On rationing and unlimited demand
Paul D. Fernhout
post-scarcity issues, specifically about how the economic interpretation of
what it means if production cost drop to zero depends on you assumptions
about "demand" (which is a psychological idea, not a mathematical one).
In the long run, I feel our industrial base will be able to produce far in
excess of the capacity of any current human to consume on a personal basis,
so rationing the basics like water, food, shelter, information, manufactured
personal goods and health-care will be meaningless. (I'd expect big projects
like diverting the output of the energy of entire stars might still require
"discussion". :-)
But in the short term, there are a lot of questions about how to get beyond
rationing the basics, perhaps using a currency system like depicted in Manna
or some other approach:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
And clearly our society is having a major financial crisis right now related
to rationing and the seizing up of a control system built around the
movement of fiat dollars. From:
http://www.pithypedia.com/?author=Douglas+Adams
"This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the
people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions
were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned
with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
--Douglas Adams"
Here is an interesting comment on "rationing" from:
"A Medicare-Like Plan for the Non-Elderly - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com"
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/a-medicare-like-plan-for-the-non-elderly/
"""
Evidently, many Americans do sincerely believe that when a public health
plan refuses to pay for a procedure it is “rationing,” while denial of
health care to an uninsured, low-income individual who cannot afford to pay
for that care is not. But as textbooks in economics explicitly teach, the
role of prices in a market economy is precisely to ration scarce resources
among unlimited demands. The American health system has rationed health care
by price and ability to pay all along for a sizeable segment of the United
States population. In its report “Hidden Cost, Value Lost,” for example, a
distinguished panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine of the
National Academy of Sciences estimated that some 18,000 Americans die
prematurely for want of health insurance and timely medical care. That is
rationing life years. ...
"""
That paragraph in a NYTimes blog is another opinion data point on the road
to moving to a post-scarcity society. It's interesting distinguish between
what has been spun as "rationing" and what is accepted as just the way it is
when one buys into the cultural assumptions of the mainstream in the USA.
One flaw in the mainstream economic thinking referenced there is to assume
"unlimited demand". What is the basis for economists to think that a healthy
human in a healthy community would have unlimited demands for goods and
services?
By contrast:
http://www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com/
"Voluntary simplicity is a philosophy. Often called compassionate living, it
is a conscious choice to simplify your life and a deliberate downshifting to
create the life and home environment that fit you and your family."
Or in fiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
"The Man Who Ate the World" (originally published in Galaxy in 1956) tells
the story of Anderson Trumie who had a scarring experience in his childhood,
before Morey Fry changed the world [with cheap energy powering cheap
manufacturing]. All [Trumie] wants is a teddy bear, but his parents'
lifestyle of frantic consumption won't allow him to have one anymore. As an
adult, he is a compulsive consumer. He has taken over North Guardian Island
and he is putting a burden on the local infrastructure. A psychist, Roger
Garrick, with the help of Kathryn Pender, find a way to heal Anderson and
end his exorbitant consumption."
It seems to me that a core assumption of mainstream economics is that people
and communities are very sick mentally and culturally, and that nothing
produced by economics will improve that situation. Thus, people pursue an
"unlimited" demand for goods and services, to repeatedly try to fix
some perceived-to-be-broken-or-missing part of themselves with consumption
of goods and services supplied by others (also induced in part by
advertising). There are thousands of years of stories in our history that
suggest that human happiness does not come from satisfying unlimited
desires, but rather from the psychological basics of friendship, community,
family, art, and spirituality, and materially from having enough as a
community for the entire community to be reasonably comfortable and
reasonably secure in terms of water, plain food, and basic shelter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
(Granted, what is "reasonable" is subject to debate. :-)
Psychological issues that might might drive "unlimited" demand include:
* arms-races and status competitions (ultimately over mates and social
position and ideologies),
* a desire to boss people around or otherwise control their behavior using
ration units,
* a deep insecurity about material prospects in the future (leading to a
desire to hoard), and
* a morbid obsession with living forever (so, a desire to spend infinitely
on medical interventions, even past the point of diminishing returns).
In small amounts, those desires may even be adaptive, but in big amounts,
those desires are generally dysfunctional.
In the book "Always Coming Home", Ursula K. Le Guin paints a different
picture of life, where people have high technology but limited demand.
If you assume "limited demand", but exponentially increasing industrial
capacity, then the economic consequences are different. Then you either get:
* shorter work weeks (like France),
* a guaranteed basic income not related to working (like Alaska), or
* mass unemployment, economic collapse, and widespread unrest (Greece,
Iceland, and parts of the USA?).
Or, perhaps some mix of all of those.
The problem was foreseen in the 1960s:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing
proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on
minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social
security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to
disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population
is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time
when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of
everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by
conventional economic analysis. "
One person's comment on an example of the unrest happening now in the USA (a
recent mass shooting in Binghamton, NY):
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-binghamton-shooting6-2009apr06,0,57628.story
"Over the years, she has been laid off from various factories. Nguyen said
the slumping economy had reduced her prospects. Despite being in a similar
situation as Wong, Nguyen said she could not fathom how it would push an
individual to commit such horrific acts."
What a wonderful person that commenter is, but obviously, not everyone is
like her. Obviously some people will always commit horrific acts, but we can
at least reduce the likelihood. Still, the healthiest reason for reform is
not to prevent the worst, but to encourage the best.
Note that it is the people (like immigrants) already at the edges of the
economy that often get hardest hit the soonest in a slump. And diffuse
stress from economic issues is generally just vented locally into local
relationships in a variety of less dramatic ways (depression, domestic
violence, divorce, suicide, bar fights, drug and internet addiction, etc.).
The governing elite have multiple levels of protection (including that an
elite will just replace itself with new recruits as needed), and as with
9/11, any direct violent confrontation just makes the elite power base even
stronger and further justifies a world view based around guarding and
creating artificial scarcity.
Anyway, it seems to me that debunking this idea of "unlimited demand", at
least by those who are reasonably healthy mentally (even if not physically
healthy) is part of envisioning a new post-scarcity economics. If we accept
"limited demand" as a fundamental principal, then people sharing with others
from abundance becomes easier to conceive of rather than people hording (or
insisting on direct trades).
Before Columbus, many Native Americans lived that way.
"Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress"
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"""
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from
their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look
at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying
swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food,
water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many
other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.
They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with
good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know
them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves
out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They
would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and
make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the
mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and
again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not
stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the
religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked
Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher
Columbus. ... The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the
gold? ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with
their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it.
When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary,
they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a
little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his
next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask."
He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives
victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."
"""
Columbus missed the real treasure of these people -- their culture. As
Theodore Sturgeon said in his 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu":
"He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is
obvious."
Or, from:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other
group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent
society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's
material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is
therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to
bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a
tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few
possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of
goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a
relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the
invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an
invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary
relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural
catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
One reason economics has to assume unlimited demand is to avoid the
mathematical equations blowing up. If costs go to zero, unless demand goes
to infinity, then you would get big discontinuities in the economic
equations (prices would crash). This is a basic mathematical fact. For
economists to not see it, they really have to have their head in the sand,
or they must just be in ideological unity about human behavior under all
circumstances. But of course, limited demand is a fact of healthy human
psychology, not a fact of mathematics. Economics mostly study math, not
psychology.
To be clear, what is "limited demand" might be relative to a culture, and,
say, a "post-scarcity" culture might have a different conception of what is
"normal". But even in that case, if people want to expend the electric power
of a year of our entire current civilization in a minute for some personal
amusement or artistic impulse, we should distinguish between the energy
needed for basic life support (limited) with the aesthetic impulse (maybe
with much higher limits).
