The Open Enterprise
knu...@gmail.com
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg2jzdft_113cv6gghdh&invite=f387thn
It's not an attachment -- it's stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.
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This is a project to define the Open Enterprise in which Open Manufacturing is a part and how to move the Open Enterprise forward into physical actions and lived experience. Open Source Software is already known to create abundance, but is captured by proprietary enterprise to benefit a small ownership elite. The Open Enterprise encourages OSS for the benefit of all. The goal of the Open Enterprise is to expand physical wealth to greater degrees unattainable finite nature of scarcity based productive means.
Those who participate in this project will help to discourage a New Dark Age and encourage a New Enlightenment.
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Capitalism, a pillar of the proprietary enterprise. Capital is cost. It represents deficiency and hardship. Capital, also quickly coming into transparency, must use the invisible instruments of finance and markets that lack and stifle Full Open Automation, the goal of Open Enterprise. Proprietary automation benefits ownership of a productive enterprise with a historical tendency to deny intellectual and physical capacities to non-proprietors as the machine of consumption advances at any and all cost with the demands of growth. Capital's finite mentality ensures it too must have an end, an underlying cause for "boom" and "bust." Proprietary automation, left to its own capacities, will bring into question more frequently who deserves the benefit and ownership of its abundance. Money is waste. If used, it means nonrenewable resources are destroyed or humanity is under the forbearance of the workforce.
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The goal of the Open Enterprise is 'no cost': environmental, monetary, and emotional. Managers of finance, markets, and the entirety of the proprietary enterprise will need to "power down" the financial growth model markets feverishly demand, unsustainable without toil, struggle, or greater involuntary action. Freedom is not limited to the confinement of arbitrary economic institutions. The ability to self organize in a variety of Open enterprises will demonstrate the most favorable colors of a most grand enterprise if it shall be named, the human enterprise. At the dawn of the 21st century, the open enterprise must be partially closed and the proprietary enterprise partially open. This does not mean that both are in the long run compatible—only one can survive—and the survival of one or the other will have exceptional circumstances. The proprietary enterprise taken to its most core logic involves only the one at the top with everything. The open enterprise is each person, everyone "at the top" (e.g. limitlessly on the horizon) with everything.
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Energy. Also known as "free energy" must be captured in a way that requires no cost as defined in point one. This means it will need to operate with renewable, freely available resources. Sun and water, when modified, are known abundant energy sources.
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Distribution. Specialization can be integrated with the whole by forming a cost free transport network that spans the globe and meets the needs of each individual. As the workforce dwindles, so too will the need for the conglomerate retail box. The least waste involves direct shipment to the one favoring an acquisition. It does not require sophisticated artificial intelligence to transport items from place to place if transportation is taken to the sky or rail. Both sky and rail transport are powered by abundant energy sources.
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Manufacturing. It is where physical production is most visible. In alignment with distribution networks, measurable resources that cannot provide more than enough for all will need to be abandoned to produce abundant resources. If scarce resources exist, they cannot be used or suffer the consequences of the pyramid of prioritised tyranny and force due to any more favorable way to judge or deduce what is 'deserved'.
Paul D. Fernhout
It doesn't have to be under a free license it is a personal opinion -- even
Richard Stallman often puts his writings under a license that says you can
pass it on but can't modify it. See:
http://www.stallman.org/
Example from there: "copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted
provided this notice is preserved."
So, at the very least, does your document have permission for redistribution
other that viewing in a web browser, like Stallman uses? That would allow
others to include the text of what you write in other works.
But if you want people to extend your document collaboratively, it helps if
it is under a clear free license. And it seems like you are inviting
collaboration on this document (I signed in to Google as a test and could in
theory edit the document). But I did not edit it. Assuming I had the
inclination to do so, why should anyone invest their time in a collaboration
which does not have a clear understanding for what happens to the results?
I know that issue all too well from a past experience. :-) About a decade
ago, I spent a month collaborating with someone on a software package,
porting their software to a new platform with my intent it would be
available under a standard free and open source license, only to find out as
our collaboration wound down that the original "non commercial use"
licensing he provided would not allow that (he makes money potentially from
the commercial licensing of it). I did not press him on the licensing (maybe
he would have granted an exception, but I did not want to create the awkward
situation of asking and being turned down).
The lesson I took away from that time is that it is important up front to be
clear about licensing, and when you use a copyleft license (where derived
works are under the same license) that is in a sense a "constitution"
governing the social process of your collaboration. And in the absence of
copyleft, then you have to be clearer about contributor agreements (you
should anyway, but it is even more important without copyleft, since
copyleft at least makes it clear what the intent was, as in "Hey, you knew
the software was GPL and so you should have known that your contribution
would be covered under the GPL when you contributed or when you
redistributed your own changes."). Obviously, nothing in the USA can stop
legal battles for any reason, but at least being clear on intent reduces the
potential problems down the road. The belt-and-suspenders types at the FSF
still get signed contributor agreements for GNU software though, even when
it was under the GPL, for a few reasons including: to defend the copyright
in lawsuits, to possibly relicense the work in the future under other free
licenses, and to do due diligence that the contributor does not have an
employee agreement preventing them from legally contributing. Wikipedia, on
the other hand, just uses what is essentially a "click through" agreement
and big warning notices.
Either the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license might be appropriate here for your document
(or both as a dual licensed work). You could even use the GPL or LGPL as
well; it's frustrating and confusing that there are so many different
copyleft licenses. Other licenses could work too, but may require more
affirmations by future authors. That is, if you put it under a
non-copylefted license like the BSD-revised or even disclaim copyright and
put your document in the public domain, each additional author needs to more
positively affirm they are making their contribution to the document under
that license, so that you can know where the licensing of the combined work
stands. (I'm developing a tool, linked below, to help with that process of
license affirmation, as this is an interest of mine, but it's not quite
ready for prime-time yet. :-)
Anyway, I bring this up, as I did with SKDB, because IMHO these licensing
issues are fundamental to collaboration. Or like is pointed out in a comment
here by "Morgaine" (slashdot user 4316):
"Sun Banks On Open Source For Its Survival"
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/11/15/0149229.shtml
"Sun needs to stop thinking of open source as a business strategy, because
for them it's merely what's referred to as a "hygiene factor" in social
sciences --- it's not a benefit when it's exercised, but it's a severe
demerit when it's not exercised. In other words, yes, be fully open with
software, but not because it's a source of profits, but because you'll be
shunned without it."
Another way to look at licensing, if you are allergic to the idea of
copyrights as some are, :-) is in terms of "attribution". Most people in the
arts and sciences often think of "attribution" as more important than
ownership, because it is the basis of their fame and thus their livelihood
(and sometimes, but not always, self-esteem). So, a clear copylefted license
chosen for a work also makes a statement about handling attribution.
No one is perfect on all this (I fall short myself often enough), but
licensing clarity is a goal we should strive for IMHO. You may well know all
this, but I thought it important to point out in general for everyone to be
aware of.
--Paul Fernhout
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Bryan Bishop
> just click the link above. --- This is a project to define the Open
> Enterprise in which Open Manufacturing is a part and how to move the Open
> Enterprise forward into physical actions and lived experience. Open Source
> Software is already known to create abundance, but is captured by
> proprietary enterprise to benefit a small ownership elite. The Open
> Enterprise encourages OSS for the benefit of all. The goal of the Open
> Enterprise is to expand physical wealth to greater degrees unattainable
> finite nature of scarcity based productive means. Those who participate in
> this project will help to discourage a New Dark Age and encourage a New
> Enlightenment. To have a fully Open Enterprise the following systems must be
> reorganized:
Nathan, from the technical end of things it takes less words than
those you used to write the document to implement some "enterprise"
systems, such as person management (contact information, address
books, etc.), to manage correspondence and emails (MTAs like postfix,
etc.), payroll management, networking,shared drives over the network,
and so on. Many of these software packages are already written and
that's how RedHat (etc.) get away with just doing consulting these
days. I think you should go install drupal and the various modules and
see how far that gets you.
- Bryan
Nathan Cravens
I'm not so much interested in tinkering with software as much as using software to "do stuff."
This project is intended to go beyond the scope of software. I assume all information systems are freely available or can be customized collaboratively. How software will function will be described as the essay forms.
Once the rough manufacturing and distribution models are described, Bryan, you'll be the first person I contact to see what software might be available to pull it off.
I'm interested in source materials. Anything you can think of that is the "best of the best" in free Energy, Distribution, and Manufacturing like solar and hydrogen fuel cell energy, automated transport and distribution, and automated manufacturing (3d printing, fabrication, ect) will be helpful.
I appreciate the contributions from this community and others.
Nathan
Paul D. Fernhout
Thanks for putting that document under an explicit free license.
I fixed a couple of typos. I also added a paragraph (more to try out the
system than anything) related to Google's Virgle "Open Source Planet" idea.
