Great way to sum up the problem with market-for-everything ideology. The valuable things that people do often aren't transactionalized but sometimes they are commemorated.

I'm slowly working on an idea for an alternate cryptocurrency based on commemorating ordinary human moments (instead of CPU time as the source of scarcity).

A couple of articles on the project: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...

> Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.)

I need to think about this VERY HARD. I've never seen it put that way before.

I guess I'm not understanding...at what point would we be penalizing already-cooperative behavior?

I can't think of many instances where someone would be paid enough to not raise their child, for example.

And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?

What I mean is that you can't be paid to raise a child, but you can be paid to manipulate them through marketing. You won't get paid to pick of trash off the street, but you can get paid to produce things that produce street-prone trash.

"And if you could pay someone to do something they normally wouldn't wouldn't they be merely passively not for it and not actively against that thing?"

It doesn't matter. They might be actively against it, but if you pay them enough, they'll still do it. We -- as a society -- pay people to do things that nobody really wants to have happen except those who happen get paid to do it (like market cigarettes.) And there are things that everybody wants to have happen that almost nobody gets paid to do (like care for your family.)

We're potentially using our economy to create problems rather than solve them.

Very true, but how else would you do it? How would you pay them to help each other?

I don't know if there is a good way to deal with this directly, but there are a couple ways to deal with it indirectly. Basic income is one such method, though you could also pay people for performing civic responsibilities or charitable work. (Some of this already exists, of course.)