Extract

This chapter explores the long-run economic and policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain technology adoption. Blockchains disrupt the historical rationale for much modern economic policy. the authors formulate the institutional logic of a co-evolutionary model of the demand for economic policy. In the industrial revolution, complex production led to economic growth, but that complexity had to be managed through hierarchical governance. Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter both identified the consequences of hierarchy for power relations, creating a demand for public policy to counteract the effects of hierarchy. Blockchains offer the dehierarchicalisation of capitalism, and a corresponding reduction in demand for anti-hierarchy public policy.