Feel free to remove my changes or edit them.
I'm not sure if the different color idea for different contributions will
hold up over time, but I tried it anyway. :-)
Also, at some point, the number of resources and people you want to talk
about may grow so large that a single page document may not hold them or
organize them, at which point you may want to move to at least a wiki.
I guess what I am saying is there are at least two aspects to the document
now -- one is as a "manifesto" or "white paper" or "position paper" about
the open enterprise idea, the other is a directory of projects that are
doing things related to it in one way or another. The manifesto part makes
sense as a document, but the directory part, if it is other than a shallow
overview of the field, would take a wiki or something else like a database
IMHO (including with metadata information).
--Paul Fernhout
Nathan Cravens
Thanks for the contribution. I've enjoyed your lengthy prose and links on this discussion board.
It my intention to instill the ideas discussed within our group into a single written article, The Open Enterprise, to further the discussion and development of Open Manufacturing and related areas.
Anything related to Project Virgle, Venus Project--even past organizations that are more or less defunct, like the Technocracy movement will help the work.
I intend to write 'a history of abundance' segment for the project to learn from the pitfalls of other abundance movements. It will include more subtle proposals like the Triple Revolution; what I consider a pre-post-industrial proposal. The progression of Open Source Software will no doubt be included.
The Open Enterprise is both a pre-post and post-industrial work as it will gauge how to work its way out of the "scarcity trap," a general practice that discourages abundance (with its lacking sales price) to sustain "economic growth" models.
The project will be a hefty one, so I formed openenterprise.wikispot.org to further develop the work. Its more organized that way. It is also under the same license.
Nathan
Paul D. Fernhout
--Paul Fernhout
Nathan Cravens
Great to see progress.
If that's your story, I'll stick to it!
Nathan
Paul D. Fernhout
right now is a good way to go, and can create a very solid part of the
document, and Virgle would fit well in a "historical" section.
I'd suggest considering some of the hunter/gatherer issues too in a
historical section. See:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
(Not everyone agrees with him, of course, see the criticisms here:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
I feel there is a lot of truth to what he wrote based on the remaining
fragments of stories from the times of transition, including the Genesis
story. As I wrote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"A history lesson: pre-scarcity times (Eden), then scarcity times (Dickens),
then post-scarcity times (real soon now) ... But some of those older peoples
still have more detailed stories about what life used to be like and in
detail how awful that transition was from the freedom of hunting and
gathering to the bondage of agriculture, or as Chaplin suggests, to
industry. There were even rough times when agriculture finally started
working well and populations grew and people invented industrialization. So
it was worse than now in the time of Dickens, but if you go way, way back,
to the times Sahlins talks about, certain aspects of life might have been
better that they even are now (not all aspects, of course). For example,
art, music, story-telling, poetry, dance, conversation, gift-giving, and
child-rearing had a more central role in some of those hunter-gatherer
societies than in many of the industrialized societies of today. Those are
the kind of things people tend to do when they have idle time."
Feel free to reword that paragraph of text above if you find it useful for
the document on the wiki. But in any case, maybe it will give you some ideas
for structuring a history section.
More historical evidence, also cited above:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture
approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement
in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows,
this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer
ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and
endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal
living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic
changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and
lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic
disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
It is only in the last hundred years or so that many people are as tall
again as they used to be 10000 years ago.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
Here are some more thoughts on the history section of this document. Feel
free to use any of this somehow in the document rewritten as desired
(although you'd want to think about whether any quotes that I embedded below
were covered by "fair use" if you also include them in the wiki).
I was rereading the paragraph I sent below on Larsen's work, and thinking on
Jane Jacobs and now more recent anthropologists saying cities predated
agriculture:
"11,000-Year-Old Temple Found In Turkey "
http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/11/12/2340257.shtml
It occurs to me that the emergence of technologies of social control (or
more charitably, wide scale social cooperation) likely happened in cities
*before* we saw the emergence of large scale agriculture or, later,
industrialization. And these control technologies were an essential
prerequisite to large scale agriculture and large scale industrialization.
Very few people want to do backbreaking agricultural labor every day and eat
a monotonous diet, or wanted to work in the dangerous and boring early
factories. They did it because they had little choice (or they sent their
children to do it, which was fairly common, and the children didn't know any
better and had few options). See: :-(
"Factory Workers in the British Industrial Revolution"
http://www.galbithink.org/fw.htm
"Factory work greatly affected the life experiences of children, men, and
women. For children, factory work served as a form of hard schooling. It
channeled into adult factory jobs child workers who obeyed orders, worked
diligently, and survived the health hazards and tedium. While the Industrial
Revolution eventually put great pressure on men to engage in paid work
outside the home continuously from adulthood to retirement, some men,
particularly older men, refused to work in the factories and preferred to
engage in spot labor and work around the home."
If people can instead pick fruit off trees or hunt and fish plentiful game,
they will. But, if the land is enclosed or taken away (as in England) or a
heavy tax is put on individuals (as in colonial Africa), then people have
little choice but to go into the big fields or big factories under the terms
of those who own them (or starve or be imprisoned). Granted, the labor union
movement was an attempt to shift the balance of power, as were African
revolutions like in South Africa, so there is a more complex dynamic here,
like Howard Zinn's "A People's History" documents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States
It is hard to imagine anymore how abundant the Earth was biologically on a
per capita basis in the remote past, with flocks of passenger pigeons
darkening the sky for days, or immense herds of Bison thundering on the
plains, or streams so thick with fish you could walk across their backs, and
a total human population measured in only millions or less. Although for a
balanced view on this see:
"Beyond Civilized and Primitive" by Ran Prieur (a very insightful essay,
if a bit pessimistic and mystical in parts)
http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
"A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a goal,
and instead just set it up as a perspective: "Hey, if I stand here, I can
see that my own world, which I thought was normal, is totally insane!" Or we
can set it up as a source of learning: "Look at this one thing these people
did, so let's see if we can do it too." Then it doesn't matter how many
flaws they had. And once we give up the framework that shows a right way and
a wrong way, and a clear line between them, we can use perspectives and
ideas from people formerly on the "wrong" side: "Ancient Greeks went
barefoot everywhere and treated their slaves with more humanity than
Wal-Mart treats its workers. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern
Americans, and thought it was degrading to work for wages. Slum-dwellers in
Mumbai spend less time and effort getting around on foot than Americans
spend getting around in cars. The online file sharing community is building
a gift economy." ... There is a third option, but it requires abandoning the
whole civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, "We can regrow the
spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700's, not as a
temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolizing society and the
rise of another, but as a permanent condition -- and we will protect this
condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing
new ways. We can do this because human nature continues to evolve. Just as
the old model of civilization became available to us as we changed, we are
changing again and new doors are opening."
Ran Prieur later writes something in that essay that gets at the heart of
"open manufacturing" and the issue of empowering "cradle-to-cradle" design:
"We like ice cream and hot baths and sailing ships and recorded music and
the internet, but we worry that we can't have them without exterminating
half the species on Earth, or exploiting Asian sweatshop workers, or dumping
so many toxins that we all get cancer, or overextending our system so far
that it crashes and we get eaten by roving gangs. But notice: primitive
people don't think this way! Of course, if you put them on an assembly line
or on the side of a freeway or in a modern war, they would know they were in
hell. But if you offered them an LED lantern made on an assembly line, or a
truck ride to their hunting ground, or a gun, they would accept it without
hesitation. Primitive people adopt any tool they find useful -- not because
they're wise, but because they're ignorant, because their cultures have not
evolved defenses against tools that will lead them astray. I think the root
of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became
clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy. It's like the famous
Twilight Zone episode where there's a box with a button, and if you push it,
you get a million dollars and someone you don't know dies. We have countless
"boxes" that do basically the same thing. Some of them are physical, like
cruise missiles or ocean-killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your
mouth gets a million dollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like
subsidies that make junk food affordable, or the corporation, which by
definition does any harm it can get away with that will bring profit to the
shareholders. I'm guessing it all started when our mental and physical tools
combined to enable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway, as soon as
you have something that does more harm than good, but that appears to the
decision makers to do more good than harm, the decision makers will decide
to do more and more of it, and before long you have a whole society built
around obvious benefits that do hidden harm."
Still, it is also true that ice ages and droughts were bad times for
everyone. Modern technology could help us cope with them better (including
by expanding into space). But in general, Sahlins research suggests the
question that if you know how to live off the land, and can do that in a
community of like-minded people, and you grew up that way where eating
termites is thought of as enjoying a delicacy, why would you want a boss and
to join the bottom level of a social hierarchy to have a few knick-nacks?