Part of the tragedy is perhaps in having one economic system that tries to
handle both human needs (fairly limited) and human desires (much higher
limits, if any). In today's terms, one person's desire for a big house and
human domestic servants and endless personal financial security might crowd
out thousands of people's needs for access to water, food, basic shelter and
basic healthcare. This happen either in terms of directly shifting where
production and innovation happens in the economy to the concerns of those
with money, or in terms of creating external costs like pollution or war
which are often paid mostly by the poor.
Still, it is true it can be fuzzy to distinguish between needs and desires.
Contrast, for example, multi-billionaire Bill Gates' house:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates%27_house
"Bill Gates' house is a large earth-sheltered mansion in the side of a hill
overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. The house is noted for
its design and the technology it incorporates. It is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0.
According to zillow.com, the total assessed value of the property (land and
house) is $147.5 million and the annual property tax for 2006 was
$1,063,602. Seattle Weekly reports the 2008 tax jumped to $1.06 million and
the home's assessed value to $147.5 million."
with multi-billionaire Warren Buffet's house:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_buffet
"In 2007, he earned a total compensation of $175,000, which included a base
salary of just $100,000. He lives in the same house in the central Dundee
neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at
around $700,000."
Seriously, which person sounds more healthy mentally? :-)
Still, large houses for executives, like the castles of old, can often
function more as hotels or catering organizations for parties, so that's
only one data point about a person.
(Wonder if Bill Gates knows about the other meaning of "Xanadu" as in "The
Skills of Xanadu"? Another irony in life. :-)
Anyway, in conclusion, this assumption of "unlimited demand" in all areas of
life is at the bedrock of mainstream economics. To move beyond mainstream
economics, we need to move beyond that assumption, or at least shape that
assumption into one more compatible with life-affirming and
community-affirming values. Or failing that, we need to come up with
alternative ideas about rationing that take in account external costs and a
more life-affirming vision of a healthy culture. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Samantha Atkins
> This note was sparked by a discussion recently with someone about
> post-scarcity issues, specifically about how the economic interpretation of
> what it means if production cost drop to zero depends on you assumptions
> about "demand" (which is a psychological idea, not a mathematical one).
>
> In the long run, I feel our industrial base will be able to produce far in
> excess of the capacity of any current human to consume on a personal basis,
> so rationing the basics like water, food, shelter, information, manufactured
> personal goods and health-care will be meaningless.
It depends. Most of the items on your list would be available in
unlimited supply. Information actually increases in value and amount the
more it is used even today except for those types whose "value" consist
in not being available to most. But items like "health-care" are an
amalgram of not just material goods but also the services of a lot of
very highly trained people. It is not clear that mere physically
abundant economy will produce a super-abundance of highly trained and
skilled people (ar AI / robotic medical systems). Now if we have full
nanomedicine then no problem.
> (I'd expect big projects
> like diverting the output of the energy of entire stars might still require
> "discussion". :-)
>
> But in the short term, there are a lot of questions about how to get beyond
> rationing the basics, perhaps using a currency system like depicted in Manna
> or some other approach:
> http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
>
> And clearly our society is having a major financial crisis right now related
> to rationing and the seizing up of a control system built around the
> movement of fiat dollars. From:
>
We are not in an abundance economy yet for a variety of quite physical
and technological reason as well as very sticky psycho-sociological ones.
> http://www.pithypedia.com/?author=Douglas+Adams
> "This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the
> people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions
> were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned
> with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
> the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
> --Douglas Adams"
>
> Here is an interesting comment on "rationing" from:
> "A Medicare-Like Plan for the Non-Elderly - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com"
> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/a-medicare-like-plan-for-the-non-elderly/
> """
>
Medicare is a disaster. Anything based on it has both feet already in
the grave.
> Evidently, many Americans do sincerely believe that when a public health
> plan refuses to pay for a procedure it is “rationing,” while denial of
> health care to an uninsured, low-income individual who cannot afford to pay
> for that care is not.
"Rationing" is hardly applicable if there really is not enough to go
around.
> But as textbooks in economics explicitly teach, the
> role of prices in a market economy is precisely to ration scarce resources
> among unlimited demands.
It is to most reasonably meet demands in the face of scarce resources.
Still required this side of abundance.
> The American health system has rationed health care
> by price and ability to pay all along for a sizeable segment of the United
> States population. In its report “Hidden Cost, Value Lost,” for example, a
> distinguished panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine of the
> National Academy of Sciences estimated that some 18,000 Americans die
> prematurely for want of health insurance and timely medical care. That is
> rationing life years. ...
> """
>
No. It has simply said that if you can pay for X whose price is a
function of supply and demand then you can have X. This is in accord
with the freedom of the producers and the consumers. It is not
"rationing" in any sort of artificial sense at all.
> That paragraph in a NYTimes blog is another opinion data point on the road
> to moving to a post-scarcity society. It's interesting distinguish between
> what has been spun as "rationing" and what is accepted as just the way it is
> when one buys into the cultural assumptions of the mainstream in the USA.
>
>
Things like freedom of association, freedom to dispose of what one
produces as one wishes (i.e., trade or giving it away) come into play.
Not just "cultural assumptions".
> One flaw in the mainstream economic thinking referenced there is to assume
> "unlimited demand". What is the basis for economists to think that a healthy
> human in a healthy community would have unlimited demands for goods and
> services?
>
If demand is greater than supply it does not matter if it is "unlimited"
or not.
More later perhaps. I have to get to work.
- samantha
Kevin Carson
But items like "health-care" are an
> amalgram of not just material goods but also the services of a lot of
> very highly trained people. It is not clear that mere physically
> abundant economy will produce a super-abundance of highly trained and
> skilled people (ar AI / robotic medical systems). Now if we have full
> nanomedicine then no problem.
It's true that training--"human capital"--is going to be a material
cost in any system. But the present system, by creating "radical
monopolies" controlled by licensed professionals, imposes artificially
high educational requirements for obtaining a given unit of
want-satisfaction, just as it imposes artificially high material
capital outlays and overheads per unit of want-satisfaction. Simply
eliminating the toll gates and entry barriers, the mandated minimum
overheads in both material and educational terms, might not turn
healthcare into "free beer"--but it would probably make it a lot freer
than it is now.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Paul D. Fernhout
> Things like freedom of association, freedom to dispose of what one
> produces as one wishes (i.e., trade or giving it away) come into play.
> Not just "cultural assumptions".
"Freedom" is a slippery topic. :-)
To begin with, there is "freedom to" as opposed to "freedom from".
And "freedom" in turn often depends on the definition of what human rights are.
For example, in the 1950s Soviet Union, everyone had a right to a job, a
right to housing, a right to food, and a right to medical care -- but they
did not often have much choice about the quality or appropriateness of those
things. In the USA of the 1950s, everyone (who was white and male and
mainstream) had a right to find a job they liked (if they could), had a
right to buy the food they wanted (if they could afford it based on their
job or other capital), had a right to live where they wanted and could
afford (again if they could afford it), and had a right to pick the doctors
they wanted (again, if they could afford it).
So, the old Soviets might say, what good is the "freedom to" pick a doctor
in the USA if you can't afford to pay for the doctor you want? And the old
USA might say, what good is a "freedom from" medical wants in the USSR if
you didn't like the quality of the doctoring you get?
One recent comment on that, by the way:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/04/042214&art_pos=2
"I don't know the right answer. I work for the NHS (as a retinal specialist
too!) and have had endless grief getting funding for some treatments for my
patients; on the other hand, I've worked in systems where the first question
you have to ask is not "what does this patient need?" but "what can this
patient afford?" and I prefer the former despite all its problems and
stupidities. "
Anyway, there are also vast limits on freedom of association and freedom of
trade in the USA, they just are so taken for granted they may not seem obvious.
