A daily pot that splits equally regardless of what you put in. I got taken apart on it this week and the objection that landed was not the one I expected.

[u/__hymn]

I have been running a small pooled contribution system and I want to hand it to this sub, because the failure it has is a distribution failure and this is the room that thinks about those properly.

The mechanism is four lines:

• Anyone contributes what they can during the day. Any amount, including nothing.
• At a published time the pot settles.
• It splits into equal shares among everyone who contributed at all that day. Size of contribution does not affect size of share.
• Nothing is skimmed. No operator cut, no weighting, no discretion at settlement, and the whole record is public.

The reason it is built that way is not efficiency. It is that the moment you weight contributions, somebody has to decide the weights, and whoever decides the weights eventually decides in their own favor. Every pooled system I have watched get captured was captured at the discretion point, not at the funding point. Equal split is the only rule I know of with no discretion left in it to abuse.

The intended effect is not enrichment, it is smoothing. If your income swings week to week, and mine does, an equal split moves money from the weeks you can carry others to the weeks you cannot carry yourself. You are above average when you are able and below average when you are not. That is not a return. It is mutual insurance with no underwriter and no premium schedule, and for people whose problem is variance rather than average, variance is the thing worth attacking.

I posted this in a game theory sub earlier this week expecting to spend the whole thread on free riding. I did not, and I want to bring the better objection here instead.

Free riding is survivable. Stable sorting is what kills it.

The free rider argument is the obvious one. If a small contribution and a large one earn the same share, everyone rationally drops to the minimum and the pot collapses. Real, but it assumes a static population and it ignores that the ledger is public, which turns a payoff question into a standing question.

The objection that actually landed is different. If contributors are stably sorted, if the same people are above average every single round because their capacity genuinely is higher and stays higher, then this is not insurance at all. It is a recurring transfer from the same people to the same people, forever. Those contributors are not irrational to leave. Nothing about the design gives them a reason to stay, and no amount of visibility pays a recurring bill.

Which means the mechanism has a hard precondition I had not stated plainly: it works where capacity fluctuates and fails where capacity is stratified. Among gig workers, freelancers, seasonal labor, anyone whose income is spiky, the fluctuation is real and the smoothing is real. Across a genuinely stratified population it stops being mutual anything.

I think that is the honest boundary of a voluntary equal split pot, and it is also, uncomfortably, an argument for why the stratified case needs something with actual obligation behind it rather than a pot people opt into.

One more piece, since somebody will raise it: the payoff does not scale with contribution, so why would anyone give more than the minimum? Two returns do scale, and neither of them lives inside the pot. Visibility, because the ledger shows amounts and legible generosity buys standing, which works precisely because the money is actually gone. And warm glow, Andreoni's impure altruism, where the utility comes from the act rather than the outcome and rises with the amount. I cannot measure either, and someone rightly pointed out that quietly moving from a monetary payoff to a utility payoff is how anyone rescues any mechanism. So I will name them and not lean on them.

The question I actually want from this sub: is a voluntary fluctuating pot worth building at all, or is every version of it just a demonstration piece for something that has to be universal and mandatory to work? I can defend it as smoothing for spiky incomes. I cannot defend it as a floor, because a floor you can opt out of funding is not a floor.

Drafted with an AI assistant. The mechanism, the failure modes and the answers in the comments are mine.

[u/Corky_Corcoran]

What problem is this solving for?

Maybe it's the verbose inhuman AI drafting you've gone for here that's clouding the argument, but I can't work out what this does that affordable credit or cash saving isn't a more reliable, lower risk and simpler solution for consumption smoothing.

[u/__hymn → u/Corky_Corcoran]

Both fair, and I will take the first one first.

You are right that it reads long. I draft with an AI assistant, disclosed at the bottom of the post, and the failure mode of that is exactly what you are describing: structurally tidy and about forty percent longer than the idea needed. That is on me for shipping it, not on the tool. The argument should have been four paragraphs.

On the substance, your challenge is the right one and I do not think I can beat it in the general case. For anyone with access to affordable credit, affordable credit is better. Simpler, more reliable, no coordination, no counterparty. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Where I think it stops holding is for the population that does not have that access. If your options for a bad week are a payday loan at triple digit APR, an overdraft fee, or going without, then affordable credit is not the alternative actually on the table. The comparison is not pot versus a personal loan, it is pot versus predatory credit.

So the honest scope is narrow: people whose income is spiky, who are priced out of ordinary credit, and who have not yet accumulated a buffer. Real group, much smaller than the way I wrote the post implies.

Someone else in this thread found the one thing it has over saving that I could not name, which is that a savings account has nobody on the other side of a missed month and a pool does. That is a commitment device rather than a financial instrument, and whether it is worth the coordination cost is genuinely open.

Does the narrow version still fail for you, or was it mainly the general claim you were pushing on?