Maybe recently (sometime in the last few hundred years) the balance of
preference for factory work has changed somewhat for most people,
considering most people in Westernized nations no longer know how to live
off the land (even by farming) and expectations for material goods (if not
free time) have risen, and food preferences have changed. See:
http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
"In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured
in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took
in that year. ... Yet hours have risen steadily for two decades. In 1990,
the average American owns and consumes more than twice as much as he or she
did in 1948, but also has less free time. How did this happen? Why has
leisure been such a conspicuous casualty of prosperity?"
To have a really big city for any length of time, with big temples, you need
some means of getting people to stay where they are and do what they are
told. That means might be using an army, using a religious or civil
bureaucracy (Pharaoh), promoting a political ideology supporting enclosing
the lands, establishing a compulsory schooling system, promoting a sharp
division of labor, or even just creating written (and thus unquestionable)
stories (or advertising). From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system
has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful
readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based
economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the
Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant
people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type
economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"
Daniel Quinn writes stuff related to this issue of why people turned to
agriculture and why they almost always abandoned it. See his Ishmael books,
especially his latest non-fiction work:
http://www.ishmael.org/Origins/Beyond_Civilization/
I don't want to make big cities or social control sound all evil. There is
obviously value to organizations that can enforce a peace, because the flip
side of too much organization (and so producing wars and terror) is too
little organization (and so allowing long running feuds and having no
preparation for disasters or invasions). See:
"Marxism of the Right" by Robert Locke
http://web.archive.org/web/20080117125733/http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom,
though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple
physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but
one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it
makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be
rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of
the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it
derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once
they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease
or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of
happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern
governments. "
A balance of social organization and freedoms of various sorts may be the
best possible situation, or perhaps even the only one, :-) as Manuel De
Landa's writings imply:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains
and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Jane Jacobs goes at length into all the reasons big cities have been a good
idea in many respects, especially as centers of manufacturing and knowledge
sharing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
And rising populations may simply force a need for different forms of social
organization and cooperation if the population is not to crash. Elites can
do self-serving things, but, by comparison, cattle ranchers still need to
care about the health of their herd some.
So, this isn't meant to say social organization is evil, but more to say
that we need to look at forms of social organization from a broad
perspective (and that can even include saying some forms of social
organization are better in some ways than other forms, or some forms are
more appropriate to certain situations, depending on our goals or priorities).
Jim Beniger, a previous professor of mine in college, wrote a book called
"The Control Revolution"
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Revolution-Technological-Economic-Information/dp/0674169867
where he suggests more advanced control systems came into being in response
to the demands of industrialization and its quickening pace. But what if it
is the other way around? Or, more likely, some interplay of new control
systems making possible new forms of social organization, which in turn
drive a demand for innovation of new control technologies as a positive
feedback loop? (It's been years since I read that book, so maybe he does
touch on this point.)
With open manufacturing and the "open enterprise", what is happening is (in
part) that new means of social coordination via the internet are making
possible new forms of social organization. At the same time that human
civilization on Earth (build on unsustainable processes, like mining and
pollution) is facing enormous challenges in terms of climate change, the
threat of nuclear war, widespread environmental degradation in some areas,
and rising human population pressures made harder to accommodate by a
simultaneous rising of social and material aspirations per capita. One
question is, how essential is it that these new means of social coordination
be used in order to solve these massive new problems? Is "business as usual"
simply inadequate to address these global challenges through coordinated
local efforts?
The new possibilities have some parallels with some aspects of the old
pre-agriculture cultures, because, with new internet technologies, the
balance of forms of social organization is shifting back from hierarchical
social forms towards meshwork ones. So that's why I feel looking back at
pre-agricultural societies sheds some light on the possibilities of the
future. But obviously, shedding some light on the future is *not* the same
thing as saying the future will use identical social forms as in the past
(or similar technologies).
As Ran Prieur says in the essay previously linked above:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
"I don't think there's any escape from complex high-energy societies, so
instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them
tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its
participants -- that the activities necessary to keep it going are
experienced by the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen.
Second, our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My standards
here are high -- the totality of biological life on Earth must be better off
with us than without us. And third, our system must not be inherently
unstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age, but it must
not destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that has to grow or
die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having any trend at all
that ratchets, that easily goes one way but can't go the other way without a
catastrophe."
--Paul Fernhout
Nathan Cravens
Paul D. Fernhout
previously written related to economic re-envisioning and the document
Nathan started, so people here can feel free to ignore this all for now. :-)
Nathan, feel free to rework any of this into the document (mostly the
history section?)
Nathan Cravens wrote:
> The difference would be food and drink
> would come from a pocket module that turned plant material into whatever.
> Now to digress from such silliness into silliness of another form.
A beginning towards what you suggest, based on nanotech:
"LifeStraw"
http://www.vestergaard-frandsen.com/lifestraw.htm
"LifeStraw® Family is an instant microbiological water purifier with a high
flow rate, efficacy as per US EPA standards and longevity of more than
18,000 litres ... LifeStraw® Personal has been referred to as 'One of the
Ten Things that will Change the Way We Live´ by Forbes Magazine"
Making food from arbitrary cellulose is a little harder. :-)
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2005/08/a_real-life_rep.html
"A NASA-funded study is about to look into a simpler option - a compact
cooking machine that will create a larderful of familiar foods from a
limited range of space-friendly ingredients."
> Recently, I've been working out the kinks in a theory of financial value;
> I've concluded finance is waste, as I've mentioned on this forum before.
>
> Money may arbitarily represent value,
Values. Which ones? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
> I liken the current economic collapse to the child, old enough to know
> better than what the parent says, is now in a state of rebellion,
Well, maybe a better analogy would be a parent selling their child into
slavery? :-(
http://nhs.needham.k12.ma.us/cur/Baker_00/2002_p7/ak_p7/childlabor.html
"Children as young as six years old during the industrial revolution worked
hard hours for little or no pay. Children sometimes worked up to 19 hours a
day, with a one-hour total break."
Because in theory our elected officials in the USA represent the People's
interests, but in practice they need to get "elected" and in the USA that
takes a lot of money...
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"But if all the
ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to
make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so.
They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions,
exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about
anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for
us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the
lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions
and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in
exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think
we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed
by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as
the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious
differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly,
none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to
keep us working."
Consider the analysis of G. William Domhoff, author of _Who Rules America?_.
In his book he says essentially that about half a million mostly
intermarried families represent the bulk of economic and political power in
the USA. Occasionally newly wealthy or otherwise promising people are then
integrated into this elite group in various ways (including attending
Princeton) as fresh blood via marriage. See:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/who.html
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Rules-America-William-Domhoff/dp/0881339385
One amazon reviewer says of his later book: "G. William Domhoff poses the
right questions: who benefits? Who governs? Who wins? By answering these
questions, he arrives at the clear-cut result that the US is ruled by an
'interacting set of families and socially adhesive cliques that possesses
great wealth and makes up only 0.5 percent of the population.' In other
words, the US is ruled, nationally and locally, by an oligarchy constituted
by members of this small upper class. Nationally, we find those members in
the most important corporations, banks and law firms. Locally, we find them
in real estate, construction and land development companies. This power
elite created and controlls directly the best think-tanks like the Council
on Foreign Relations, the Conference Board, the Hoover Institute or the
American Enterprise Institute. As also Michael Parenti clearly explains,
this oligarchy influences decisively the media (TV and press) via the
enormous and crucial advertising budgets of big corporations. The power
elite also supports heavily the 'best' candidates in both political parties.
G. William Domhoff illustrates cleverly his viewpoints with the example of
senator Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the actual president. This book is
a brilliant and masterful analysis and a must read for all those interested
in the US political/economical system." "
I don't intend this to be a "conspiracy theory", but consider this article
to see an example of the intermarriage effect in an extreme case:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/
From the article: "What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot
Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all die-hard hawks
who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. But
they are also part of one big neoconservative family -- an extended clan of
spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations."
> What sources have you on this topic of finance as I've observed it? I'd
> imagine anyone who's thought on post-scarcity has come upon this sort of
> inquiry. The macro-market economic system is finally coming to grips with
> its abstractions... What fun it is to watch ;)
From:
http://www2.hernandotoday.com/content/2008/nov/21/shocked-disbelief/
"Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) unwittingly summed up Greenspan succinctly
when he noted, "If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, where is the man
who has so much to be out of danger?" It looks as though nobody ever knows
enough, because Greenspan admitted he found a "flaw" in his "model." But he
hasn't fully explained it yet. When he and the rest of the global luminaries
of finance figure it out, we'll need sensible regulation to protect us from
these Wall Street clowns, because they are incapable of self governance."
My own thoughts on this are inspired by a variety of sources which it is
hard for me to list succinctly, in part because I may have only taken one or
two good ideas form some source, or I may have seen an idea and then seen a
complementary or even opposite idea had more usefulness. So these links
won't totally give you how I view the content there.
