Sāmatvārtha: An Indic Vision for Sustainable and Inclusive Futurism
This essay articulates the mission of Sāmatvārtha - a system that integrates balance and purpose to propose an Indo-Futurism and Indic/Accelerationism framework leveraging technology and market mechanisms for sustainable, federated, and regenerative development, transcending traditional economic binaries and promoting a balanced, inclusive future.
The Vision of Sāmatvārtha
Sāmatvārtha combines "sāmatva," signifying balance and harmony, with "artha," representing purpose and prosperity. This union encapsulates policy proposals not just as frameworks, but as a mindset and principles embodying Indo-Futurism and Indic/Accelerationism. Sāmatvārtha aims to leverage technology and market mechanisms, respecting the freedom of adaptive systems and avoiding micromanagement. It seeks to address collective action problems and internalize external costs, transforming weaknesses into strengths for an advanced Indic Civilizational State. The goal is to move beyond simplistic binaries like capitalism vs. socialism, towards economic sustainability and a balanced motion of change.
Sāmatvārtha rejects over-abstraction in economic policies, advocating for simpler governance heuristics over centralized micromanagement. It critiques the excessive focus on GDP and consumerism, advocating for sustainable goals beyond mere hedonism. Sāmatvārtha envisions a federated, inclusive, and regenerative future, countering both socialist overreach and capitalist consumerism.
Addressing debates between Effective Accelerationism (E/ACC) and Effective Altruism (EA), Sāmatvārtha promotes a balanced approach, leveraging technology for sustainability rather than unchecked growth or stringent control. It calls for harmony over polarization, recognizing the deep civilizational wisdom of Bhāratāya and advocating for a solar-punk Indic-futurism.
Ultimately, Sāmatvārtha seeks to transcend false debates and avoid pitfalls of imperialist capitalism, hedonistic consumerism, and fascistic socialism, promoting a balanced and sustainable future.
The Mission of Sāmatvārtha
The spirit of Sāmatvārtha is to bring certain clarity to our economic thinking which promotes an enterprising civilization while reconciling them with ecological realities. It aims to remove the friction for building, and further collaboration towards continued socio-economic leapfrog of India and Indic Civilizational State. This will be enabled via the profound power of technology and radical clarity of first principles. It envisions a more open, interoperable, sovereign, federated, modular, inclusive, sustainable, regenerative future.
India has not yet recovered from the era of Fabian Socialism. We still find ways to outperform Nehruvian economists in their socialism by masquerading it behind some extra wrappers. Instead of authoritatively planned consumption and production, we should strive for simpler, interoperable, open heuristics for human coordination and consensus. Thus, it is imperative for us as a society to acknowledge and respect the uncertainty and might of our complex adaptive (eco)systems. 1991 merely marked the beginning of the beginning, forced upon us by circumstances. We are still in the process of refactoring how we operate as a society. As Sanjeev Sanyal says, there are quite many structural as well as process reforms that are waiting to be addressed. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) is formulating some of them, but can we attribute these reforms solely to political will, or can there be more to it?
In one of his books, Ajay Shah (@ajay_shah) pointed out how it is not always political will that translates to policy; sometimes, robust technocratic platforms can eventually manifest the political will. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. We, the Indians of this Amrit Kaal - as a fraternity of citizens, builders, mediators, etc. - need to help our policymakers and economists with such profound technocratic solutions. And we have a highly successful precedent for doing precisely that - #IndiaStack! So, it is not an unrealistic goal.
The 2020s are witnessing a significant convergence of scalable technologies, with rapid advancements in trustless data management, interoperable protocols, artificial intelligence, robotics and more. Consequently, Indic Futurism must encompass research mediation, policy advocacy, and the development of technocratic solutions, all aligned with the future envisioned above. To bring to life this collective vision of a solarpunk Indic-futurism, our goal is to accelerate civilizational progress while nourishing nature and ecology, instead of just exploiting it.
Tenets for a Solar-punk Indic/accelerationism
To avoid the mistakes of over-abstraction in economic thinking and whatever-tf happened in 1971, and further enrich theIndic/accelerationism narrative with sustainability, the approach is to define our broad objective followed by a holistic basket of opportunity cost signals to achieve those objectives. In an ideal world, the significance that GDP enjoys as a metric would instead be enshrined upon such a basket of more holistic metrics - a clarion call to align public as well as private capacity building towards these ‘north stars’.
One such potential basket is listed below, with a subtle playful retrofitting into India’s G20 2023 theme. The aim is to keep improving on these metrics in harmony as soon and sustainably as possible:
- Nominal GDP per capita // to Accelerate (One Earth)
- Gini’s coefficient // to Include (One Family)
- Doughnut metrics extension // to Sustain (One Future)
Ultimately, money is nothing but an accounting system for social IOUs. All the economic policies - be it fiscal or monetary - thus do not exist in their silo. A policy is not bad in itself, how it interplays with existing boundary conditions and the meta-psychological incentives will decide if it will end up being bad or not. Therefore, while GDP per capita will tell us about the average prosperity, Gini’s coefficient will ensure the averages are not too skewed in favor of power concentration. Doughnut metrics help us internalize the cost of externalities. All three together ensure prosperity, inclusivity and sustainability in simple clear-cut abstractions to apply even simpler taxation - aka fees to operate the civilization without primordial violence and private property operations.
Coming to the aspirational tenets for Samatvartha, below is a list of objectives and their sub-goals:
- Improve Governance to mitigate
- Corruption and Rent Seeking
- Complexity and Incoherency
- Jugaad and Bad Quality Control
2. Accelerate Civilization
- Sustainably and Ecologically
- Openly and Inclusively
- Culturally and Technologically
3. Enshrine Civility by ensuring
- Trust and Safety
- Contract Enforcement
- Timely Delivery of Justice
4. Universalize Opportunities (not outcomes) via
- Open Education and Skill Development
- Digital and Public Infrastructure
- Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Capacity Building
With these in mind, our focus for Sāmatvārtha will be on providing simple policy prescriptions for Taxation, Welfare and Urbanism to address the three proxies of GDP growth, Gini’s coefficient, and Doughnut Metrics. This will be followed by a new-age approach to blending the fiscal and monetary policy of the nation - of monetary localism - while taking advantage of the technological progress to deploy much simpler policy heuristics on the nation.
Authored by Moberation. Published by Brhat.