Despite the "freedom to" associate how one pleases, it can be hard to build
deep relationships of any sort across class lines in the USA. From:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that
you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that
my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are
numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right
class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly
under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and
very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to
be done to their kid without a fight.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make
them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers
like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my
job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because
I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have
contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the
class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real
lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your
place.
"""
In New York State, almost US$20,000 a year per child is being spent to teach
that and other related lessons. There is little talk of "freedom from"
thirteen years of compulsory classes of this sort. Yet, the old USSR was
"evil" because it did things like forced children to learn propaganda from a
young age.
And what good is the "freedom to" do what you want with what you make as you
wish if you are not able to make it in the first place (from lack of access
to capital or from patent or copyright restrictions)?
>> One flaw in the mainstream economic thinking referenced there is to assume
>> "unlimited demand". What is the basis for economists to think that a healthy
>> human in a healthy community would have unlimited demands for goods and
>> services?
>>
> If demand is greater than supply it does not matter if it is "unlimited"
> or not.
In the short term, you have a good point that relates to understanding
different degrees of rationing.
The reason it matters in the long term is in assessing the appropriateness
of the current rationing-based economic system in light of increasing
productivity over the next couple of decades. Unless demand rises as fast
(or faster) than productivity, prices must fall, but without continual
innovation profits must fall to zero from competition. If productivity rises
a lot faster than demand, then prices will approach zero. So, there is an
*inherent* problem with mainstream economic theory if you assume healthy
people who are self-limiting in wants.
Assessing the pattern of demand is ultimately a psychological (or perhaps
anthropological) question. But many economist, who are essentially mostly
mathematicians, seem to act like they know about human desires better than
anyone.
But sure, it is good to generalize along the lines you raise. So, even if
demand is limited, the issue is, does productivity rise faster than demand,
or does demand rise faster than productivity?
I'm suggesting as exponential growth of technological capacity really starts
to show up (in part driven by cheaper computing power), that demand by
humans for human things will still remain essentially the same for most
things. So, there will be a wider and wider gap between how much we can
produce and how much we want. So, prices and profits will fall. And
job-related unemployment will go up. It has only been the fact that most
communities on Earth were materially poor and thus a good export market that
has kept this entire system working. As prosperity spreads globally, then
growth-oriented economic equations must fail.
(There is also the fact of external costs of economic transactions, like
pollution and war, which can cause failure, but that's a different issue.)
So, I suggest that the current economic crisis of a debt-bubble bursting is
coinciding with this other trend about increasing manufacturing
productivity, making the current economic crisis worse. Thus, at best, we
will see, as Marshall Brain's talks about, a "jobless recovery" in the face
of increasing automation.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
--Paul Fernhout
Samantha Atkins
It's true that training--"human capital"--is going to be a material
On 4/7/09, Samantha Atkins <sjat...@gmail.com> wrote:
But items like "health-care" are an
> amalgram of not just material goods but also the services of a lot of
> very highly trained people. It is not clear that mere physically
> abundant economy will produce a super-abundance of highly trained and
> skilled people (ar AI / robotic medical systems). Now if we have full
> nanomedicine then no problem.
cost in any system.
It is more than mere training. It includes things like aptititude and interests that are not so malleable or as plentiful as we might wish or need.
But the present system, by creating "radical
monopolies" controlled by licensed professionals, imposes artificially
high educational requirements for obtaining a given unit of
want-satisfaction, just as it imposes artificially high material
capital outlays and overheads per unit of want-satisfaction.
Removing the AMA / FDA monopolies would resolve much of that.
Simply
eliminating the toll gates and entry barriers, the mandated minimum
overheads in both material and educational terms, might not turn
healthcare into "free beer"--but it would probably make it a lot freer
than it is now.
It is good to ensure we don't throw out free as in freedom to acquire free beer. :)
- samantha
Samantha Atkins
"Freedom" is a slippery topic. :-)
Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Things like freedom of association, freedom to dispose of what one
> produces as one wishes (i.e., trade or giving it away) come into play.
> Not just "cultural assumptions".
To begin with, there is "freedom to" as opposed to "freedom from".
Freedom from initiation of force is pretty fundamental ethically and to any form of human rights. Freedom to do anything you wish except initiated force directly or indirectly seems pretty straightforward also.
And "freedom" in turn often depends on the definition of what human rights are.
No, it is more foundational than human rights and partially definitive of them. Not the other way around.
For example, in the 1950s Soviet Union, everyone had a right to a job, a
right to housing, a right to food, and a right to medical care -- but they
did not often have much choice about the quality or appropriateness of those
These are so-called "positive rights" and are not freedom from initiation of force as they require initiation of force for these things to be provided regardless of the desires of those capable of providing them. They are one of the most pernicious eroders of "freedom" and of understanding of ethics.
things. In the USA of the 1950s, everyone (who was white and male and
mainstream) had a right to find a job they liked (if they could), had a
right to buy the food they wanted (if they could afford it based on their
No, everyone had a right to pursue their own happiness and to trade their skills and time for compensation. They had no right to a job but merely to look for those they could reach a voluntary exchange with in this area.
job or other capital), had a right to live where they wanted and could
afford (again if they could afford it), and had a right to pick the doctors
they wanted (again, if they could afford it).
Well of course if they could afford it. Otherwise it would not be voluntary on the part of the providers of the things desired. There is a voluntary only trade of value for value (or in some cases philantrophy) required by freedom. Anything else masks violence and oppression even if it dresses up in high sounding ethical finery.
So, the old Soviets might say, what good is the "freedom to" pick a doctor
in the USA if you can't afford to pay for the doctor you want? And the old
USA might say, what good is a "freedom from" medical wants in the USSR if
you didn't like the quality of the doctoring you get?
The old soviets found out the hard way what the difference was. I don't want to go there.
One recent comment on that, by the way:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/04/042214&art_pos=2
"I don't know the right answer. I work for the NHS (as a retinal specialist
too!) and have had endless grief getting funding for some treatments for my
patients; on the other hand, I've worked in systems where the first question
you have to ask is not "what does this patient need?" but "what can this
patient afford?" and I prefer the former despite all its problems and
stupidities. "
Anyway, there are also vast limits on freedom of association and freedom of
trade in the USA, they just are so taken for granted they may not seem obvious.
Yes there are. We have fallen a long way from initial purported ideals.
Nick Taylor
>>> But items like "health-care" are an
>>> amalgram of not just material goods but also the services of a
>>> lot of
>>> very highly trained people. It is not clear that mere physically
>>> abundant economy will produce a super-abundance of highly
>>> trained and
>>> skilled people (ar AI / robotic medical systems). Now if we have
>>> full
>>> nanomedicine then no problem.
>>
>> It's true that training--"human capital"--is going to be a material
>> cost in any system.
>
>
> It is more than mere training. It includes things like aptititude and
> interests that are not so malleable or as plentiful as we might wish or
> need.
Yea - as a tangential aside, I just got out of a fairly majorly
traumatic hospital experience... and the first thing I can remember that
wasn't an agonising nightmare was a nurse putting a comforting hand on
my shoulder. The human-touch reaches places that morphine can't.
There are people who work in hospitals who are like angels - they're
there because it's a calling... and they're really good at it in ways
that machines probably won't ever be. There was a surgical-tech
development a couple of weeks ago where a Japanese surgical robot can
now do heart-bypass surgery, without stopping the heart... the scalpels
"beat" in time with the heart, and still manage to carry out sub-mm
precision surgery. Sooner or later, machines are going to be better at
this stuff than we are... but the human-touch? I wouldn't count on it.
But as I say... tangential.