Obviously there is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus
but consider:
http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/the-return-of-thomas-malthus.php
"Malthus himself ultimately rejected his theory that resource scarcity would
lead to a crises caused by population increases. He had a period of time to
observe actual progress involved in the industrial revolution and realized
that he was wrong. Being a moral person, he recanted his theory, something
modern Malthusians are incapable of admitting."
Some of many, many sources of ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hawken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_lovins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(biologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Black
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookchin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Bernal
From here (resources I read around 1990):
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/081919dbba30d1f7
"""
The ingredients of my Sunrise Soup (people, books, and ideas)
O'Neill & Bernal: Space Habitats and Self Replicating Systems
Skinner: Walden Two
Norris: Socially Responsible Business and Control Data
Calthorpe and Van der Ryn: Sustainable Communities
Lovins: Brittle Power and the Soft Path
Morris and Hess: Neighborhood Power and Community Technology
Jane Jacobs: Cities and the Wealth of Nations
Coates: Resettling America
Bass: Space Biosphere Ventures and Biosphere II
Taylor: Micropolis and the renewal of the Earth
Disney: EPCOT-Experimental Prototypical Community of Tommorow
Bookchin: Post Scarcity Anarchism
Robbins: Diet for a New America
Ogilvy: Many Dimensional Man
Merril & Gage: The Energy Primer
Todd: The New Alchemy Institute
Dickson: The Politics of Appropriate Technology
Harlan Thompson: Silent Running, Robots, and Domes
Tokar: The Green Alternative
Ekins: The Living Economy
Hopkins: How to master the Art of Selling
Winner: Autonomous Technology
Simon: People: The Ultimate Resource
Commoner: The Poverty of Power
"""
And as I mention in another email, the sci-fi writings of James P. Hogan
have been very influential (especially Voyage from Yesteryear, and The Two
Faces of Tomorrow. And Theodore Sturgeon's short story "The Skills of Xanadu".
Maybe Cybernetics is an underlying theme in some of my thinking?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
Which I first saw in detail as a teenager in the book "Brain" by Victor
Serebriakoff (founder of MENSA).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Serebriakoff
I like the core ideas here, even while I disagree with discounting some
environmental issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
"The Ultimate Resource is a 1981 book written by Julian Lincoln Simon
challenging the notion that humanity was running out of natural resources.
It was revised in 1996 as The Ultimate Resource 2. ... The overarching
thesis on why there is no resource crisis is that as a particular resource
becomes more scarce, its price rises; this rise of price creates an
incentive for people to discover more of the resource, ration it and,
eventually, develop substitutes. The “ultimate resource” is not any
particular physical object but the capacity for humans to invent and adapt."
While I agree with that core idea, I note that the greatest pain felt as the
system adapts tends to be felt by those with the least money (ration units).
And the distribution of ration units (money) is a political thing.
In general, I agree with conservatives that individual initiative should be
supported and industry is a road to prosperity in the long term, and I agree
with liberals that the government should invest in the health and welfare of
its populace (including by regulation of pollution and by taxes supporting
R&D in alternative energy). Manuel De Landa's point on a balance of meshwork
and hierarchy tends to keep me from too many extreme positions -- except
that I think the threats posed by nuclear and biological weapons should spur
us on to extreme measures of increasing productivity by automation and
attempts at improving social equity.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
"Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values
and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of
thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions,
and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the
scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry
Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism
without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its
heat."[2] To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin, "the most accomplished
American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of
society America would become.""
Here are snippets related to economics from some emails I've sent to another
discussion list I am on, so they are not a coherent whole:
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Lots of snippets of points, not in any order or coherence
"The Law of Accelerating Returns" by Ray Kurzweil
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
Or my own (earlier :-) writings on topic that:
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
====
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
"The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is
based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings as
these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to
draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of it.
Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less
and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards. Employees who
are praised for meeting a manager's expectations suffer a drop in
motivation."
===
"war is a racket",
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
====
Something I posted on a non-public list mostly populated by libertarians:
"""
People are spending so much time keeping a creaky industrial
status-quo going in the new post-industrial information age (including
wasting young people's lives in compulsory K-12 schooling and then
college, see for example:)
_The Underground History of American Education_
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Could college attendance be a form of cowardice?"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html
that there is not time to use their imagination and available tools and
resource to build a better way (like a Buddhist economic system):
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
or the abolition of work:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Consider for example:
"The 'fab' machine that could spark an industrial revolution"
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0,,2044800,00.html
"In 1975, people were soldering together Altair 8800 computers - that's
where RepRap and Fab@Home are now. The Apple II came out in 1977, the
BBC Micro and IBM PC in 1981, and then the world was never the same,"
says Bowyer. "I think that within 10 years private individuals will be
able to make for themselves virtually any manufactured product that is
today sold by industry. I sometimes wonder if politicians realise that
the entire basis of the human economy is about to undergo the biggest
change since the invention of money."
I might rephrase that as "politicians and libertarians" given the
audience on this list. :-) The basis of so much talk on this list is
that making things (or getting them from others) is hard and time
consuming; I am showing how that assumption is soon-to-be outdated. One
of the consequences is that one can then begin to prioritize things like
convenience, privacy, or liberty over the cheapest possible
manufacturing process in centralized facilities with long supply lines
and very rich owners (same as happened with printing at Princeton
University, as it decentralized). Additional innovations may then lead
to easy recycling of such items. And local production of solar cells or
other energy production systems. Eventually local production of useful
computers. And then perhaps eventually food replicators. And of course,
local production of more fabricators in a somewhat self-replicating
fashion. And perhaps that will provide enough productive capacity to
undo the harms to people and the environment of the industrial
revolution (pollution, alienation, colonialization, materialism, etc.).
Perhaps it will provide a capacity to build faster than war (including
nuclear war) can destroy.
To the best of our knowledge, it is (sadly?) a given that any living
organism must draw energy and materials from its surrounding to survive
(including to replicate). This implies a degree of competition among
organisms. But, it is also true organisms can cooperate to do grander
things and make available more energy and more materials for the whole
(e.g. all the asteroids in the solar system just waiting to be turned
into living cities). This tension informs and shapes our lives. The
cooperation to create free fabricators (and related things like
self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from
sunlight and asteroidal ore) will be a defining moment of our times IMHO.
See J.D. Bernal's writings from the 1920s, which I came across one day
by chance in Firestone (a first edition perhaps?):
_The World, the Flesh & the Devil_
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/ch02.htm
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the
lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular
materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation
its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The
source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in
small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure
would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids,
rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of
construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably
consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to
a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build
the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit
by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same
time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would
fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In
default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its
atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its
nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it
would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated
single-celled plant."
This from the 1920s!
"""
=======
_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the
Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives_
The book's web site:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0742516857
A Marxist critique/review of the book:
"How the ruling class exercises ideological control"
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/nature-society-thought.htm
That critique includes a good point on the undeniable successes of some
parts of some professions. One relevant paragraph from that review: "In
the typical physics qualifying examination, which he studies in
considerable detail, there is an “emphasis on quick recall, memorized
tricks, work on problem fragments, work under time pressure, endurance,
quantitative results, comfort with confinement to details, and comfort
with a particular social framework. The exam de-emphasizes physical
insight, qualitative discussion, exploration, curiosity, creativity,
history, philosophy, and so on. This forces the student who wants to be
passed to adopt an industrial view of the subject, to view it as an
instrument of production, to use it in an alienated way” (136). This
helps ensure that “students who are willing and able to conform to the
faculty’s attitudes and values, which usually favor the status quo over
social change, are less likely than others to get cooled out of
professional training” (201)."
A good general review highlighting key points in the book:
http://louisville.edu/journal/workplace/martinreview.html
But, whatever economic paradigms people subscribe to (including strange
notions of what "capital" is (confusing bank balances and pieces of paper
with machinery and nature and health and education), the reality is that
there are people, objects, information, and the rest of the natural
environment like bears and bunny rabbits and bacteria and bauxite. Whatever
models decisions makers build on top of that reality are just that --
models. Those models may be wrong, or may lead people to do weird things
(especially as the react to each others models) -- like try to make
electrons representing numbers in banks accounts change in a certain way
regardless of the effects on the rest of the world. But the reality is still
there -- even as the models themselves are part of that reality (a fact
George Soros used to make fortunes, see:)
"Reflexivity, financial markets, and economic theory"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Reflexivity.2C_financial_markets.2C_and_economic_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_%28social_theory%29
I develop that theme here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could
vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of
nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision
makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three
levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical
writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time
can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion
reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons
from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content
or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes
(including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous
three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns)
embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer
programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by
picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats,
computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people
and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their
characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where
decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using
various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens
like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on.
What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers
is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will
pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective
can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens,
centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted
demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a
diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one
should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for
the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet
contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics
"""
========
Consider:
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical
self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine."
