Mark Blyth - So can we have it all?

This is sort of a rambling summary of ideas that Blyth has considered and his thoughts on them. Topics range from worker cooperatives, the green new deal, digital dividends, sovereign wealth funds, etc.

Here is a sample transcript (modified pronouns and phrasing for clarity in some places) on the topic of Digital Dividends

We give away our data, that makes no sense. The only reason these digital monoliths make all the money that they do is because we give them data. Amazon's gotten to the point where they aren't even relying on us giving them the data, they're extorting it from local governments and they're creaming it from the fact that they run all your business from their servers. So if you think about it, you could do it as private property but then you've got a scalability problem. Average revenue per user for Facebook and Google is about between $9 and $12 per year. The user is not going to bother with licensing their data to lots of different platforms so they can get 45 cents. So what do you actually need to do then? You need to do public trusts. So basically you can opt in or out to an NGO or something that's independent from the state that nonetheless is not dependent on private: 501c3, charity, whatever you want. Then you can sign your rights to them and say "I want my data to be used by the following firms or types of firms (or not)" and then you will get whatever we get back when we sell it all as a block rather than just give it away. Because if you sell it as average revenue per user, that's just the limit cost that they're extracting the data at. But that's why they have unbelievable profits. So if you want to change that then you sell it in blocks or you don't get it at all - in which case the service providers can't do any business in Canada or the UK for example - at which point you'll suddenly find that the selling price of that data jumps up dramatically which reduces their profitability which is exactly what you want to do.