Paul D. Fernhout
> Yea - as a tangential aside, I just got out of a fairly majorly
> traumatic hospital experience... and the first thing I can remember that
> wasn't an agonising nightmare was a nurse putting a comforting hand on
> my shoulder. The human-touch reaches places that morphine can't.
>
> There are people who work in hospitals who are like angels - they're
> there because it's a calling... and they're really good at it in ways
> that machines probably won't ever be. There was a surgical-tech
> development a couple of weeks ago where a Japanese surgical robot can
> now do heart-bypass surgery, without stopping the heart... the scalpels
> "beat" in time with the heart, and still manage to carry out sub-mm
> precision surgery. Sooner or later, machines are going to be better at
> this stuff than we are... but the human-touch? I wouldn't count on it.
>
> But as I say... tangential.
Actually, some of the medical care in the USA is either from voluntary
"candy stripers":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_volunteer
"Duties of hospital volunteers vary widely depending upon the facility.
Volunteers may staff reception areas and gift shops; file and retrieve
documents; provide administrative backup; help visitors; visit with
patients; or transport various small items like flowers, medical records,
lab specimens, and drugs from unit to unit."
or is lower paid because of an assumption of "psychic income":
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FSW/is_2_22/ai_n17206865/
"Although money and material recognition are important, they do not
substitute for true appreciation. For many employees the psychic income of
being openly acknowledged and appreciated equals their material income. In
today's highly competitive market, employers put too much of their focus on
short-term, material rewards and not enough investment into creating the
right match between the needs of the individual and the organization."
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
On freedom, in relation to, say, Propertarian Libertarianism, with which
these ideas you are outlining seems congruent, here a couple relevant
sections from:
"A Non-Libertarian FAQ"
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html
"""
Nor might we need or want to accept the versions of "freedom" and "rights"
that libertarians propose. To paraphrase Anatole France: "How noble
libertarianism, in its majestic equality, that both rich and poor are
equally prohibited from peeing in the privately owned streets (without
paying), sleeping under the privately owned bridges (without paying), and
coercing bread from its rightful owners!"
"""
And:
"""
Taxation is theft.[?] Two simple rebuttals to this take widely different
approaches. The first is that property is theft. The notion behind property
is that A declares something to be property, and threatens anybody who still
wants to use it. Where does A get the right to forcibly stop others from
using it? Arguments about "mixing of labor" with the resource as a basis for
ownership boil down to "first-come-first-served". This criticism is even
accepted by some libertarians, and is favorably viewed by David Friedman.
This justifies property taxes or extraction taxes on land or extractable
resources if you presume that the government is a holder in trust for
natural resources. (However, most people who question the creation of
property would agree that after the creation of property, a person is
entitled to his earnings. Thus the second argument.) The second is that
taxation is part of a social contract. Essentially, tax is payment in
exchange for services from government. This kind of argument is suitable for
defending almost any tax as part of a contract. Many libertarians accept
social contract (for example, essentially all minarchists must to insist on
a monopoly of government.) Of course they differ as to what should be IN the
contract.
"""
and:
"""
Why should I be told what to do with my property? That infringes on my
rights of ownership.[?] This question comes up rather often, since absolute
ownership of property is fundamental to most flavors of libertarianism. Such
propertarianism fuels daydreams of being able to force the rest of the world
to swirl around the immovable rock of your property. For example, there were
trespass lawsuits filed against airlines for flying over property. A good
answer is: what makes you so sure it is yours? ... What do you hold the deed
to? Property as recognized by a government. As such, you can address
infringement of your rights through the legal system. However your property
as recognized by the legal system is limited.
"""
So, those are all different perspectives on freedom, making it not as
obvious as it might seem at first.
There are other versions of libertarianism. Here is a different take on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
"Libertarian socialism ... is a group of political philosophies that aspire
to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e.
a society in which all violent or coercive institutions would be dissolved
(or at least drastically reduced in scope), and in their place every person
would have free, equal access to tools of information and production."
(Noam Chomsky favors that variation.)
For a different perspective of first use of violence, consider, from a
review of the book,"On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace" by
Donald Kagan:
http://www.amazon.com/Origins-War-Preservation-Peace/dp/0385423756
"Kagan, professor of history and classics at Yale, focuses on international
relations, pondering why states choose to go to war. He sees the determining
factors as those enunciated by Thucydides: "honor, fear, and interest." War
cannot be eliminated because peace is not regarded as an absolute good, yet
particular conflicts can be averted, according to Kagan."
What that boils down to is that first use of force is often not the original
"cause" of war (or any large conflict). This is even true in personal
human-to-human conflicts. Someone does something repeatedly that is harmful
to you but not directly violent but which may then lead to a violent
confrontation (say, a neighbor sprays pesticides on their land which then
drifts through the air onto your land and thus poisons your well and
increases your cancer risk -- you are being harmed, but often have little
legal recourse). Often economic issues, like trade issues, cause economic
distress in countries and then they retaliate with the use of force. That
was the justification the Japanese government used for attacking the USA in
WWII, that the US had caused Japan economic distress by embargoes. The
German government also justified its initial actions in WWII based on
economic distress. I'm not defending any of that here, but I am pointing out
that "economic violence" is an issue with any definition of "economic freedom".
Inherent in any real social system given the "economic freedom" and
supposedly "voluntary" transactions is the use of what amounts to "economic
violence" against others to get them to submit to the will of the person
with a lot of money. Often that is then translated into physical violence or
harassment in ways that employees feel powerless to defend against (even
when there are laws on the books against it). The same happens when a spouse
is dependent on another spouse for income (or child support), leading to
accepting domestic violence. Any *real* economic landscape for *real* people
also includes family ties and other social obligations that limit economic
choices. That is another reason people are at a disadvantage when
negotiating with large amoral corporations without family ties. Capital can
flit without emotion over national borders in seconds (as can rockets),
whereas, even with all the proper permits (which may take years to get), the
movement of people across national borders (or even just doorsteps) for
economic reasons (or violence-related reasons) is often a heartbreaking thing.
You might not want to define anything in economics as violence or force, but
the dynamics of inequality in power leading to unfairness is still there. As
Daniel Quinn suggests, what most defines our culture is that all food is
under lock-and-key. So, there is a a stick of starvation as well as a carrot
of benefit to these transactions.
Why is this? Historically, having wealth also gave one better information,
better education, better nutrition, better medical care, better
opportunities plus the capital to pursue them, and so on, leading to the
rich getting richer just like one big oak tree in a field might shade out
all the other trees who then wither and die. Propertarian Libertarianism
glosses over this trend.
The rich-getting-richer-and-shading-out-the-rest is on the other side of the
coin with the sort of economic freedoms you are outlining. In the past,
progressive taxation (with up to 90% marginal tax rates) has been one
approach to that problem of the inequity of that unfairness of the wealthy
more easily making money than the poor. (It's often said: "The first million
is the hardest".) A wealth tax (say, 5% annually?) is another, and probably
better than income tax as far as keeping the current system equitable. Both
types of taxes of course have been opposed recently in the USA, leading to a
huge and growing rich-poor disparity (supposedly justified by only wealthy
people being able to give poor people jobs).
Greater economic power gives the wealthy greater political power (and then,
vice versa).
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/who_has_the_power.html
"""
Who has predominant power in the United States? The short answer, from 1776
to the present, is: Those who have the money have the power. George
Washington was one of the biggest landowners of his day; presidents in the
late 19th century were close to the railroad interests; for George W. Bush,
it is oil and other natural resources, agribusiness, and finance. But to be
more exact, those who own income-producing property -- corporations, real
estate, and agribusinesses -- set the rules within which policy battles are
waged.