Iain M. Banks is just one example of many authors thinking about world
beyond money (James P. Hogan is another, but the list goes on). From a FAQ
on his sci-fi novels:
http://www.i-dig.info/culture/culturefaq.html
"There is no hierarchy as such in the Culture's society every individual
(machine or organic) is equal. The Culture is post-scarcity due to
sophisticated technology. That is to say because the Culture can manipulate
things at an atomic level anything can be produced with ease so anybody can
have anything they want. Money, therefore, has no place in the Culture (in
fact the Culture considers money to be a sign of poverty)."
=========
Well, for the *short* term, the only real thing that stands out from
everything I looked at recently is:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/11/21/9066/stand-by-for-generalised-systemic-financial-meltdown/
"""
“Gold is for optimists. I’m diversifying into canned goods.”
So said one reader on Felix Salmon’s Market Movers blog, in response to a
post on crisis blogging.
The trouble with being the leading harbinger of doom is that, rather like
crack, you’re going to need to keep pushing the limits to keep achieving the
same highs. So Salmon notes that the über-bears, no longer satisfied with
dire predictions of a US recession, have now moved onto heralding a
full-blown financial crisis. Only an all-out, systemic meltdown will do.
The bear in question, Nouriel Roubini, has long been positioned firmly on
the gloomy side of the outlook scale - but the past week’s batch of
predictions has been ominous even by his own dark standards. In fact,
they’re nigh on apolcalyptic.
"""
That quip about gold vs. canned good stands out mostly because I found
it funny, not because I believe it a good strategy. :-)
I personally suspect "hyperinflation" is in the cards over the next decade,
in part as a way to correct the over-inflated market values of houses (where
houses will just inflate more slowly than wages), but that is just a guess
(or maybe wishful thinking?). It's biased by my feeling the USA is a bit
like 1930s Germany in closing in on itself and turning into a security state
and blaming others for the problems it has created, but there are also many
dissimilarities -- the US is more diverse, there is the internet, and so on.
Many fewer people still push the notion of deflation -- and certainly
computers and software are deflating. And 3D printing might deflate the
value of manufactured good. Clearly what I outlined (including 3D printing)
would essentially involve massive deflation of most manufactured commodities
and most informational goods, and even eventually energy (solar panels) and
primary materials (through automated mining). So, if I were to speculate,
the US dollar will hyperinflate over the next two decades or so following
all these "doom and gloom" trends (with maybe a shock or two of sudden
onset) until it is worthless, but it won't matter too much as shortly
thereafter almost everything will deflate to being free, so nobody will need
many inflated dollars anyway. :-) How's that for weaseling?
I worked very briefly while a PU student doing computer stuff for one person
investing a small part of the PU endowment, and, while no doubt there is
more to the story then this, he said the reason they do so well is they had
no or low transaction costs and access to more (and more timely) information
than most investors. While things may have changed some in recent years with
the internet, I think that general between-the-lines implications of what he
said are still true, that as a small investor you are mainly just shark
"chum" (even without a mythical PPT shaping markets).
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95q3/bear.html
Of course, on the flip side of that is the "Sword of Damocles" of large
institutional investors, that is, 99.9% of the time every year they make 10%
to 20% returns, and 0.1% of the time (so likely not in a twenty year
investment career) they may lose everything. Once you understand that, you
know that even though the traders holding the hot potato when/if the PU
endowment unwinds to bankruptcy will get fired, until then they will make a
lot of money in bonuses, and when they do get fired, they won't need to work
anymore (not that they could work again in that field :-) unless they are
unlucky enough to have that happen their first year out. I posted this
before, but it bears repeating: :-)
"How To Speak Hedge Fund"
http://www.slate.com/id/2172224/
""We have been caught in what appears to be a large wave of de-leveraging on
the part of quantitative long/short hedge funds,'' James Simons of
Renaissance Technologies said in a letter to investors last week, which
sought to explain losses in his highly regarded hedge fund. He also noted
that the methodology used by his fund was "undoubtedly shared by a number of
long/short hedge funds." Goldman Sachs similarly blamed other funds'
behavior for its own losses. Of course, the premise of high-end money
management is that you don't simply mimic the same investment strategy of 30
other hedge funds. That why Simons was paid $1.7 billion in 2006."
Let's see, he was paid $1.7 billion last year. Does it matter if he loses
all your money? Nope. He probably has more than one private island purchased
already. :-)
====
"Subject: Social Credit Party formed by Republicans and Democrats instead of
abolishing work"
Except the Social Credit "citizen's dividend" program is now called a
"stimulus package" in the USA. :-) See:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/24/news/economy/stimulus_package/?postversion=2008012417
"Congressional leaders and Bush administration officials forged a bipartisan
deal Thursday on an economic stimulus package that would give $600 to more
than $1,200 to most taxpayers in an effort to keep the economy from falling
into recession."
The title of my post is meant as a joke, obviously. :-) Still, there is a
grain of truth to it. The new bipartisan "stimulus package" is as I see it
essentially a "citizen's dividend" (for all US Americans). Well, I should
say "almost everybody in the USA", as there is apparently a cap starting at
$150K for couples ... And of course the ten million or so undocumented
(mostly Mexican-origin) immigrants probably won't get it either.
See the theory of Social Credit here:
"Social Credit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
A simple explanation both of "social credit" (and of what Bush and Congress
is doing and why) is here:
http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/socialcredit/socialcredit.htm
And, for fun, a still active "Social Credit" party in Alberta, Canada:
http://www.socialcredit.com/
if you want an example of the real thing somewhere and not an ersatz ad-hoc
one made of US Republicans and Democrats. :-)
Woohoo! Money given to each person in the USA based on tapping the money
supply (i.e. essentially printing it via electronic debt). In theory, this
is inflation free if it tracks the increased need of cash in the society.
Normally that money is spent into circulation in other ways. Tapping the
"money supply" is one of the items I list as a way to finance a "Star Trek"
society:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
For alternative ideas to this crisis of capitalism, see either of two links
to book reviews related to "The End of Work". The first is pessimistic:
"The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and
Negri" by George Caffentzis
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1927.html
Excerpt:
"""
Demands were not formulated until the third day of the strike. They asked
for "everything." One worker said, "I just don’t want to work." The
separation between income and productivity, enforced by the struggle, could
not have been clearer (Linebaugh and Ramirez 1992 : 160).
...
Negri and Rifkin are major participants in the "end of work" discourse of
the 1990s, although they occupy two ends of the rhetorical spectrum. Rifkin
is empirical and pessimistic in his assessment of the "end of work" while
Negri is aprioristic and optimistic. However, both seem to invoke
technological determinism by claiming that there is only one way for
capitalism to develop. They, and most others who operate this discourse,
forget that capitalism is constrained (and protected) by proportionalities
and contradictory tendencies. The system is not going to go out of business
through the simple-minded addition of more high-tech machines, techniques,
and workers come what may, for Marx’s ironic dictum : "The real barrier of
capitalist production is capital itself" (Marx 1909 : 293), is truer than
ever. It might be an old and miserable truth, but still to this day profit,
interest, wages and labor in certain proportions are particular, but
necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism. Capital cannot will
itself into oblivion, but neither can it be tricked or cursed out of
existence. Rifkin tries to trick the system into believing that a viable way
out of the unemployment crises he foresees is to abandon profit creating
sectors of the economy. He reassuringly says that all will be well if the
capitalists are in control of automated agriculture, manufacturing, and
service industries and nearly everyone else is working in a non-profit third
sector which makes no claim on hegemony. But this scenario can hardly to
pass the eagle eyes of the capitalist press much less those of the boardroom
without ridicule. So it cannot succeed. Negri tries philosophical cursing
instead. He calls late 20th century capitalism "merely an apparatus of
capture, a phantasm, an idol" ontologically (Hardt and Negri 1994 : 282). I
appreciate Negri’s desire to put a curse on this system of decimation,
humiliation and misery, but I question his "merely." As the highest organs
of capitalist intelligence (like the Ford Foundation) have shown, capital is
as impervious to these ontological curses as the conquistadors were to the
theological curses of the Aztec priests. Indeed, capital revels in its
phantom-like character. Its main concern is with the duration of the
phantasm, not its ontological status. The "end of work" literature of the
1990s, therefore, is not only theoretically and empirically disconfirmed. It
also creates a failed politics because it ultimately tries to convince both
friend and foe that, behind everyone’s back, capitalism has ended. It motto
is not the Third International’s "Don’t worry, capital will collapse by
itself sooner or later ;" rather it is, "Capitalism has always already ended
at the high-tech end of the system, just wake up to it." But such an
anti-capitalist version of Nietzsche’s motto "God is dead" is hardly
inspiring when millions are still being slaughtered in the many names of
both God and Capital.
