The Usufruct Economy-as-a-Service

Background: Global Warming

The current global warming is directly threatening entire species and life on Earth which is not used to the extreme impact that humans are causing. This impact is from human activity which is facilitated by the “linear” economic system, powered mostly by fossil fuels.

The solutions from most researchers are:

1. Renewable Energy and Carbon Capture

This is expensive and unreliable.

2. Fusion Power

This is not a reality yet because of the backwardness of Physics

3. Circular economy

This is what most governments and institutions are pushing for.

4. Reforestation and afforestation

This is what most NGOs favor.

Our Proposed Solutions

1. Reforestation and Afforestation via Usufruct Economy
2. Seawater Agriculture
3. Residential Ships
4. Fusion Power

The first and most doable step is Reforestation and Afforestation. This matches the solution from the most enlightened philosophers to simply plant a lot of trees to combat climate change:

Unlike expensive carbon-capture technologies that require energy, plants capture carbon for free. The main problem is that they occupy a lot of space that could have been used by humans for agriculture, commercial, and residential purposes.

This limits the carrying capacity of the planet. If populations increase, then more forests will be converted into farmland and houses. This then makes climate change worse. The only solution by then would be to move the population underground in the absence of other habitable planets nearby.

This is why we introduce the concept of a Usufruct Economy in order to sort out the issues with land use.

The Usufruct Economy as the Perfection of The Circular Economy

Many academics, institutions, and government agencies have embraced the circular economy which aims to share, lease, reuse, repair, refurbish and recycle existing materials and products as long as possible.

We upgrade this into a usufruct economy from the Latin “usus et fructus ” which means use and enjoyment of fruits. Usufruct is a legal right given to a person or party to temporarily use and derive benefit from someone else’s property.

We apply this to the whole economy, for anything above $100, through lease contracts instead of purchase.

For Electronics, Vehicles, and Utility Goods*

For example, a person can lease an Android smartphone for $100 from a shop. After 3 years, he might want to upgrade his phone. So he returns the phone and gets a better one worth $150 by paying $50 into the contract.

The shop will then return the phone to the manufacturer for recycling. The contract will prevent the lessee from switching brands.

Currently, contracts exist under the telecom service providers, not the phone manufacturer. In a usufruct economy, telecom services will have one service provider made up of a semi state-owned corporation.

For vehicles, instead of buying a car, a person can put $10,000 in a transportation fund that will provide for him instant transportation to wherever he wants to go in the country. The fund will maintain a fleet of vehicles and keep them closer to where the fund owners are.

For Real Estate

All real property will be leased, whether agricultural, commercial, residential, or industrial. This will give the state a more active role in settling disputes in inheritance and ancestral domain, since even ancestral lands will be usufruct to the tribes.

In theory, this will allow the government to take over land more easily and convert them back to forests through reforestation or afforestation.

It will also reduce the tendency of real estate developers to create speculative projects since they will have a limited lease to the land.

Integrates Easily with our Points-Based Economic system

The Usufruct Economiy integrates very well with our proposed points-based economic system which uses granular points to determine the productivity and economic behavior of its users. It, together with ‘point bankers’, will help decision-makers make lease decisions:

• The government can know who is the best person, among litigants, to administer the disputed property
• The manufacturer can know whether the lessee will return the product undamaged

Moral Effects of Transitioning from Sale to Lease

The transition from the circular economy into the usufruct economy will create a change in mindset from permanent personal ownership, into temporary rent or borrowing. This is more in line with Nature where no one lives forever in the physical domain.

Rather, humans exist in order to achieve or experience something in this life, and then move on to experience other things in the next life. This implies that one’s existence is made up of individual life-segments that form a pattern of experiences across lifetimes.

This impermanence and dynamism is the metaphysical basis of “marginal utility” wherein we are never happy doing or experiencing the same thing again and again. Very few people have the same job or role from the time they graduate from university to the time that they retire. We frequently change jobs, and those who have careers often change companies or move to other cities or countries.

And so, the Usufruct Economy is more in line with such a dynamic nature of things. In future posts, we will discuss the other solutions:

• Seawater agriculture will be discussed by Bio Superphysics
• Residential ships will be discussed by Social Superphysics
• Nuclear Fusion Power will be discussed by Material Superphysics