A New Public Utility

Imagine a sophisticated market platform packed with new functionality to maximize your income, opportunity, and choices. 

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Within your rules, it can seamlessly (a) trade hours you want to work across your entire range of abilities, with full protections and benefits (b) rent out possessions (c) apply for jobs and open other possibilities (d) lend/borrow cash to/from peers.

 

Imagine this platform will give you constant, localized, actionable, data about demand, supply, and earnings across thousands of microeconomic sectors. It can use those insights to incentivize market-aligning investment in your upskilling, and can trigger government interventions if you are struggling. Operating at huge scale with ultra-low charges, the connected markets it offers are open, equitable, decentralized, and transparent.

 

It's hard to grasp how much platform technologies could be doing for us. We have become so used to Silicon Valley's work apps;  global, siloed by work type, run by unknowable algorithms. Those markets are structured to maximize operators' profits, many are financially unstable, data is concealed. They can retain 30% of your earnings. 

 

How does the imaginary option become real? Your government has to understand its unique leverage, remit, and need, to instigate empowering markets.

 

 

Initiation, not Regulation

Daily life is dependent on amenities started by government. Take roads. In the 1890's there were uncoordinated turnpikes for landowner profit. The idea of universal "government roads" with enforced rules, standardized junctions, consistent surfacing, and unified signage discomforted many. But those arteries spawned transport innovations, making travel cheap and easy for people or goods.

 

Money, electricity, railways, postage, and water supply are other inventions first launched by start-ups before public policy shaped a gamechanging version. Each then cut costs of living while driving growth, fairness, and societal progress worldwide. 

 

We aren't forced to use these utilities. If you don't like the one-size-fits-all voltage from your nation's electricity grid, buy a generator. But, for most of us, the options initiated by governments are fine. 

 

 

Markets Matter

Access to comprehensive, truly enabling, economic platforms is vital to realizing potential in a computerized economy. It should now be a basic right; like the way public agencies ensure we have power, communications, travel, or clean water. 

 

If widely adopted, platforms for economic activity operated as a genuine public utility could surface new resources from regular people and local businesses, then match them to buyers with unprecedented efficiency. That makes any market economy more inclusive, green, and supportive. 

 

This "Peoples' Capitalism" is a policy possibility alongside Universal Income, Jobs Guarantees, Baby Bonds, or Green New Deals. But it costs taxpayers nothing. The new platforms should be initiated through competitive official concessions. (It's the way we get state and national lotteries.)

 

 

About Us

The People’s Capitalism initiative sits in our MM4A (Modern Markets for All) non-profit. MM4A emerged from British government programs to shape more supportive labor platforms. We now work with public agencies in the US who have also launched our technologies. 

 

Our speciality is the breathtaking possibilities for advanced market platforms initiated at scale by governments for public good. Peoples' Capitalism is the big-picture end of that vision. It is waiting for political leaders to, again, show the world how transformative some technologies can be when shaped by facilities only governments possess. 

 

Equitable infrastructure for today's capitalism requires "Modern Markets for All".

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