"""
The second is more optimistic::
"A review of Jeremy Rifkin's the End of Work" by Bob Black
http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
Excerpt:
"""
To speak of the "end" of work is to speak in the passive voice as if work is
ending itself, and needs only a nudge from progressive policies to wind down
without a fuss. But work is not a natural process like combustion or entropy
which runs its course of itself. Work is a social practice reproduced by
repeated, multitudinous personal choices. Not free choices usually -- "your
money or your life" is, after all, a choice -- but nonetheless acts of human
intention. It is (the interaction of many) acts of will which perpetuate
work, and it is (the interaction of many) acts of will which will abolish it
by a collective adventure speaking in the active voice. Work will end, if it
does, because workers end it by choosing to do something else -- by living
in a different way.
...
We finally know what's wrong with this picture: we've seen it before, and we
know how it ends. The future according to the visionary Rifkin is the
present with better special effects. Putting people out of work does nothing
to put an end to work. Unemployment makes work more, not less, important.
More makework does not mean less work, just less work it is possible to
perform with even a vestige of self-respect. Nothing Rifkin forecasts, not
even rising crime, offers any promise of ever ending work. Nothing Rifkin
proposes does either. So strongly does he believe in the work-ethic that he
schemes to perpetuate it even after the demise of the toil it hallows. He
believes in ghosts, notably the ghost in the machine. But a spectre is
haunting Rifkin: the spectre of the abolition of work by the collective
creativity of workers themselves.
"""
Bob Black is the guy who wrote the classic:
"The Abolition of Work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
And of course, a general site again on the topic:
http://www.whywork.org/
But I'm really seeing that this notion of the abolition of work is an
interesting lens to see what appear to be extensive ongoing discussions
among economists over the last decade or two about something fundamental
being wrong in terms of job loss and economic restructuring and not being
able to get a handle on it. Bob Blacks analysis of Jeremy Rifkin's 1995 book
seems pretty accurate to me -- and (to side with ... libertarians for
a moment) how the Far Left can't really get out of a mindset of maximizing
state controlled working conditions -- even when the facts stare them in the
face.
Political Scientist Langdon Winner in _Autonomous Technology:
Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought_
http://www.amazon.com/Autonomous-Technology-Technics-out-Control-Political/dp/0262730499
says in the introduction:
"The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in
the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The
contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded
our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent
judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have
been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of
perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us
systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal
a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as
we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in
the world will make no difference."
So, is it any wonder our government is turning to "Social Credit" out of
desperation? :-) Too bad they could not admit that is what they are doing.
Of course, then people might ask for more. :-)
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our
banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a
revolution before tomorrow morning.” - Henry Ford
For most people in the USA, this is closer to the truth I think:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the
boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going
to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a
euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only
transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes
primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel
don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G.
Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!""
This is a nice read in that direction by the way:
"THE EMERGENCE OF GOVERNANCE IN AN OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY"
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/scientific_study_about_debian_governance_and_organization
Although it is limited in that it focuses on "authority" or a
people-centered perspective but does not focus on "stigmergy"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
or the artifact-mediated process where people collaborate indirectly which
is a lot more important IMHO. It's like saying who leads sWikipedia? Sure
some people keep the servers running (which I outsourced to Pair Networks
:-) and it has a person as a face:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
but ultimately, it is the Wiki and community co-evolution itself that does
the "coordination/organization". Or Engelbart might say it is a
"tool/user-community" co-evolution. That's not exactly the same, but it's
related.
Taken from the academic report:
"... However, organizational forms that do not use a bureaucratic basis of
authority have a long history (Coleman, 1993; 1974; 1970). Such perspectives
have not received the attention they deserve (Marsden, 2005; Stern and
Barley, 1996), perhaps because the institutional persistence of the dominant
corporate bureaucratic form (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Zucker, 1977)
*inhibits* other sources of variety (Stinchcombe, 1965). ... To further
this research agenda, we focus on communities involved in knowledge sharing
and production. Community forms appear to be increasingly important to
solving problems and sharing knowledge (van Maanen and Barley, 1984; Brown
and Duguid, 1991; 2000; 2001; Hargadon and Bechky, 2006) and may be well
suited for an economy that relies upon the production and diffusion of
knowledge (Adler, 2001; Powell and Snellman, 2004). More broadly, theorists
now recognize that community forms can provide an alternative to market and
hierarchical forms of organization and production (Adler, 2001; Powell,
1990; Bradach and Eccles, 1989; Ouchi, 1980). Yet little is known about how
communities organized around production govern themselves. ..."
[my emphasis :-)]
====
"Libertarian socialism"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialist
====
On ending world hunger and someone's comments on "rights":
Who says that is the only extent of someone's rights? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms_speech
"The Four Freedoms are goals famously articulated by United States President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in the State of the Union Address he delivered to the
United States Congress. In an address also known as the Four Freedoms
speech, FDR proposed four points as fundamental freedoms humans "everywhere
in the world" ought to enjoy:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
"
Notice #3, "Freedom from want". Francis Moore Lappe suggests that since
everything is commodified in a "free" market system, and people are excluded
from it for various reasons, they starve as they cannot afford to buy "free
market" food. So, freedom from want implies some sort of baseline guarantee
of ability to participate in the market (at least from the buying side).
It might have been better "freedom from need" as needs and wants are
different (wants being larger -- "I need rice and beans" but "I want caviar"
etc.), but it is meant in the "need" sense, although even "needs" are to an
extent socially determined -- what constitutes acceptable food or shelter or
clothing or information access etc.
Replying to a comment that: "A "right to food" really means that someone
else has to provide it for you whether you can or can't pay for it and at
the expense of someone else. "
You've already assumed away a lot of interesting political issues people
fight over even now.
Who "owns" the land?
Who owns the fruit of the land?
Who controls people's movements across the land to other land?
What does it mean to "provide" something and what services does "providing"
something for pay use for free and what costs does "providing" paid services
impose on society?
What does an "expense" really mean when there are "profits" of various sorts
to various individuals and organizanions to having more happy people around?
And so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
"Permaculture principles draw heavily on the practical application of
ecological theory to analyze the characteristics and potential relationships
between design elements. Each element of a design is carefully analyzed in
terms of its needs, outputs, and properties. For example a chicken needs
water, moderated microclimate, food and other chickens, and produces meat,
eggs, feathers and manure while doing a lot of scratching. Design elements
are then assembled in relation to one another so that the products of one
element feed the needs of adjacent elements. Synergy between design elements
is achieved while minimizing waste and the demand for human labour or
energy. Exemplary permaculture designs evolve over time, and can become
extremely complex mosaics of conventional and inventive cultural systems
that produce a high density of food and materials with minimal input. While
techniques and cultural systems are freely borrowed from organic
agriculture, sustainable forestry, horticulture, agroforestry, and the land
management systems of indigenous peoples, permaculture's fundamental
contribution to the field of ecological design is the development of a
concise set of broadly applicable organizing principles that can be
transferred through a brief intensive training."
====
In reply to a comment on "land ownership"
What you are not saying is all the best land most suitable for farming was
already stolen at gunpoint or other means from those who used to live on it
without much agriculture by mainly hunting and gathering. In Princeton
University's case, the land was essentially stolen from the Delaware tribes
who had a different view of land ownership enforced on them. And no, even
having one person with some social standing under duress sign a treaty does
not obligate an entire civilization to abandon their way of life. Manhattan,
for example, is under a cloud. See:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/415.html
http://www.tolatsga.org/dela.html
The literal bedrock of capitalism and no proof of ownership.
And even if someone did "sell" it -- what does that really mean, to "sell"
land which various people have been using for thousands of years? And which
others might want to use in the future? It's all a social construction
backed by a *local* military which has sworn allegiance to the rulers (or
principles) of that society.
As the novel "War of the Worlds" showed, what would those social conventions
mean in the face of such Martians? Or would a Martian takeover of Manhattan
Island using superior weapons at a great cost of human life be deemed
unfair? By whom?
If the Martians landing in Manhattan is deemed unacceptable, why was the
"settlement" of much of the USA fair enough to base libertarianism on
without some recompense for a social contract that benefits some and harms
others?
Or what if the Martians picked the first person they saw in New Jersey,
handed him or her a ton of platinum in exchange for a nod (under duress?)
that they could have Manhattan Island, and then said, "OK, everyone,
Manhattan Island is ours now, here is the video of the treaty nod", and
started paving Manhattan over as a landing field, slow enough that people
could evacuate? For example:
"Austin Powers 1- Stoooooooooooooooop!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlUgilKqms
Who's responsible for the death of the henchman in that film clip?
