A visitor asked a great question about home ownership.
Question: In our current system, the only way most people can own housing is via mortgage debt. In Copiosis, I assume we would need enough Net-Benefit Reward to “purchase” luxury housing outright. How could we do this without the equivalent of a 25-year mortgage?
In Copiosis you don’t take on a mortgage or debt to own a house. You must have enough NBR to take ownership all at once. That means either saving the needed NBR or doing something so extraordinary that you earn a lot of NBR in a short time.
For most, it will mean being patient while you perfect your offering—the thing you do that will make people and the planet better off. How long that takes depends on your creativity and application. The things you’ll need to produce something that will earn you NBR come at no cost to you, including your education and the food, healthcare, and clothing you need while you’re learning. As you perfect your offering, you can live at no cost in “necessity” housing or rent one of many kinds of living spaces. These spaces are guaranteed to be better than today’s equivalents, and you’ll rent them for far less than people pay today.
Houses won’t cost an average of $500,000. Since “expenses” going into a house don’t exist, including labor “costs”, there’s no need for hefty price tags, and I would expect nearly all houses to be far less “costly”. They will also be far better homes than today’s models, mostly because those costs don’t constrain what is possible.
When you do have enough NBR, you still may not want to own a home. Think about it. Home ownership in Copiosis (as well as car, airplane, and boat ownership) doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re going to use that asset to benefit other people. Physical assets put in service to benefit others earn you NBR. Why would you own a home(s) and allow it to be vacant when you can have someone live in it and earn NBR from the asset? Today we’re seeing this level of enlightenment with Air BnB, where people are allowing their surplus rooms, mother-in-law suites, vacation homes, etc., to be used by strangers in return for income. That trend will continue in spades in Copiosis.
Homeownership today really isn’t “ownership” for most people. We “own” houses today because we feel a sense of accomplishment in the owning of them. We’ve been conditioned to see homeownership as the iconic aspect of the American Dream. However, as we have seen, most recently with the Great Recession, homeownership the way most people practice it today is more like debt-ownership, and it’s questionable who owns what.
Another reason we own our homes is as a means of “security”. Some believe owning a home means if the poop hits the fan, at least they have a roof over their heads, although in some places, if you can’t pay your property taxes, even if you actually own your home, you could lose it. What I’ve often heard and experienced as a former owner of five homes is that owning a home comes with a lot of hassles—maintenance, yard work, cleaning, worrying about someone breaking in, worrying about something going wrong, worrying about the neighborhood going bad, worrying about what the schools are like. … There are a crap ton of issues to be dealt with when you tie yourself to a place. Homeownership often means the home owns you.
“Ownership” implies private use. We own things so we can exercise a level of exclusivity of use of that thing. This is why we have so many hammers, leaf blowers, bicycles, and everything else all over the place. Convenience comes with exclusivity of use of course. It also brings inefficiency. Was this concept of ownership conditioned in us in order to create constant demand for things we could manufacture once and then share? Maybe. That’s why we see tool-lending libraries popping up in communities in the US and elsewhere.
Do you need to own it?
In Copiosis, living the good life has nothing to do with owning a lot of things. Living the good life in Copiosis means achieving unparalleled levels of self-expression through personal development and understanding, supporting that expression in others, professional collaboration, and enjoying the benefits of fabulous luxuries through the accumulation of NBR. The material possessions that currently define “success” are replaced by fulfilling experiences, by freedom, by your sense of joy, by your full self-expression, and by service to others in the way that makes you happiest. It’s not about “the one with the most toys wins”, as it seems to be in capitalism.
It will take a while for people to learn that owning a lot of things doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on many levels. Yes, if you “own” something, you can use it to earn NBR. But in that case, the idea of ownership, i.e., “nobody can use it but me because I own it”, fades away, and your ownership becomes a kind of stewardship. You make sure that the thing you own is maintained and used in a way that maximizes the benefit to others, and you allow as many people as possible to use it for as long as possible.