While this may seem simple and/or obvious, the reasons behind it are
complex. They involve an understanding of social classes, the role of
experts, the two-party system, and the history of the country, especially
Southern slavery. In terms of the big world-historical picture, and the Four
Networks theory of power advocated on this site, money rules in America
because there are no rival networks that grew up over a long and complex
history:
* No big church, as in many countries in Europe
* No big government, as it took to survive as a nation-state in Europe
* No big military until after 1940 (which is not very long ago) to
threaten to take over the government
So, the only power network of any consequence in the history of the United
States has been the economic one, which under capitalism generates a
business-owning class that hires workers and a working class, along with
small businesses and skilled artisans who are self-employed, and a
relatively small number of independent professionals like physicians. In
this context, the key reason why gold can rule, i.e., why the business
owners who hire workers can rule, is that the people who work in the
factories and fields were divided from the outset into free and slave, white
and black, and later into numerous immigrant ethnic groups as well, making
it difficult for workers as a whole to unite politically to battle for
higher wages and better social benefits. This important point is elaborated
on toward the end of this document in a section entitled "The Weaknesses of
the Working Class." ..
"""
Yet, in reality, if "Joe the Plumber" was not there to buy a plumbing
business with several employee plumbers he could boss around, likely
plumbing would still get done (and even perhaps at lower cost or with
greater enjoyment and higher working plumber salaries).
Anyway, fixing the current system has been tried again and again. It's
failed to do much beyond barely hold things together. Now the current system
is going over a cliff from the double whammy of a debt bubble bursting and
exponentially increasing automation changing the jobs landscape (and the war
landscape).
If "war is a racket":
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it
seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what
it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense
of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
then that helps explain why much of the robotic design efforts of late have
been going into the military robotics:
"Talks P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html
(That is a short video of recent advances in military robotics.)
That trend to militarization of robotics is an example of post-scarcity
robotic technology in the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds.
We need to move *entirely* beyond that scarcity mindset IMHO if anyone (rich
or poor) is to have a chance. Military robotics is like a three year old
playing with matches inside a house. It isn't going to end well unless the
matches get taken away or the kid grows up some.
Anyway, I generally agree with you on the value of various freedoms.
Where we may disagree is how those freedoms play out in an economic system
based around scarcity.
I don't see the current economic approach as being workable as capital
continues to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. A "free market" can't
function with such a high degree of capital concentration, even by standard
economic assumptions. Given the power of large centers of capital, without
extensive regulation and extensive progressive taxation and basic income
guarantees by big government (which I'd assume you likely oppose), the
current economic system will fail, and is failing. And even then, you would
be right to point out that big government has the potential for big
corruption in various ways.
Ultimately, what is the difference between big government and big business
in a capitalist framework? Banks are too big to fail (thus bailouts). The
auto industry is too big to fail (again, bailouts). The motion picture
industry and the print publishing industry is too big to fail (thus more
copyright laws). The schooling system as a jobs program for "teachers" is
too big to fail (thus increasing compulsion laws and bailouts and taxes).
The US medical insurance industry is too big to fail (thus, a cheaper
tax-paid program can't be considered for everyone, with private insurance as
a supplement above the government set limits on procedures). And so on. So
Obama is trying to prop up several systems that are all supposedly either
"too big to fail" or really "too big to confront". Remember those age old
tales of the villagers sacrificing young damsels to the local dragon that
was too big to fight? Well, that's what we have now in US politics, and have
had for some time.
Globally many are also facing pollution externalities caused by US
consumption of products not designed with a cradle-to-cradle philosophy, a
problem that appears because even *if* any transaction between two people is
voluntary, there may be others who are effected (in both good and bad ways)
by the externalities associated with that transaction. Our current economic
system has no way of considering those externalities, because it is hard to
put a dollar figure on them. Some of those are best weighed just by discussion.
Also, since our current economic system is based on continual expansion on a
limited globe with limited demand, what would we really be temporarily
fixing anyway, a doomed paradigm? So, in that regard, I'm not advocating
anything here as a patchwork solution here, even if in the short term I
think most people in the USA would be better off with various reforms (like
Medicare for all). But I am trying to outline the reasons I disagree to show
that a solution to today's economic crises using an extension of today's
economic assumptions just is not going to work long term. The USA is already
essentially the most libertarian capitalist culture on the planet and has
been driving most of these crises. I know, I know, you will say "not
libertarian enough". The fact is, the current system is just not working for
many in the USA or many around the globe. As one example, building on that
increased cancer risk of pesticide overspray mentioned earlier, the entire
globe has lived under a fifteen minute threat of nuclear annihilation for
decades. As Einstein said, with the release of the power of the atom,
everything has changed except our way of thinking. And that goes double now
that we have biotech, nanotech, robotech, and so on.
So, I feel any effort to patch up our current economic system, without
fundamental change, is just very problematical. Not that it may not be worth
trying by some, but ultimately, the whole landscape is changing.
In any case, before social momentum in the USA builds for those reforms in a
big way (given the slowness of most social change and where the USA would be
starting from), the exponentially increasing abundance trend will play out
and a related total change in the employment landscape will be upon us,
IMHO. So, I don't feel like I am saying what *should* happen; I feel more
like I am saying what *will* happen, and I'm asking how can we participate
in that to help it unfold in the most positive way (given our values and
assumptions)?
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
"free people create free markets. Free markets do not necessarily
create free people" - Gupta's Libertarian Observation.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
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"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Samantha Atkins
On Apr 10, 2009, at 7:03 AM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>
> We've been around this topic before. :-)
>
But apparently you haven't thought deeply enough on it yet. :)
> On freedom, in relation to, say, Propertarian Libertarianism, with
> which
> these ideas you are outlining seems congruent, here a couple relevant
> sections from:
Use your own words. I am not interested in discussions with ghosts.
Or do you think you can win points with sheer weight of verbiage?
Speak to the points raised directly or lets end this.
- samantha
Paul D. Fernhout
Samantha-
Ah, arguing with ghosts. :-)
Maybe much of what any of us are is ghost stories? :-)
OK, I'll be a bit more pointed in my comments. :-)
Part of this relates to the difference between "open" manufacturing to
facilitate current capitalistic business needs and "free" manufacturing (in
a free-as-in-freedom sense, but also a free-as-in-beer sense). The
assumptions behind "rights" and "freedoms" will likely change with the
transforming of the cultural landscape through abundance, especially as
specialization and long supply chains become less important to a high-tech
economy, as more and more specialized knowledge and ability gets encoded in
FOSS software and productive hardware that is local and flexible (whether 3D
printing or biotech or nanotech or klanking robotic replicators, or some
combination).
You previously wrote "Freedom from initiation of force is pretty fundamental
ethically and to any form of human rights. Freedom to do anything you wish
except initiated force directly or indirectly seems pretty straightforward
also."
Then you went on to use words like "rights", "ethics", "freedom",
"voluntary", and "ideals", like they were self-evident.
Well, a lot of people would disagree about the "pretty straightforward"
part, and further suggest that it masks endless cultural assumptions you
seem (to me) to be taking for granted right now.
What you seem to me to be outlining is a typical line of propertarian
libertarians. I'm not saying you believe in all the rest of the propertarian
libertarian package. I don't know. Fiscal conservatives believe some of the
same things. But, in any case, what flows from those marketplace and
monetary assumptions is going to have the same likely consequences and
issues as propertarian libertarianism. There are of course other versions of
libertarianism, like libertarian socialism, such as many Native Americans
practiced, with all the land held communally (often by the women, like with
the Iroquois).
It's also hard to discuss things like "rights", "ethics", "freedom",
"voluntary", and "ideals" when they are just assumed from one frame of
reference (a market-driven one focusing on one-to-one exchanges?) as you
seem to me to be doing (consciously or not).