Martians like Colonel Kit Carson?
http://www.logoi.com/notes/long_walk.html
"The Long Walk of the Navajos - When the Navajos tried to take advantage of
the military slack caused by the outbreak of the Civil War, the US
government sent Colonel Kit Carson to settle the uprising. His mission was
to gather the Navajo together and move them to Fort Sumner on the Bosque
Redondo Reservation. When the Indians refused to move and hid in the Canyon
de Chelly, he began a merciless economic campaign destroying crops and
lifestock, burning villages and killing people. By destroying their food
supplies, eventually he convinced the Navajos that going to the reservation
was the only way to survive. In 1864, the Navajos, among with some other
tribes, a total of 8-9,000 people, began their move to Fort Sumner. Along
the 300 miles trip to the camp, about 200 people died of cold and
starvation. Many more people died after they arrived at the barren
reservation. The original idea was that the Navajos would engage in
agriculture at the reservation but because the land was unsuitable for
raising crops and the people had no farming experience, the plan failed.
Four years later, in 1868, partly as a recognition of their mistake, the US
government allowed the people to return to their homeland."
So, with that kind of history, no wonder people are starving today as they
are excluded from land by intellectual descendents of Pilgrims with a fear
of scarcity and no real understanding of how to survive in style with
minimal effort as the First Peoples' knew. Or, as is said here:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as
Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on
the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When
the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to
assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native
understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is
shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick
was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually
understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack
of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful
teaching."
But, sadly, I'm now thinking those words written by someone who says she is
part-Native American may be indeed generous, as from this link:
"THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING"
http://www.manataka.org/page269.html
"The Pilgrims displayed an intolerance toward the Indian religion similar to
the intolerance displayed toward the less popular religions in Europe. The
relationship deteriorated and within a few years the children of the people
who ate together at the first Thanksgiving were killing one another in what
came to be called King Phillip's War."
Sad, sad, story. Maybe we can do better now?
Or as is said at the last link:
"""
It is sad to think that this happened, but it is important to understand all
of the story and not just the happy part. Today the town of Plymouth Rock
has a Thanksgiving ceremony each year in remembrance of the first
Thanksgiving. There are still Wampanoag people living in Massachusetts. In
1970, they asked one of them to speak at the ceremony to mark the 350th
anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival. Here is part of what was said:
"Today is a time of celebrating for you -- a time of looking back to the
first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating
for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my
People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with
open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before
50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and
other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead
from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian
is and was just as human as the white people.
Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the
lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we
work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature
once again are important."
"""
Anyway, that is all the history that treating land (and the fruits of it) as
obviously "property" with a clear title just assumes away. That is the
historical basis which you ignore when you imply starvation of others is
acceptable because to do otherwise means "coercion". Maybe, if more
Wampanoag and Deleware and so on were around today, using modern technology,
maybe they might gladly share the abundance of those land with people in,
say, Africa, just as someday Africans living in abundance might gladly share
with those people. Maybe, given the title to most of the USA is unclear, we
should respect their wishes should they direct most US agricultural products
to be shipped abroad at no charge? :-)
===
I have to concede that, from an economic survival perspective in a
depression, there are things about today's US economy that are better than
in 1929 and things that are worse.
Worse things relative to 1929 include that in 1929 in the USA, a big
percentage of people either lived on a farm or had grown up on a farm and
still had relatives on a farm. These people knew how to grow their own food
as well as to make and repair a lot of the objects around them. They had a
common culture involving good seasons and bad seasons and patience. They
could live by the adage "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without".
Almost all their artifacts from motors to shoes were meant to be
user-serviceable, and many users knew how to do just that and had the needed
tools. There were many tight knit communities. The young people were mostly
overall healthy -- walking ten miles to see a friend was considered normal.
Fast forward to 2008, and yes, as far as better things relative to 1929, we
know more in some ways about materials and science (though typically at the
PhD level),
See Goodstein: "paradox scientific elites and illiterates"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=paradox+scientific+elites+and+illiterates
and we sure have a lot more material goods, and we have the internet. But,
as to worse things relative to 1929, how many people could grow their own
food? How many could repair their own essentials of life (plumbing, heating,
transportation) and also have the tools and materials on hand? One of the
sad things for me trading in [an old car for a newer one] was going from a car I
knew I could fix myself if I had to (even if I chose to let someone else do
it usually) to a car which I could not fix myself (without great difficulty
and expense). Most cars of any make today are much harder to work on than
old ones. How many people today have close relatives who have a farm (which
could increase production if the people came to live there)? How many shoes
we buy could be repaired? While it is great from a survival perspective that
half the US population is obese, how many US Americans could walk ten or
twenty miles every day in whatever weather? How many would even have the
patience?
"The Impatience of the Google Generation"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/18/0420247
How many have a heating system that burns wood? Or have well insulated homes
which do not need much supplementation? How many know their neighbors?
Women are now very much in the work force so that doubly big poorly
insulated house is more often than not payed for by *two* incomes.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/11/10_400.html
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income
Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is
now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy." ... In the face of such
hardships, many families have sent both parents into the workforce to try to
make ends meet. After all, surely if both parents work full-time it
shouldn't be hard to ensure financial security, right? Wrong, say authors
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, in their book, The Two Income Trap.
Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income
counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more
in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health
care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today
actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner
families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial
trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked
against them." ... What we found was that, while those families certainly
make more money than a one-income family did a generation ago, by the time
they pay for the basics -- an average home, a health insurance policy, a
second car to get Mom to work, child care, and taxes -- that family actually
has less money left over at the end of the month to show for it. We tend to
assume with two incomes you're doubly secure. But if you count on every
penny of both of those incomes, which most families today do, then you're in
big trouble if either income goes away. And obviously, if you have two
people in the workforce, you have double the chance that someone will get
laid off, or double the chance that someone could get too sick to work. When
that happens, two-income families really get into trouble, and that's how a
lot of families quickly go bankrupt. ... It used to be that a stay-at-home
parent was a sort of safety net -- she (and it was usually a "she") not only
took care of the children, but she was there if anyone got sick. Or if
Grandma broke a hip, she could step in and provide care without costing the
family financially. But today, with both parents in the workforce 100
percent of the time, there's just no way to care for somebody on the side --
either somebody has to take time off work or somebody has to pay someone to
provide that care. In either it represents a big financial blow, and
families just don't have the flexibility to deal with it anymore. ... "
Those authors also talk about how the second income in families has been
used to offset the result of bidding up the cost of homes in "good" school
districts and bidding up the rising cost of college. The key point is there
is no more *slack* in the US family's finances or their ability to shoulder
other burdens.
There is also little slack in the US manufacturing system due to cost
savings via "just in time" inventory management.
A brittle energy infrastructure is just one more of the ways our society has
little room for maneuvering in a crisis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Food supply liens also typically stretch thousands of miles.
So, compared to 1929, we have a system with very little flexibility. The USA
is far more *brittle* in many ways as a a society than 1929.
And sure you can point to other countries that have a good quality of life
without being a superpower (including France, mentioned previously :-), but
most of them are socialist to some degree (a bad word around here. :-) Most
of them also have less dual income families and more intact family networks
(in part due to less geographical mobility in smaller countries, but also in
part due to cultural values). They don't have two million people in prison.
They don't have huge drug wars. And so on. US Americans' expenses (or
follies) as well as the government's have risen with the superpower status
-- they are not going to change easily when the dollar party is over. Many
of those expenses are long term fixed obligations (retirement obligations,
mortgages, college loans, Medicare, etc.) The previous superpower, Britain,
is now at the lowest overall for childhood happiness in industrialized
countries (US is just above it). This is not a good place to be starting
into another Great Depression from.
It is common to attribute the success of US America on the world scene to
"capitalism". I would argue that the US success stemmed from very specific
things that had to do with US history and less with the economic system, like:
* A huge ecologically-functional unpolluted continent remote from European
wars where the relatively-poorly-armed (but mostly happy and socialist)
natives were relatively easily killed off by plagues and then mop-up
genocide by European settlers and the US Army.
* A longstanding Black slave trade (at untold human cost) for cheap
agricultural (and then factory) labor.
* Open immigration, causing a mixing of ideas and technology from abroad --
including perhaps most importantly agricultural seeds from around the world
to make US agriculture more productive and diverse than most places.
* Not respecting foreign copyrights or patents, allowing US industry and
academia to surge ahead in the early years (ironic now).
There are probably were other advantages as well having nothing to do with
the specific economic system.
But those advantages are mostly long gone now. Slaves set free (though still
kept as cheap labor somewhat by institutionalized racism). Land polluted and
worn out (like by 3/4 topsoil loss by poor farming practices). Warfare
globalized. Immigration greatly reduced. Copyright and patents strangling
industry and innovation via litigation and chilling effects.
So, when you think about the USA, this land of the impatient, home of the
national security state, awash in gas guzzlers, and where even half the
rural people are fat (due to not walking) -- then you have a recipe for
trouble if the economic activity drops, say, by half. Huge trouble in terms
of social unrest, especially since half of all households have guns. Those
guns are essentially meaningless against the force of a US military hardened
in Iraq and possessing air superiority as far as defending Democracy. But
they are easy enough to use deadly enough weapons to make a lot of local
trouble through gang violence and looting, thus justifying even more
security crackdowns as a downward spiral (like Iraq). Thankfully there is
only IIRC a two years supply of ammunition out there (or less if the
shooting really starts) even if there is a 100 years supply of guns.
