I created SORAnomics from the works of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Plato as an alternative to modern Economics which has caused crises as recurring Panics, Depressions, and Recessions.

The ultimate cause of the problem is its focus on the self, as selfish interest. This causes it to promote the wrong idea of prices, which then fluctuate as to cause those crises.

SORAnomics is different because it is based on society instead of the self. This allows it to look at prices and value at a bigger perspective, which Smith calls the view of the impartial spectator, and which Plato calls Dialectics. To simplify things, it views prices as particles and value as waves*.

I define 'value' to mean abstract feelings of worth (from Latin valere or worth), and 'price' (from Latin pretium or reward or prize) to mean objective ideas of worth, manifesting as a discrete number. Value has the same dynamics as waves, while price has the dynamics of particles. Value is more fudamental than prices just as waves are more fundamental than particles*.

We can say that value is the cause, and price is just the effect. You can hand out prizes such as trophies, but not the value that they represent such as being brightest in class. The cause of value then is the feeling, of which the strongest is the ego or the feeling of the self.

SORAnomics implements the wave-particle principles of Superphysics as values and prices

Value is then divided into Use-value and Exchangeable-value.

• Use-Value is the feeling of usefulness or pleasure or pain-savings that an ego gets from an object or service.
• Exchangeable-Value is the feeling of usefulness that two or more egos get from an object or service.

Exchangeable value vanishes when one is removed from society (other egos) and only Use-value remains:

Money is useless outside of society because there is no one to exchange with and no other egos to express their use-valuation.

Now that we have put Use-value away, we now can analyze Exchangeable Value in isolation.

Since ego is the determiner of value, the exchangeable value of a thing for the self alone is totally arbitrary. We call this the nominal value. The validity of this value is verified if other egos agree to it and proven by their purchase. At that point, it becomes its real value, or value to the self and others. An example is me baking a cake that I think is delicious (nominal value). It will become real if others taste it and agree to buy it. If they don't agree, then my nominal value was wrong and the cake is never exchanged and never acquires a real value.

You could say that nominal value is the value that the self (seller) wants the others to believe (which may or may not be real), and is thus subjective, while the real value of a thing is its actual importance to others (not yet to society), ultimately measured in the "toil and trouble toil of acquiring it (or) saved in disposing it" and is objective from the perspective of society as an organism in itself.

In the cake example, the others will buy my cake because it saves them from having to learn how to make such a delicious cake themselves. If I price my cake too high (a sign that I have a too-high regard for my ego), then they will try to make their own cake instead. Thus, we can say that the freedom to compete and create products and services by ourselves naturally check the egos in society. Allowing free competition in economics* is therefore as essential to commerce just as allowing changes in leadership is essential in politics.

• Market value is the nominal value seen by society as an entity different from the self.
• Natural value is the real value to society. Microsoft Windows has more utility for most of society than Ubuntu, making it command a higher natural value and subsequently a higher market value, even though the real value of both could be the same*.

Another example of real and nominal value is a singer auditioning for American Idol. He thinks that he is the best (highest nominal value). It is only when the judges give their decision will his nominal value be proven to be real or not real. If real, then this value can then be validated as a natural value when the votes of the audience comes in. More votes mean a higher natural value which can then be converted to a high market value when he starts selling his records to the public.

The social end result of the journey from nominal to real to natural value is therefore market value. In the past, this was done through barter, making circulation slow and arbitrage difficult. The growth of wealth correlates directly with the circulation of value. This is why civilizations (organized societies), such as the ancient Romans and Chinese, naturally invented money to speed up the process so that everyone could get their feelings satisfied faster. This created objective market prices, allowing widespread arbitrage and subsequently the opportunity to address demand with supply.

Arbitrage is the taking advantage of the difference between the real and pretended importance of an object, by buying something cheaply and selling it expensively. Business science, whether in selling bread or achieving 5x corporate valuation, can thus be summed up as merely buying low and selling high. It would be very difficult to do arbitrage in a barter system, and so businesses and Economists will naturally go against barter. But this difficulty is exactly what gives it the stability that the money-based system frequently loses***.

Both wealth and crises arise from the invention of money.

When done naturally, this performs the work of the invisible hand of human dharma as a natural resource allocation tool using profits to "make nearly the same distribution of life’s necessities.. and afford the means to multiply the species," something that animal dharma is incapable of. However, when monopolized and overtraded, it leads to the ruin of society by imposing a lot of toil and trouble on others:

To maximize the arbitrage, Economic systems pool money together as firms and corporations to make, buy, and sell real goods and services in society. In time, this naturally creates an oligarchy which then naturally competes with the government and the society itself. This whole cycle leads to tyranny and social collapse* as revolution or wars that reboot all society, oligarchs included. Notice how 'businesses' is a huge entity in the Circular Flow of Economics.

The Circular Flow of SORAnomics, on the other hand, views trade equally between individual egos and collection of egos as organizations (remember that SORAnomics separates use-values and exchangeable values). This prevents too-big-to-fail companies and oligarchs from gaining power because they are checked by the constant natural competition between egos.

Copyright SORA Tech

The dominance of business, arbitrage, and profit maximization in Economics leads to one common observable thing in all Economic systems: high market prices. After money is invented, it is pooled into corporations which is used to

• create economies of scale, and
• lobby laws and lawyers to create intellectual property laws* and tax breaks.

Such laws then prevent competition that could hamper the egos of those oligarchs and corporations. The common justification is that by protecting their interests, employment is preserved and social order is maintained. This is so easily countered by the fact that people can employ themselves as entrepreneurs, and each other as partnerships. This is especially true after the invention of the internet.

An easy example is the high price of iPhones  wherein Apple works hard to protect its intellectual propertyand brand  through the (in)justice system. This gives it high profits as unnatural prices which then benefits its investors or a tiny segment of society. In addition, the public is unable to use its advanced technology to solve their pain points in other fields such as in the military or in medicine.

The falling Android prices below reflect a more natural price due to competition, falling with time as natural market prices, far below the unnaturally high market price of iOS.

High market prices have led to revolution ever since money was invented. High market prices of assets such as stocks and property have led to stock and real estate crashes which destroy value and savings, which then destroy the accumulated work done. This regular destruction of wealth and low purchasing power of savings then implies that people are really just working everyday for food, rent, and utilities in order to keep on working for food, rent, and utilities -- not so different from a slave.

Slave wages have been a thing since the 1970's. Objectively, it sucks to be a Gen Xer or a millennial who are economic slaves to baby boomers.

All of these then lead us to create one of the main goals of SORAnomics which is zero inflation. This is different from the goal of Economics which is an inflation of 2-4%. To explain why a 2% inflation target is bad, we first have to define inflation and deflation in Part 2.   Part 3will then explain how Economics and its 2% inflation target leads to inequality and how it favors the oligarch or business class, at the expense of the working class. These then explain why economic crises, poverty, and inequality still persist despite over 100 years of Economics.