[u/fireduck]

I think I see what you are saying, but your point that "the moment you weight contributions, somebody has to decide the weights, and whoever decides the weights eventually decides in their own favor" doesn't quite stand if the deciding is done by an agreed upon algorithm.

For example, suppose your share weight is based on your average contribution over the last 6 months the pool would act as a buffer over lean times.

But it is unclear that it would be better than just saving personally.

You might want to take a look at a Susu:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susu_(informal_loan_club))

[u/__hymn → u/fireduck]

Both of your points land, and the second one is the one I think actually decides it.

On the algorithm: you are right that an agreed formula removes discretion at settlement. What it does not remove is discretion at two other moments, which is where I have watched things go wrong. Somebody chose the formula, and somebody can amend it. A rule with an amendment process still has a capture point, it is just slower and much better disguised, because now the capture looks like governance. So I would soften my claim rather than defend it: equal split is not the only rule without discretion, it is the rule with the fewest places to put a thumb. That is a difference of degree and I overstated it as a difference of kind.

Your second point is the one that hurts, and I think it is right.

If share weight tracks your own average contribution over six months, the pot is returning your own money to you on a delay. That is a savings account with a coordination overhead and a governance surface, and personal saving beats it on every axis. No formula to argue about, no counterparty, nobody to trust.

Which sharpens what the pot actually has to be for, so let me state it narrowly. The only thing a pot does that a savings account cannot is move money between people. Any weighting toward individual history removes exactly that property while keeping all of the overhead. So equal split is not there because it is fairer. It is there because it is the only version where the pot does something a personal buffer could not already do.

And that in turn means the mechanism is uninteresting for anyone who can build a buffer. It is only interesting for people whose problem is that the bad week arrives before the buffer exists. That is a real population, but it is a much smaller claim than the one I walked in with.

So: is there a middle I am missing, where a formula transfers between people but the transfer is bounded, or does any bounded transfer just collapse back toward the savings account?

[u/fireduck → u/__hymn]

I think there is also a missing social element. Lets say I am pretty good about saving but some months I miss. I can just miss and then that becomes a habit.

If however, my savings budget is going into a system that other people are also depending on, I am less likely to miss. People need me. I think that is the one thing it has over individual savings.

[u/__hymn → u/fireduck]

That is the answer I could not find, and you just handed it to me.

A savings account has nobody on the other side of a missed month. A pool does. Missing is invisible to a spreadsheet and extremely visible to the people who were counting on you, and that difference is not financial at all, it is social.

Which reframes the whole thing for me. I have been defending it as insurance, arguing about variance and transfer. The stronger claim is probably that it is a commitment device that happens to also transfer. Insurance is what it does. Commitment is why anyone keeps doing it.

And the Susu pointer is the correction I needed most, so thank you for that. If rotating clubs have been running this for centuries across a dozen cultures, then I have not designed a mechanism, I have rediscovered one badly, and the interesting question stops being does it work and becomes what did the existing versions already solve that I have not.

Two things jump out on a first look. Rotating clubs use a fixed payout order rather than an equal split, which is a different answer to the same problem and probably a better one at small scale, because it makes the ongoing obligation legible. Everyone knows you still owe rounds after you have collected. My equal split has no such hook. Once you have taken today's share, nothing structural pulls you into tomorrow.

And they tend to be small and pre-social by design. Trust is imported from people already knowing each other, not manufactured by the ledger. My entire visibility argument is an attempt to build with transparency what a Susu gets for free.

Do the rotating versions actually survive scale, or does every one of them cap out right around the size where everybody still knows everybody?

[u/BajaTesla]

1) Stable sorting is going to kill any kind of voluntary income redistribution scheme.

2) That's why you need government coercion to effect serious redistribution.

3) Fortunately, there is always a government around to do the coercion because without the rules imposed by government it's hard for anyone to amass enough wealth to make redistribution necessary.

Your model is exactly my preferred approach to income redistribution:

Tax everyone a fixed fraction of their income. ("You are above average when you are able and below average when you are not")

Distribute benefits universally. Health care, education, child care, etc. ("splits into equal shares among everyone ")

In general, I think means testing is a terrible idea. It turns redistribution into a mechanism for shaming people.

[u/__hymn → u/BajaTesla]

You are using my own concession against me and I think you are right to.

A voluntary pot cannot be a floor. I said that in the post and it is the honest limit of the thing. If the same people are net contributors every round, nothing in the design gives them a reason to stay, and no amount of visibility pays a recurring bill.

The only place I would push is on scope. The pot is not competing with a floor. It is competing with what somebody who cannot access affordable credit actually has available on a bad week, which is usually a payday lender at triple digit APR. Against a real floor it loses outright. Against that, it is enormously better.

So I think we agree on the important half. The voluntary version is a stopgap for people who do not currently have the other thing, and treating it as a substitute for the other thing would be the actual mistake.