The Majority Shop
Money is a cheaper, less complex, easier alternative to politics
This article is also available at https://www.each.app/home/majority-shop
Imagine a group buying website or a shop. It offers limited products, sort of a deal, for a limited time. Users can visit and show their intent to buy one of the listed items by paying the price. We can also assume that all items are fixed price. It is compulsory to buy something from the website in every deal. You have the pay but you can buy "NOTA" i.e none of the above. Once the time limit expires, the website figures out the most wanted product on its website and delivers it to all the people. If "NOTA" is the winner, the second highest wanted product is declared the winner and the website will send that item to everyone.
Such a shop can be called a majority shop. Anyone who has to work hard to earn their money will have a hard time making sense of this nonsense. It looks horribly unfair and wrong. If this is how we traded with each other, our houses will be full of stuff that we don't want and most of our life will be spent doing politics to get things we wanted. Money is a cheaper, less complex, easier alternative to politics.
The first thing we may want to fix is the ability to keep our money with ourselves if we don't want to buy anything. No compulsion to buy.
And the second obvious thing to fix is to return the money to those who didn't get what they ordered.
The third but a little non-obvious thing that needs to be fixed is that the shop may not have enough money to deliver on its promise when it returns money to people. This means that the price of the thing that is finally delivered will depend upon the number of people who want it. Let's assume that the shop will charge the credit card of those whose option wins by extra amount depending upon the number of people who want it.
We might think that the majority shop is hypothetical, but our life is full of such shops. Instead of calling it a shop and calling what we pay: money, we call it a poll/election and what we pay, the vote. What we typically buy is a group decision, binding on all and its consequences applicable on all members of the group.
We built Each to make group decisions simple and fair. It works just like money and like money ensures that you get exactly what you pay for. You don’t pay anything when you don’t get what you want.
Download Each App to make your group decisions simple and fair.