with PPP (or in this case CPI deflating) everything, most notably related to physiological human needs which have likely not gotten cheaper and in some ways have gotten more expensive, possibly while locking in higher quality standards.

Counter to this is the fact that we have vastly advanced tech. And then add in that GDP per capita doesn't take into account distribution.

So any quantification is at best a very loose guess for fun.

What I do think is true is that by 1929 we had a lot more stuff than we needed. AND paradoxically we've added a lot of super useful (to modern humans) technologies (but more nearly useless technologies!) and the most useful tech has, in 2024, become very cheap (but old technologies, such as houses, have not become much cheaper and possibly more expensive).

I agree that adding nuance adds nuance.

We're still over here living technologically advanced lives on creativity and 10-50% of average consumer spending.

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. I have so little control over the world.

[xmj]

Two things I'm cooking up that I hope will be worthwhile:

1. Actualization!- Level 7 towards 8 thread viewtopic.php?t=13137
2. I have extended the Wiki with subpages for the Yields and Flows, and Systems Theory, as well as Actualization levels, and collect the book recommendations I've found in various Forum threads there. More legibility - and reading material.

This because I had an interesting breakthrough after reading a tweet earlier today

Edit: added the Wiki page links.

[Jean]

i agree, but this person's avatar come from one of the best band to ever exist: magma

[7Wannabe5]

@ducknald_don:

Yes, I agree that it very much depends on how you layer the spreadsheets. I also didn't mean to lob the term "naive" directly at you. We've all had these same muddled thoughts.

Here's what occurs to me when Level Green notion that "Money is Evil" is dismissed as naive. The story of possible redemption at the Keynesian juncture is equally naive. In fact, the extent to which it so very closely mirrors the tale of Exile from the Garden of Eden should give anyone with a spark of intelligence pause. The world full of anything a human could possibly need was created by God/Early Efficient Enlightened Capitalist Producers, but the Devil in the form of a Serpent/Marketing Department took advantage of the base desire for Apple/Shiny Egg Cooker and tricked Adam's more gullible derivative form human Eve/the Consumer into taking a bite, and from thence forward Adam/the Worker was doomed to labor by the sweat of his brow 40 hours/week in the IT Department.

How might we rewrite the fable of the Keynesian juncture in a manner that reflects Eve/Consumer knowing exactly what she was doing when she bit the Apple/bought the Shiny Egg Cooker? IOW, can we rewrite the fable in a manner that grants more respect/empathy for Eve or even the Serpent towards even higher level thinking or practice for ourselves?

A not unrelated note would be that the most popular anti-feminist sexual dichotomy theory books of the mid-20th century clearly denoted Frugality as a Masculine Virtue. It seems to me that at Level Yellow/Turquoise this virtue should be balanced by a Feminine Virtue, rather than alarmed by the chaos of a Feminine Vice. IOW, I believe the higher vision is post-consumerist rather than anti-consumerist.

[Jin+Guice]

The ERE WL table as it is going from succeeding at the interobjective system as it is (WL1-5) to developing objective skills (WL6-7) to questioning the subjective values of what one wants to do now (WL8) ... and moving on connect intersubjectively with others on the same path (WL9). This is not the only path.

Be aware that ego development and the related inner work is decoupled from financial aspects for most people who take a more 'live and let live' approach to finances - most of mine happened at savings rates between near-zero and highly negative.

You don't *need* a perfectly harmonized homeotelic Web of Goals to self-actualize. It helps, but that's a very different question.

And the "infinite game" may start way earlier.

As I've moved through the WLs, I noticed that WL1-5 is very specific, while WL6-8 is more general. WL 1-5 is pretty much achieving FIRE (though possible to FI without reaching WL5, it will just take longer). In the WL7/8 thread quoted above, there has been a more general discussion of WL 1-5. My interpretation: WL1-5 is the process of playing around with whatever the conventions of your culture are and learning to make that system work for you rather than working for that system. For most of us, money is a large component of this. However, this does hint at alternative paths outside of FIRE.


Ego Development Theory Overview (from 7->8 thread).

The trap of not following the FI plan is being "pre-conventional" and thinking you are "post-conventional."


WL 6-8 (and possibly beyond) has the opposite problem. This is the process of becoming post-conventional and moving towards self-actualizing, which means that a well laid out plan is not possible. The "Needs" series of posts in my journal is me grappling with how to figure this out and think of a possible system structure.

This is why the break between WL5 and WL6 is the hardest one, because it breaks with conventions and establishes new conventions... or rather WL6 transcends and includes the previous convention---it's not just imagining things or making shit up. WL6 is actually rooted in reality.

I agree. WL5 -> WL6 necessitates shattering an ego narrative about your place in the world. In some ways it felt to me like being born again or waking up from a long sleep. You also graduate from being at the top of one way of being to the bottom of another.