It may be useful to explore the range of possibilities and then explain why
we happen to emphasize some values over others. That, again, is often a
cultural thing and relates to the stories we tell ourselves.
For example, here are four famous freedom articulated by US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt; which don't you think are important?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
"""
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
"""
But, each can be seen as contradicting the other in some situations. How can
we have freedom from want without restricting some people's ability to
corner the market on food (freedom of expression using the market)? How can
we have freedom of speech without also not considering people who are
fearful of being slandered or lynched? What if people in some religions
think others' speech via cartoons is infringing on their practice of
religion? And so on. So, we rapidly have some complexity in our social
relationships. Even the supposedly very open and tolerant
Unitarian-Universalists have problems with this, for example wrestling with
the issue of how to be tolerant about intolerance? See:
"Principles and Sources--The Hidden UU Creedal Test"
http://www.left-bank.org/antiuu/principles.htm
And these pages have long lists of other virtues, values, and rights various
people have supported at various times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights
The US Civil war was in part fought over "human rights", as Southerners saw
it, they were fighting for their basic human right to hold property (slaves).
Here is one attempt to outline rights for children globally (I'm not to keen
on the compulsory schooling part, but like much of the rest):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child
The Triple Revolution memorandum suggests that with increasing automation
breaking the link between human labor and output, people need to have a
right to consume some part of industrial output irrespective of work.
Frances Moore Lappe makes the same point in relation to a right to food,
given all food is under lock-and-key and people have no right to a job.
Now, you may disagree with all these notions of rights. Fine. People
disagree about "rights" across cultures. That is a fact. For example, in
modern Germany, you'd have all sorts of rights you don't have in the USA (in
Germany, you have a right to personal data privacy in relation to commercial
transactions, for example, and also a right to ignore software patents), and
vice versa (in the USA, you have a right to homeschool). Deciding on those
rights as a society (however that is done) is all part of establishing a
healthy meshwork-hierarchy balance or symbiosis between a loosely networked
collective of individuals and organizations and an emergent State.
Obviously, the US politics has been torn for a long time over whether and
individual has any rights (or even exists) before that individual is born.
Some Native American thinking could be considered to give individuals rights
seven generations before they are even *conceived*. And at the other end,
there are conflicts over whether individuals have rights (like to privacy or
moral rights relating to copyright) after they are dead. Maybe in the
future, there will be rights about digital resurrections as simulations. :-)
One may argue about where that balance would be. One may explore whether
specific non-government organizations should be as strong as the State in
various ways (or even replace it entirely, but essentially be the same thing
with a different name, like a paid security force that is essentially the
local police). But, at that point, we are still talking balances, not
absolutes. That is why propertarian libertarianism can be labelled the
"Marxism of the Right" by the American Conservative Magazine,
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
as propertarian libertarian tries to deny this balance among values like
family, security, prosperity, and freedom. Such a balance is just always
there in the current industrialized economic landscape given current
cultural practices that relate to defining "work" and how any right to
consume is linked to engaging in "work". And Bob Black and E.F. Schumacher
points out how many people just take the nature of current "work" for
granted and won't talk about it as being variable depending on our social
assumptions.
As I pointed out, there is such a thing as "economic violence" inherent in
the current marketplace where some actors (and cartel-like groups of actors)
have a lot more power than other actors (like the billions of people live on
US$2 a day or less). For one example, tobacco companies used lots of money
to target children with tobacco advertising; it's not like these companies
were hurting the kids *directly*, was it? Microsoft used its economic power
to crowd out other operating systems (and has faced anti-trust legislation
for that). Oil companies, car companies, and tire companies bought up street
car systems and destroyed them. ADM and other big companies have been
indicted for price fixing in regards to agricultural commodities.
Propertarian libertarians (or just most plain old US Republicans) would
usually want to do away with even the limited laws we have on these things
in the name of "freedom", and we have seen the results of the last decade or
two of banking deregulation. (Granted, Ron Paul wants to do away with the
Fed and fiat currencies, but that's only part of the issue, like with Madoff
and Ponzi schemes and a conflict between proprietary methods and business
transparency.)
This issue of "economic violence" makes the voluntary nature of transactions
in the face of starvation or other pleasantries questionable, yet you are
suggesting marketplace transactions are "voluntary" and that is a good thing
about the "free market". In a world where all food is under lock-and-key,
participating in the market is essential to physical survival, but people
have no "right" to a job in the USA (I'm not saying they should, I'm just
pointing out a conceptual problem). And with automation in the face of
*limited* demand (or demand that at least rises less quickly then
productivity), the market needs human labor less and less. So, even with
warehouses full of food and shoes, we may see starvation and shoelessness
today (like we saw in the Great Depression of the 1930s); in fact, we do see
starvation and material poverty both globally and to a lesser extent in the
USA. It is just not politically acceptable in the USA today to show the
lines at the food banks or tent cities very often in the media.
So, there are also broader conceptions of human rights than just "freedom".
In the USA, a lot of what passes for "freedom" is the "freedom" for wealthy
people to collect rent on "property" they claim they own and then spend the
money in the marketplace however they want without any concerns for
externalities either of non-wealthy people or for future generations. This
of course is justified as "greed is good", suggesting it is only greed that
motivates people to do anything including create jobs for others, and
further, that greed is the best way to get things done. Propertarian
libertarianism has at its core a vision of a world built around material
greed (there is lip service to a voluntary sector, but it is more window
dressing I'd suggest). Whether that is a good or bad philosophy one might
question, :-) but in any case, I'd suggest in a world of material abundance
that has moved beyond rationing, it would be a mindset that will soon be
obsolete. :-)
Also, there are emergent market failures, as with the overuse of antibiotics
(mainly in livestock feed). Even with the USSR you dismiss so readily, for
example, Soviet scientists, working from different economic assumptions than
Western ones, created a cheap and versatile phage therapy, which might
someday save you or a loved one from a antibiotic-resistant bacterial
infection contracted in a typical US hospital. See:
"Phage Therapy: Where communism succeeded"
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm
"By the 1980s, there could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going
to be a major problem in (if not before) the twenty-first century. Yet, we
just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most
important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made
in communist Georgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is embarrassing when
western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually,
when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only
did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage
research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be
destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little
reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the
knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?"
I point that out as just one example of Western market failure, a failure in
this case so deep conceptually that the marketplace itself is creating the
antibiotic resistant organisms now destroying so many lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
But who are you going to sue for the creation of Clostridium difficile as a
negative externality of the market and "voluntary" decisions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance
Can you begin to see why "voluntary" is such a slippery subject? As is
"rights"? Do you have a "right" not to have C. difficile destroy your colon?
Yes? No? I'm not saying there is a simple answer, but thinking about that
question can't help but bring up a lot of interesting issues about rights
and responsibilities, about values and obligations, about fairness and
equity, especially in thinking at things on a scale beyond individual
transactions.
If C. difficile does destroy someones colon, who is to blame? As a *society*
we can think about that questions, including somehow trying to make amends
for a person suffering that externality of a way of life (like
free-to-the-user medical care). As individuals thinking of suing other
individuals, the question is more difficult to approach.
There are many example of these sorts of issues, like nuclear accidents, the
cumulative effect of non-point source oil and gas spills, global climate
change, endocrine disruptors from plastics, mercury pollution from burning
coal, and so on. Anyway, thinking through some of these issues would be more
possible with better tools for looking at webs of technological
interdependencies (or supply chains) and risk assessment, as well as
cradle-to-cradle manufacturing issues. Several people would like to make
such tools with that focus (a different focus than current ERP packages).
