3 key facts to remember: 1. some businesses ground out (proverb "does it grow corn?") ; others float on top 2. whoever pays you gets (paid by someone who)ⁿ eventually gets paid by a farmer or oil-worker 3. growing the specialized floatyland economy requires exporting out of it
Grounded vs. floaty economies and where coaching money comes from
15 tweets · November 2023 · 270 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
this isn't just true of coaches: if you only sell your music and your concert tickets to fellow musicians, your economy is broken (if others also do) if you only sell substack subscriptions to other writers who... likewise.
note that floatyland is not just about creative or indie pursuits—it also applies to bureaucrats getting paid by other bureaucrats to arrange the desks properly! and big tech companies are also somewhat floaty, but they already export to everybody so it works
and tech companies that sell backend tools to other tech companies (eg Stripe, Datadog, Zapier) need those other tech companies to actually themselves have something to export from the SaaS economy, because you can't eat API calls
ANYWAY! insofar as the creator & coach economies are growing, it's probably in part the result of: 1. increased economic productivity per person (in jobs and solo) due to tech 2. people still being expected to work full-time if they do have jobs
thus some ppl who work full-time generate much more value than they need to live insofar as that surplus goes to people (workers or execs) they can spend it on eg coaching insofar as the company gets surplus... R&D investments? insofar as the consumer does: cheap stuff
but the nature of what coaching is (as a sort of multiplier thing) means that (as @utotranslucence points out) it has limits on how big of a fraction of the economy it can be (although this is partially a function of how much surplus there is in the economy 🤔)
we talked out loud a bit and I named some examples where I had coached students and for ~$1k (quite a lot for a uni student!) I helped them make major moves towards the careers they wanted she said "okay, that's an investment, though"
OH: a big crux of this whole question is like... what kind of multiplier are various kinds/skill-level of coaching on people's economic participation? and not just in legible ways like making more sales. (eg lots of energy freed up by ending a bad relationship, moving cities,.)
because insofar as coaching can manage to actually pay for itself economically (long-run, in the economy of real value, even if people quit jobs in the short run) then maybe as the number of coaches increases it'll just grow the wealth of the whole economy!
...convinced? I'm not. but it's neat to think about! certainly could be true in principle like if you imagine a world in which in fact most people could get $1000 of value by paying for $500 of "coaching", then we're bottlenecked on: - # people who can coach - access to credit
note ofc that "coaching" is a completely fake category which includes guiding peoples' workout form, giving business advice, helping people feel emotions, life strategy stuff, and many more niche and abstract stuff (plus some coaching is surely useless)
this all also somehow relates to what @Morphenius & I talk about in this long video, about how ultimately all value traces back to the id / animalbody... but coaching & music can benefit id directly, so that's a diff dimension 🤔
btw, one of the things that keeps pinging me is that I want to see Game B groups doing things like running grocery stores and construction companies, as DDOs (deliberately developmental organizations). that's definitely part of my meta-team vision.
also let us not forget that a tremendous amount of economic activity is rent paid to landlords merely for owning the land (beyond the costs of improving, repairing, etc) ...which is neither floaty culture/art/coaching/thinking/meta, nor real growing corn.
