Adding a Grain "Salary Cap"

[decentralion]

Lots of great thoughts in this thread! Going to start with the actionable decision making, and then move on to commentary.

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Deciding what to do

@blueridger

But since grain payouts are a 1 way door that can be done retroactively and since we don’t have current need for people to get distributions to a boost account, it would also make sense to me to implement a policy to cap distributions to the personal account to meet sustenance needs as described and not distribute anything more into the boost accounts for now until we can take the time to actually reflect on our strategy there.

This is a really good point. At present, the number of people who would be affected by the salary cap (and thus have need for the existence of a boost account) is very small, primarily just me. So the need for boost accounts isn’t “well validated” for us. Also, it would take engineering resources, which we already have earmarked for thoroughly validated needs, e.g. the Creditor. Also, the Creditor is needed by some of the least privileged participants (people who aren’t getting much Cred), and this “delegated boost account” idea is relevant to the most privileged participants, so we should keep this in mind when deciding how to allocate eng badwidth.

So, let’s go with the simplest solution: we just implement the salary cap, without adding “boost accounts”.

I’ll still need to work around a really big tax bill associated with my earnings (and am reluctant to actually sell any Grain since I want to keep capital inside SC). But since this is a problem that is a consequence of having a lot of economic privilege, I’m well equipped to solve it on my own, without needing to push new things on SC’s engineering queue. And, in the future, when we have many people hitting the salary cap, we’ll have a much better understanding of how to implement “Boost accounts”.

(Interestingly, I’ve been working on SC for 148 weeks, and if we were to apply this policy retroactively, my “total salary cap” would be 370k Grain, so my current Grain earnings are not inconsistent with this policy.)

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Commentary!

@KuraFire

A salary cap only alters the incentive for people whose primary objective is wealth (with the byproduct of greed).

I think this over-simplifies things. People for whom wealth is not their “primary objective” still care about their income. Consider the case where we decide to be a volunteer community, setting the salary cap to 0. This would significantly alter the incentives for everyone in the project, including people whose primary objective is not wealth. Or, suppose we set the salary cap to 60k. This might not hugely change the incentives for young single people, but it would be prohibitive for people who are trying to support a family.

@KuraFire

Let’s say that we have a salary cap of 100 × minimum wage ; in the U.S. at where we’re going to be next, ~$15/hr minimum wage, that puts the salary cap at $3+ million dollars per year.

I agree that having a salary cap at $3m per year would mostly alter incentives only for people who are trying to accumulate great amounts of wealth. The specifics of the salary cap matter a lot if we want to analyze the likely changes in behavior.

@otto

To me it seems more intuitive (as a true believer of market forces) to employ taxes instead of caps.

Yeah, I think having some kind of internal tax rate could make a lot of sense. A salary cap is a nice simple thing that we can implement now, though.

@otto

(sidenote: does it make sense to reference authors even though its not interesting to them, but just to give them credit?)

If it’s a Discourse post or topic, you can link it directly. Cred will transitively flow to the author (and other contributors), and it’s more useful to the reader than a username mention. But if you want to thank a contributor in particular, that’s also kosher.

@youngkidwarrior

I really don’t mind that your grain distribution is so high. It certainly doesn’t feel unfair given the importance of your brain and ideas, as well as time sacrificed. The algorithm is actually doing a pretty good job. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think a majority of us that do work for SC would agree.

Now that being said. I do appreciate the sentiment, but my vote is to make you a millionaire, o great and benevolent dictator.

Thanks for the kind words. Personally, I don’t think my Cred score is unreasonable, and if/when SC is in a strong economic footing and has lots of wealth to distribute to contributors, I’d support doing that directly based on Cred scores.

However, right now SC is still incubating. We are trying to trying to keep our capital consumption and burn rate low, so that we can preserve our independence. That means keeping our total Grain issuance low. If we are keeping a low total Grain issuance, then giving me >300k Grain in a year is just not a good decision for the project; we’d be better off dividing that Grain in a way that sustains more people working on SourceCred. That’s why I propose adding a cap.