It's a difficult task, with little support so far in general. For example,
OSCOMAK, with its recent downgrade is now taking twenty seconds to two
minutes to load pages. :-( That's one outcome of my own personal rationing,
sadly (I also had unsuccessfully asked the provider for a discount for open
source stuff). I'm moving to social semantic desktop ideas in part to get
around the bottleneck of needing a big server, but it is still sad to see
that service, intended to be of some big general benefit, become so crippled
over a marketplace issue. Maybe some PHP software tweaks might improve that;
I don't know, and I'm not that inclined to delve into optimizing a system I
am moving beyond. But, fortunately, there are lots of alternatives like
Appropedia.
So, there are externalities (both positive and negative) which put even
"voluntary" transactions in a larger social context. Pollution, war,
poverty, and other forms of uncertainty are negative externalities of many
market transactions. People using free information to build a better world
(or even a next generation much better free system) is a positive
externality (one not reflected in my transaction with that hosting provider).
Unless people change the fundamental nature of the economic landscape, those
negative externalities may come to overwhelm us, especially as increasing
technological capacity makes possible even worse negative externalities.
That's in part what I mean when I say that our greatest threat right now is
post-scarcity technology (biotech, nucleartech, nanotech, robotech) in the
hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds.
While there are positive aspects of technology, they have not yet been
organized in such a way as to deal with widespread nuclear war (driven by a
short-term profit motive in accelerating arms races and other issues) or
widespread destruction of the biosphere (again, driven by the short-term
profit motive and privatization of public lands). Hopefully, some sort of
open knowledgebase about cradle-to-cradle manufacturing would be a positive
externality of voluntary transactions on this list. :-)
Anyway, as I see it, in your reply, you had just assumed away all the
interesting issues that might lead to some solutions. What does it mean for
something to be voluntary? What sorts or rights? What sorts of freedoms?
What sorts of violence? Is competition itself a form of violence? And so on.
It's not that I disagree about freedom (all sorts of freedoms) being an
important value; it is just that I disagree with freedom being the *only*
important value.
I also disagree that physical violence ("the first use of force") is the
only type of violence. Isn't creating uncertainty itself about survival of
the entire planet is a form of violence? And to the extent the marketplace
has done that, by encouraging arms races and pollution and habitat
destruction, then isn't the supposedly voluntary "free market" a very
violent place indeed? But it seems to me that a "free market" is what you
are implicitly promoting? So, are you then indirectly promoting the violence
which you say you don't want? :-) Certainly you are then promoting
competition, which has a lot of downsides (see the ghost of the still living
Alfie Kohn :-).
So, as I see it, to manage this conflict among freedoms, we need to do one
of two things.
We could have extensive government intervention in the market. That has its
own difficulties, but likely they are less worse since in theory government
can account for externalities. Life in Western Europe (like in the
Netherlands) for most people is clearly happier at this point than for most
people in the USA, especially anyone who earns less than the median income.
Although, it is not clear for how long even Western Europe will be able to
manage the contradictions inherent in the free market, and Western Europe
would still be destroyed or greatly harmed in a major nuclear war driven be
greed (and related political issues) in other countries.
"India-Pakistan nuclear war would cause ozone hole"
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN07279855
Remember, our lives in the USA are completely dependent on the proper
functioning of 1970s-era Soviet computers which run a Russian "doomsday
machine":
"The Return of the Doomsday Machine?"
http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/
It's doubly ironic the USA did what it could to sabotage USSR computing
technology back then. :-(
Or, as an alternative, we could try to transcend the marketplace altogether
for most (or all) things. We could shorten our supply chains back to the
length they used to be back when most commerce was local and we used stuff
like local wood and stone to meet most local needs. Of course, we would
probably want to have flexible local manufacturing as part of that.
It's that second part I want to focus on. But it's just painful to me to
watch people advocating a free market as an ideal like it does not have a
lot of big problems. Especially since those very problems are one of the
things I hope open manufacturing helps solve.
By the way, these same comments could apply to any focus on alternative
currency based ideals, like Marc Fawzi or others are/were attempting. An
alternative currency based on gold or labor or energy or a basket of these
things or whatever might be better for many people than using fiat dollars,
if we are going to have a currency based control system to ration resource
use. But all will still have these same issues, and to deal with them will
require either extensive government intervention or moving beyond scarcity
assumptions in general (like with widespread 3D printing *and* recycling).
However, then, since we likely still need some level of coordination in a
society that can do big things, moving dollars around gets replaced with
moving words around and discussions of what makes sense to do when we can do
almost anything. That's what we see in open source projects today, where
collaborative discussions of technical directions (leading to individual or
collective action, perhaps coordinated stigmergically) replace passing money
around to promote one wealthy actor's vision. That's another cultural
assumption, would people rather move fiat dollars around or have
discussions? One of the biggest complaints about intentional communities is
too much discussions. Part of the discussions are about deciding
collectively what to do (or what not to do), and part are about building a
collective culture. Still, as more and more resources become available to
the individual, one would expect any long discussions to revolve around
bigger and bigger projects if everyone could trivially produce and recycle
their own personal goods with 3D printing. And as FOSS values spread, there
might be less cultural discussion because more can be taken for granted.
Also, stigmergy provides an alternative to discussions, where people just
keep building on contributions by others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
Anyway, this is a more pointed and long winded way of just saying, I feel
you are making a lot of assumptions. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> For example,
> OSCOMAK, with its recent downgrade is now taking twenty seconds to two
> minutes to load pages. :-( That's one outcome of my own personal rationing,
> sadly (I also had unsuccessfully asked the provider for a discount for open
> source stuff). I'm moving to social semantic desktop ideas in part to get
> around the bottleneck of needing a big server, but it is still sad to see
> that service, intended to be of some big general benefit, become so crippled
> over a marketplace issue. Maybe some PHP software tweaks might improve that;
> I don't know, and I'm not that inclined to delve into optimizing a system I
> am moving beyond. But, fortunately, there are lots of alternatives like
> Appropedia.
OK, I still could not stand the remains of OSCOMAK Semantic MediaWiki being
so slow, so I looked some more and found the sudden decrease in speed is due
to an old bug in MediaWiki when you set a wiki to read-only and have no caching.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11533
So, it's been patched for now and is back to only taking a second or so to
load a page. :-)
Community cleverness can substitute sometimes for other resources. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
Paul, could you do a one paragraph, of no more than five lines,
summary of your posts so I know what I'll get if I read the rest?
Thanks,
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 3533 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Kevin Carson
> There are people who work in hospitals who are like angels - they're
> there because it's a calling... and they're really good at it in ways
> that machines probably won't ever be.
Unfortunately, hospital managements see such people coming a mile
away, ride them like a two dollar whore until they burn out, and then
throw them away and replace them. The minute they spot someone who
sees their work as a "calling," they realize they've got someone they
can guilt into working unwanted overtime and call up with a sob story
every single day off, in order to avoid hiring more nurses and having
to pay the benefits.
I've seen this firsthand in every single hospital I ever worked in.
Now when my shift in one of those understaffed shitholes ends, I'm
ready to chew my leg off to get out of the cage. I clock out on the
minute, and anyone who calls me with a sob story about understaffing
can talk to my answering machine.
After dealing with many such hospital administrators, I'm still not
quite ready for a Pol Pot or Robespierre to take out everyone who
wears a necktie to work--but I probably wouldn't cry about it too
much, either.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Kevin Carson
> Actually, some of the medical care in the USA is either from voluntary
> "candy stripers":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_volunteer
> "Duties of hospital volunteers vary widely depending upon the facility.
> Volunteers may staff reception areas and gift shops; file and retrieve
> documents; provide administrative backup; help visitors; visit with
> patients; or transport various small items like flowers, medical records,
> lab specimens, and drugs from unit to unit."