And note that the aspects I am hopeful about, knowledge, communications,
better technology, are all things which just speed along this "triple
revolution" to prosperity. So I can be optimistic that (if the US government
doesn't start bombing and plaguing once again, including within its borders)
that US Americans will survive and prosper in the future, even if the
current debt-based rationing-based economic party is in for a huge meltdown
and lots of mid-term pain. At that point, then maybe we will all be willing
to learn to party like the French, in our copious vacation time? :-)
[I know, France has its own problems too, of course, including offshoring to
China and India, etc. which are forcing a rethinking of the workweek in the
face of two or three billion people willing to work for less.]
====
Barter implies an economy based on people exchanging manufactured (or found)
goods. What if there just isn't much of a need for exchange? For example,
via 3D nanotech printers powered by local solar panels?
People lived for hundreds of thousands of years without barter being of much
importance because the Earth's ecosystem was so productive in terms of
humanity's small population and small needs relative to Gaia's size that the
average person could get all they needed with comparatively little effort
using only tools easily made by hand.
See:
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
or:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wilson/ant304/biography/arybios98/saxtonbio.html
"It is with this, that the context of art should be reviewed. Sahlins
focuses on the fact that hunter-gatherers are prosperous under their mode of
living, whereas modern society seems to be at odds with the mode of living
that is aspired to. This was especially true in the beginnings of
civilization when art took on a worshipful role to compensate for the
dominion of resources. Hunter-gatherers were not pressured to manipulate
their ecosystem and depend on a greater power for mercy. Therefore, the art
of the hunter-gatherers reflects more of an awareness of the natural world,
not the dependence on it. This is evident in the “animistic” portrayals at
Lascaux, and Chavet. Not only that, it has shown that hunter-gatherer
societies are deeply involved in ritualistic activities and festivities. It
is even possible that Paleolithic people invented music. The modern day
!Kung, themselves, spend the majority of their leisure time singing,
dancing, playing games, and storytelling. Also in Africa, the Hadza live in
an area of exceptional abundance. Thus, the Hadza men seem more concerned
with games of chance than chances of game (Sahlins: 27). All of these
factors represent a viewpoint quite contrary to the misconceptions that
exist about hunter-gatherer societies and their incessant quest for food. "
So even the *art* of our times may change back again. :-)
Philosophically, we end up choosing between ignoring the exponential function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand
the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
and using that exponential function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian
".. The term [Cornucopian] comes from the cornucopia, the mythical "horn of
plenty" of the Greek mythology which supplied its owners with endless food
and drink magically. The cornucopians are sometimes known as "Boomsters",
and their philosophic opponents --- Malthus and his school --- are called
"Doomsters." ... A cornucopian is someone who posits that there are few
intractable natural limits to growth and believes the world can provide a
practically limitless abundance of natural resources. The term 'cornucopian'
is sometimes used derogatorily, especially by those who are skeptical of the
view that technology can solve, or overcome, the problem of an
exponentially-increasing human population living off a finite base of
natural resources."
So, are you a Boomster or a Doomster? :-) Or is there a third option,
"Steady Stater"? :-)
Guess I'm a "Boomster"/"Cornucopian", as long as the elite does not make a
last stand with nukes and bioweapons, and such weapons also remain out of
the hands of the disgruntled from the current system or the chaotic
transition period.
======
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Anyway, all bits and pieces that were more coherent in their original
contexts. :-) But they maybe show what my perspective is going to be on
interpreting conventional economics. As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such
a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for
improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding
that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs
trend towards zero?
That's because any number divided by zero is infinity (except maybe zero
itself. :-) You know all those "divide by zero" errors in economics
simulators? Maybe they were telling us something?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22divide+by+zero%22+economics
Results 1 - 10 of about 18,000 for "divide by zero" economics.
An example:
"The Long Tail: The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance"
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/03/the_tragically_.html
I'm preparing for my talk on Long Tail economics at O'Reilly's Emerging
Technology conference in ten days, and I've run into a slight problem. The
Long Tail is all about abundance: the economic effects of infinite shelf
space. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics has virtually nothing to say
about abundance. Indeed, the economics of abundance is almost exclusively
the domain of extropians, a few other transhumanists, and science fiction
writers. How can this be? Well, for starters the classic definition of
economics is "the science of choice under scarcity". That's a warning sign
right there. From Adam Smith on, economics has focused almost exclusively on
behavior within constraints. My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw's otherwise
excellent Principles of Economics, doesn't mention the word abundance. And
for good reason: if you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go
to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically
blow up.
Also discussed here:
"The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0671.html?printable=1
So, any aspect of the economy which goes towards zero in cost, tends to make
everything else also go to zero in cost (or infinite in abundance), whether
zero cost food, zero cost energy, zero cost time, zero cost healthcare, or
... zero cost computing. Karl Marx and others talked about related (but not
identical) ideas a long time ago.
And so, maybe more economists (especially at PU) need to start using a
calculus of infinites, since infinity times anything is ... infinity. Well,
that's true for infinity times anything except maybe zero, if, say, our
global society chooses to blow itself up physically. :-( Is diverting our
R&D resources to war really a better option than learning to share, and
learning to use our collective imagination to make the world work abundantly
for everyone, and thus learning to let those now obsolete neoclassical
economic equations just blow up *numerically* instead of guiding our society
to blow itself up physically fighting over artificial scarcity? :-)
See also:
"The Myth of Scarcity"
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/783
"Perhaps the single most devastating myth on earth is that of scarcity.
... The irony of this tragedy is that while people eagerly embrace the myth
of scarcity with respect to everything which in reality is or could be
abundant if we use our imagination, they ignore the one thing that is
actually running out for humanity - TIME."
Or:
"Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek [The choice is ours]"
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15736
"Star Trek takes place in a world where all the ugly things about human
existence have been erased. Interstellar globalization has brought us new
technologies to make transportation and translation effortless. Machines
called replicators can produce absolutely anything you want, so the
economics of inequity are gone. The injuries of race and class and gender
have been surmounted, if not forgotten altogether. Scarcity, borders, money,
and culture have all ceased to exist. ... Galactica is sci-fi without that
BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people
experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own
ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of peak oil and 9/11 and natural disasters
compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy
major cities. Galactica's message is that unless we come to terms with our
own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and
to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999%
of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven't learned: that exploitation
leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your
own oppression. ... These days, Battlestar Galactica's warning that
technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is
far more resonant than Star Trek's hope that technology and progress will
solve all of our problems."
"""
Or as I also said at the above link:
"""
In twenty to thirty years (assuming continued exponential growth in
technological capacity along the lines of Moore's law like
price/performance, which most experts agree will happen),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
likely even a $100 laptop computer in 2033 will be literally a million times
faster than today (as the OLPC is approximately tens of thousands of times
faster than an Apple II). At that point, you could hold the equivalent of
all of today's Google physical computer equipment literally in your lap. :-)
And likely, someone would be throwing one out to get something better, so if
you "dumpster dived", you could get a "Google" of today's computing power
for free. :-) By the way, that computer could likely hold all the surface
internet of today in *RAM*. And if I turn out to be off by ten years, so
what? Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools*
(some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the
hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated
military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As
Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has
changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about
this, why should they listen to me?
"""
Ultimately, to survive as a society given the existence of ever more
powerful weapons of mass destruction, we need social change in terms of a
change of heart. That has nothing directly to do with technology. But, I
think improving on technology (especially in open ways) makes that change of
heart a little easier. A world built on open manufacturing may make it
easier to imagine sharing all that abundance. Then maybe more people in the
USA can imagine listening to Albert Einstein, or even John Lennon. :-)
"Imagine" by John Lennon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg
"President Bill Clinton Sings John Lennon's Imagine"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0F_6plYyTM
"President George W Bush sings Imagine" (imagined using computers.:-)
Clip version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOEhQXUS_ws&NR=1
Simulation version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ancelj-qAak
We'll see whether President-elect Barack Obama administration will bring
us closer to that "Imagine" world, and whether he will sing that song
someday for real. :-) But this is the best I've found so far: :-)
"Barack Obama: Imagine/I Have A Dream"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wTB6iNuos
The USA has made some more recent progress in moving beyond racial
inequality; we will see if it can now move beyond economic inequality and
also towards sustainability, perhaps in part through open manufacturing and
related ideas. Remember, just like copyright and software patent laws today
make open collaboration harder (though not impossible), there used to be
laws on the books in the USA enforcing slavery and then racism. So change
even in huge ways is possible, but it may take a long time.
--Paul Fernhout