How do you even make consumer choices without information overload?
J.W. Sher
May 14, 2025
One of the most common problems I hear when people attempt to grasp Free Market Ecology is how, as a consumer, you should spend your resource allocation. Consumers derive their resource allocation from profits, wages, or UBI. Many resources might be in one’s wallet in a future fully implemented system. Wealth would thus be a vector instead of a scalar value. This portfolio of resources would create overwhelming complexity in allocating one’s budget. One might buy something that would exhaust one’s budget of a critically limited resource and leave them without the budget to pay for other needs. They might have an oversupply of one resource and not enough of another to purchase a needed item. This critique is reasonable, and there are several resolutions to it. Let’s start with a few foundational principles on which free market ecology system designers can build solutions to this problem.
Principle #1: The Resource Exchange
A deep, liquid market for trading one resource for another, probably with a fixed-supply cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as the common intermediary unit, would be essential to an FME implementation.
Consumers with a surplus of one resource could trade it for another quickly and transparently. Market makers would create these exchanges, and consumers eager to conduct daily business worldwide would give the market a deep and liquid order book. This characteristic of markets would allow someone with a surplus of water rights to quickly swap those for various other rights they would need to complete their daily shopping, for example. The transactions should be high-speed and at market prices. There would be no capital gains tax on these transactions. Maximum balance sheet limits of various commodities would be an option to prevent the hoarding of rights, speculation, and cornering markets. These are always problems in fixed commodity markets. However, since there is generally limited credit in Free Market Ecology that producers use in the production process, similar to the “real bills” doctrine, so this wouldn’t be as big of a problem as in markets where credit is essentially unlimited and can flood into asset bubbles. In general, Free Market Ecology employs mechanisms that discourage hoarding rights and commodities, especially above ground, in preference for leaving unused resources in the earth undisturbed.
Principle #2: Labor in an AI world
In the average person’s life in the current capitalist system, the variable that they focus on is labor. At the most basic level, the consumer thinks I need to eat, so I must work, or I must get some sort of subsidy from a gift, government, or, more dubiously, criminal activity. Desire for consumption encourages labor, or at least the seeking out of subsidies, or theft of others’ labor. I anticipate that labor will be worth very little in Free Market Ecology. That’s because robots and AI will do almost all labor, and humans will not have much to add except creatively and competitively discovering things that make people content with the least amount of resources, using their internal notions of taste and benefit to the consumer. So, how does the consumer “work” in this system to achieve their consumptive aims? They can join an enterprise and receive a share of the markup of profits. They can work independently in whatever meaningful way they can provide value. For this, they receive resources as dividends from their equity ownership of enterprises, and “money,” in the traditional sense for labor, though their labor will be worth very little in comparison to resource rights, and almost all wealth will come from equity, UBI, and the resale of purchased goods.
Solution #1: Real-time Price Adjustments vs Labor or Cryptocurrency
In today’s world, people’s main decision is to work, or not to work, and what to work at, to increase their consumption. They simplify their consumption as a balance between work vs. consumption. We could still do this in the future, but labor would be worth very little. A local app referencing a resource exchange could convert all the resources rights available to them to “money,” the unit of human labor, bitcoin, or other fixed cryptocurrency, or whatever accepted intermediary currency between all resource rights. The local system that used exchange data to calculate the total value of resource rights owned would mark those resources to market in real-time, and thus, prices of goods would change steadily based on the supply and demand of limited resource rights. A hedging market might develop for purchases in the future, but premiums would likely be very steep due to almost full-resource utilization of limited rights in the system. This behavior might create rapid price changes as resources changed in demand for different things, but it would at least simplify it to a single number that people could use to reasonably calculate.
Solution #2: AI Agent Assisted Consumption
An AI could learn about a person and their consumption habits and design a complete consumption cycle that would optimize their entire life enjoyment based on their resources rights, and desires. Naturally, it would consider recycling, reuse, and limited ownership of items to prevent excessive balance sheet accumulations and maximum liquidity. In that way, people would think less about the price of things than they do now and have fewer economic decisions to make.
Solution #3: The All-Inclusive Resort
Developers could create all-inclusive resort-type accommodations where all food and amenities are included. These would be tailor-made to fit the resource budgets of their inhabitants, but with limited discretion on the part of the inhabitants. The resort’s systems would buy and sell every day on behalf of the residents and optimize their lives. Resorts would compete to provide the most optimal consumption experience for standardized resource budgets. This way, consumers could delegate their consumption decisions to professional organizations that would invest in capital to meet those needs.
Conclusion
Free Market Ecology would not be practical to implement without AI and computerization. However, in previous essays, I have elaborated on why the AI and ecological crisis that will arrive at meteoric speed thanks to AI and robotics requires a Free Market Ecology solution to prevent endless wars over resources on an overtaxed Earth. The primary questions have been around complexity, but preserving our environment while providing good living conditions for billions is a complex problem. Indeed, a problem that a centralized leviathan bureaucracy would lazily solve in the existing labor creates value system with the devaluation of human life and mass extermination as a pathetically blunt instrument that has been around since antiquity, which it will inevitably choose since labor will not be valuable in the future. It will view other humans as only competing for resources to feed the unlimited AI/robotics genie. Only through free market ecology can we decentralize the problem and change the equation so everyone focuses on creating the most happiness and value in the most ecologically sustainably way. To contribute, people must moderate their consumption based on sustainable consumption factors, which is a formidable problem for people to deal with daily. However, the three proposals above mitigate the consumption complexity by converting all prices to “money” for the consumer, or letting some combination of AI or all-inclusive organizations arrange consumption.