[jacob]

The trap of not following the FI plan is being "pre-conventional" and thinking you are "post-conventional."

This is called the pre/trans-fallacy and it's worth some self-questioning. The fallacy comes about because "conventional" people or mindsets often can not see the difference between "pre-conventional" and "post-conventional". (I'm just gonna drop the quotation marks henceforth). They're both odd so conventional people can not tell the difference as to whether some odd duck is just spouting bullshit or playing 4-dimensional chess.

At least one instrumental way of telling the pre-conventional from the post-conventional is the former's absence of technique and context. This harks back to the discussions about creativity. The US patent office defines a creative contribution as something that is 1) useful, 2) novel, and 3) non-obvious.

This is a very handy way of determining the difference. The preconventional mind may have new ideas, but they do not understand the techniques of the old ideas so they can not explain how their new ideas are better or fits in with the old ideas (instead they default to BS argument about how the other ideas are "just wrong" or "evil"). In short, their apparent strategy is actually NOT creative as much as it is destructive. It may be novel and non-obvious/weird-looking, but if it's not useful/actionable, it's junk. It's mud on the wall and there's no reason to believe it'll stick. In reality, pre-conventionalism is often mud in the gears rather than mud on the wall.

As far as I understand, the pre/trans-fallacy is often associated with "boomeritis". That's SD:Green talking points promoted by SD:Red values. Basically, protesters protesting for the sake of protesting. People who have a chip on their shoulder but no plan to solve the problem other than blame their out-group.

When we speak about the "transcend and include" structure, the pre/trans-fallacy is breaking this structure. For example, I often snipe at postmodernism. However, my complaint is not about postmodernism per se as it as much as postmodernists, who skipped the classes of modernism or traditionalism. They believe themselves to have transcended modernism, but they failed to include its techniques and context. As such, boomeritis is heavily infected with dreamers ("If you can dream it, you can do it!"). Not that useful because reality doesn't work that way.

One thing I knew to be absolutely crucial in terms seeking a "patent" on ERE fifteen years ago was to prove that extreme early financial independence was not only possible but probable for anyone with a 75%+ savings rate. I was basically grounding the ideas in standard financial freshman math---something that didn't take a rocket scientist but was possible to some 10-20% of the general population to verify with their own brains. Compare this to the standard lifestyle blogger of the time... superminimalist, lives on nothing, but living hand to mouth off of google-adsense. Both ideas were novel, but ERE had conventional context and more importantly an irrefutable technique for breaking with conventionalism. Relying on your youtube channel for your means of living, not so much.

I might be projecting my [modernist] scientific background too much, but it might be worthwhile to consider a 4th criteria: Is the strategy repeatable?!

In other words, a post-conventional strategy or idea should be repeatable for MANY people. It's not useful if it only works for one special person in one special circumstance. It's hard to tell that from luck. I might have a perpetual motion machine ... but if nobody else can build a copy of my machine, then my machine is irrelevant.

[mountainFrugal]

In other words, a post-conventional strategy or idea should be repeatable for MANY people. It's not useful if it only works for one special person in one special circumstance. It's hard to tell that from luck. I might have a perpetual motion machine ... but if nobody else can build a copy of my machine, then my machine is irrelevant.

Or can also be thought of as the replication crisis of lifestyle design.

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob: Thanks for expanding on that. I never understood the pre/trans fallacy but now I think I get it.

This is called the pre/trans-fallacy and it's worth some self-questioning. The fallacy comes about because "conventional" people or mindsets often can not see the difference between "pre-conventional" and "post-conventional". (I'm just gonna drop the quotation marks henceforth). They're both odd so conventional people can not tell the difference as to whether some odd duck is just spouting bullshit or playing 4-dimensional chess.

At least one instrumental way of telling the pre-conventional from the post-conventional is the former's absence of technique and context. This harks back to the discussions about creativity. The US patent office defines a creative contribution as something that is 1) useful, 2) novel, and 3) non-obvious.

Fuck. Knowing this is about to make dating so much harder.

I might be projecting my [modernist] scientific background too much, but it might be worthwhile to consider a 4th criteria: Is the strategy repeatable?!

In other words, a post-conventional strategy or idea should be repeatable for MANY people. It's not useful if it only works for one special person in one special circumstance. It's hard to tell that from luck. I might have a perpetual motion machine ... but if nobody else can build a copy of my machine, then my machine is irrelevant.

Ah yes, this is where we disagree. I think any novel solution is interesting regardless of repeatability... though I am thankful you keep discovering repeatable solutions! I agree that repeatable solutions are more interesting. I love taking other people's solutions and playing with them, so a non-repeatable solution in my eyes is something that can be borrowed and rearranged. I'm not great at coming up with generalizable novel ideas by myself.