[hatsunearu]

It's not really about money or profit.

Society has found out money is a good way to encourage/discourage certain behavior in a predictable, deterministic, and quantifiable way. It really sucks that it has to be money, and maybe this can be solved with some other universal token that cannot be bought with wealth but equitably distributed some other way.

For example the dynamic fees in express lanes in California aren't really for the purposes of paying for the roads. They dynamically adjust it such that the traffic in the lane is operating at peak efficiency. Too few people using it obviously reduces throughput, so the price cheapens to have people using it, and too many people using it causes a collapse in efficiency so the price increases. Having some kind of adjustable cost on it lets the control system appropriately change the demand to keep it efficient.

[v7n]

It seems to me like a social score system is a direct upgrade to this in certain ways: participating in undesired behaviour will cause you headaches you cannot really solve with money. Too bad it "naturally" slips into mass surveillance, but restricting privileges would be a great alternative to reducing the ability to take care of necessities for you and yours.

[sahn44]

It doesn't have to only be money. In person waiting time is another mechanism to allocate a scarce resource. Back in the day when # of tickets exceeded demand at a fixed price, the tickets went to he/she who was willing to arrive early and wait in line longer (ie, die hard fans). Camping out for tickets was a thing and I somewhat miss it relative to scalpers and price being the only mechanism to drive demand/supply to equilibrium.