brilliant, imaginative, but extremely impractical people. We don't know what to do with them

anymore. It's like they're all living in their mother's basements saying weird things on the internet

and you can't tell which are crazy and which actually have something to contribute. You

used to put them in academia but now academia is all about self marketing.

If you want to have the maximized possibility of unexpected breakthroughs it's pretty obvious

what the best policy is. You get a bunch of creative people, you give them the resources

they need for a certain amount of time, you maybe let them hang out with each other but

basically you leave them alone and most of them are going to end up not coming up with

anything at all but a few of them will probably come up with something that'll even surprise

themselves.

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, take those same

people and then tell them they're not going to get any resources at all unless they spend

the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know

what they're going to create. Well that's the system we have and it's incredibly effective

in stifling any possibility of innovation.

The one thing that's not a scarce resource in the world is imaginative people with possible

solutions to intractable problems. There's probably nobody in the entire world that doesn't

have some idea that we never would have thought of, and we're both pretty smart guys. The

problem is that the overwhelming majority of those people go around every day being

told to shut up. How do you unleash that? That's my basic question and that's why I'm

interested in these broader political questions. If one could unleash that creativity really

then I think a lot of the things we think of as problems - these supposed dead ends

of technological and social thinking that we've hit - would suddenly seem ridiculous.

There're people out there that could probably come up with cold fusion. There're people

out there who could probably come up with almost anything you could imagine. Right now

they're sitting around trying to pay off their father's debt on the rice plantation and spending

all their time in a shoe factory. That's what I'm concerned about - how do we get those

guys in on the game?

There are certain types of economic policy which would unleash popular creativity, which

is the other factor because money isn't just measuring the value of stuff - it's also measuring

the value of human action and it's also a promise of future creativity. That's the thing,

what are the forms of money creation or economics in general that will do that? Again going

back to the question of all those people with the ideas who basically are told to shut up

all the time. Some people will often criticize me for example for sometimes putting in a

good word for Basic Income which is actually something that there's certain elements that

the left and the right can support. I think of it partly as an anti-bureaucratic thing

to actually reduce the size of government and not have all these bureaucrats looking

over everybody's shoulder making them feel bad about themselves all the time. If you

simply gave people a Basic Income support it would mean that you're trusting them to

decide how they want to contribute to society.

Ironically a lot of the social welfare policies which you think of as stifling actually unleashed

creativity in ways that we only know now that they're gone. I live in England - used to

be since the 60s at least, every 5 years there would be some amazing new band or musical

trend that would sweep the world coming out of England, and that's all kinda stopped (since

Tony Blair really). I ask people there what happened and everybody says the same thing

- they got rid of the dole. All those guys were on unemployment. They were squatting

too so they got rid of squatting. So it used to be there'd be free housing, it wouldn't

be much, but you'd have a enough money that you could get your friends together with a

guitar and maybe 1 out of 1000 of them was John Lennon but that's enough. Now John Lennon

is lifting boxes in some department store as welfare conditionality so we're never going

to hear the new trend. I just think that techniques that would just leave it up to people on the

broad scale to innovate in their own ways would actually be much more effective in creating

the conditions where all these things both of us want to see would happen. That's why

I'm interested in those broader questions because at the moment I think the system we

have is very much about tying people down.

What I look forward to is a social order where people are sufficiently secure in their basic

needs that they can affiliate with each other around those things which they think are of

larger value. But you have to guarantee that people aren't debt slaves and they aren't

running around desperately trying to survive before you're going to be able to form those

voluntary associations on that scale to do that kind of thing.