This raises some of the same questions associated in other cases of
peer- or volunteer production being incorporated into a for-profit
framework, and for-profit corporations trying to monetize the value
created by user communities. There's something fundamentally perverse
IMO about doing "volunteer work" for a for-profit corporation.
Whatever labor you contribute replaces labor they'd otherwise have to
hire as an operating expense, on a one-to-one basis, and thus goes
directly to their profit margin by the exact amount you're saving
them. If people are going to volunteer labor, it's much better to do
so through self-organized institutions that they control directly, and
offer a competing alternative to for-profit wage employers as a means
of obtaining the same services.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Kevin Carson
> You previously wrote "Freedom from initiation of force is pretty fundamental
> ethically and to any form of human rights. Freedom to do anything you wish
> except initiated force directly or indirectly seems pretty straightforward
> also."
> Well, a lot of people would disagree about the "pretty straightforward"
> part, and further suggest that it masks endless cultural assumptions you
> seem (to me) to be taking for granted right now.
> What you seem to me to be outlining is a typical line of propertarian
> libertarians. I'm not saying you believe in all the rest of the propertarian
> libertarian package. I don't know. Fiscal conservatives believe some of the
> same things. But, in any case, what flows from those marketplace and
> monetary assumptions is going to have the same likely consequences and
> issues as propertarian libertarianism. There are of course other versions of
> libertarianism, like libertarian socialism, such as many Native Americans
> practiced, with all the land held communally (often by the women, like with
> the Iroquois).
I agree with Samantha's assumptions about non-initiation of force as
an absolute ethical principle.
The lack of straightforwardness in practical applications come from
the fact that self-ownership and the nonaggression principle can
applied to many different systems of property rules, and that no
particular set of property rules is self-evident in the sense that it
can be logically deduced from self-ownership and non-aggression.
Property systems require a set of rules (as Nozick said) for initial
appropriation, transfer, and abandonment, and these rules are largely
conventional. The property rules template you adopt determines
whether a given act is aggression or self-defense within a given
system. If you adopt a Lockean template, the person who continues to
squat on absentee-owned land without paying rent is an aggressor
against the property rights of the landlord. In the Ingalls-Tucker
system of possessory or usufructory ownership, a self-styled absentee
landlord who attempts to collect rent is an aggressor akin to a tax
collector. The two systems differ in the "stickiness" of property
(i.e., the threshold to be met for determining abandonment). What's
more the difference between them is largely one of degree. Even
Lockean property systems have provisions for constructive abandonment,
salvage, etc. And usufructory systems require some conventional
threshold for establishing abandonment, so nobody can "homestead" your
land while you nip out to the supermarket or take a long vacation, or
build a cottage on land you're letting lie fallow for one year.
Birita í Dali
> This raises some of the same questions associated in other cases of
> peer- or volunteer production being incorporated into a for-profit
> framework, and for-profit corporations trying to monetize the value
> created by user communities. There's something fundamentally perverse
> IMO about doing "volunteer work" for a for-profit corporation.
> Whatever labor you contribute replaces labor they'd otherwise have to
> hire as an operating expense, on a one-to-one basis, and thus goes
> directly to their profit margin by the exact amount you're saving
> them. If people are going to volunteer labor, it's much better to do
> so through self-organized institutions that they control directly, and
> offer a competing alternative to for-profit wage employers as a means
> of obtaining the same services.
>
>
>
beginning of the year, but this is my first post. I am a business
student in Iceland, mainly because of the proverb of "know thy enemy",
but more on that some other time.
I can't help but chime in, that most for-profit organizations still need
to stay competitive. By volunteering, these people are indeed saving the
hospitals some money. However, stating that said money "goes directly to
their profit margin". Does not seem to take into consideration that said
money probably goes straight back out of the profit margin and into
running the operation. This means that a hospital with many volunteers
is more capable of staying competitive, because it can funnel more funds
into equipment, supplies and improved service.
(If they don't, then they're run by incompetent managers.)
In this case, by volunteering at the hospitals, these individuals are
contributing to their community by allowing the hospital to focus on
aforementioned areas, while still not leaving anything behind.
For profit organizations are not necessarily bad, just often misguided.
It is important to remember that practically all corporations want to
keep a good image within the community. It is, simply put, profitable.
I should probably add here that I am unused to the system of having
for-profit hospitals, since all such institutions are run by the
government in the countries I've lived in. Are they owned by
shareholders? Do they pay dividends? Either way, no organization ever
lets money just lie around. It is always reinvested or spent on some
other part of the organization. It just doesn't pay off to stash it up
like a dragon's horde. It's bad business.
So there you go. My two cents in a nutshell: Volunteering for hospitals,
be they for profit or not, is always going to pay off for the community
as a whole.
Birita í Dali
Nick Taylor
> I should probably add here that I am unused to the system of having
> for-profit hospitals, since all such institutions are run by the
> government in the countries I've lived in. Are they owned by
> shareholders? Do they pay dividends? Either way, no organization ever
> lets money just lie around. It is always reinvested or spent on some
> other part of the organization. It just doesn't pay off to stash it up
> like a dragon's horde. It's bad business.
Me neither - UK/NZ
What has happened though (to a degree) with both of these embracers of
free-market-capitalism-as-social-policy countries is that regardless of
the hospitals not being for-profit, the management has still been
engineered to cater to the profit-motive... and find every cost-cutting
measure they possibly can (including spinning the figures)
It's this neo-darwinian economic/organisational philosophy that drives
the scenario where people who care (or who work unpaid) are exploited as
mentioned earlier.
It's a difficult problem though because the entire supply chain that
goes into supplying "stuff" for hospitals (everything from the buildings
to toe bedpans) is driven by these same neo-darwinian economic drives,
so are as exploitative as possible... some of the most egregious
examples of this in the UK being the Public/Private Finance
Initiatives... where the costs of multi-billion projects are inflated by
factors of 10.
So extra layers of management are put in to try to cut costs, and
although this might theoretically produce better value for the
"consumer", it's a guarantee that the societies/cultures on the supplier
side that are locked in compete-to-the-death struggles against each
other aren't going to be terribly happy.
And then of course there are our governments... who are increasingly in
the thrall of corporate lobbyists who are hovering and salivating and
pleading... to get a chance to own an extremely lucrative part of the
human life-support system. Libertarians (or any small-govt advocates)
play directly into their hands (which is why small-govt think-tanks more
often than not have massive corporate funding). Sometimes government
needs to be big.
The first time I heard a (tory) politician talk about the "Health
Industry", I thought "you fucking sleazy creep".
It used to be called a Health Service then - and it was unusual to hear
it called anything else. Hardly anyone calls it that now.
n
Samantha Atkins
On Apr 17, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Nick Taylor wrote:
>
>
>> I should probably add here that I am unused to the system of having
>> for-profit hospitals, since all such institutions are run by the
>> government in the countries I've lived in. Are they owned by
>> shareholders? Do they pay dividends? Either way, no organization ever
>> lets money just lie around. It is always reinvested or spent on some
>> other part of the organization. It just doesn't pay off to stash it
>> up
>> like a dragon's horde. It's bad business.
>
>
> Me neither - UK/NZ
>
> What has happened though (to a degree) with both of these embracers of
> free-market-capitalism-as-social-policy countries is that regardless
> of
> the hospitals not being for-profit, the management has still been
> engineered to cater to the profit-motive... and find every cost-
> cutting
> measure they possibly can (including spinning the figures)
>
> It's this neo-darwinian economic/organisational philosophy that drives
> the scenario where people who care (or who work unpaid) are
> exploited as
> mentioned earlier.
I thought this group was about Open Manufacturing. Yet most of the
volume seem oriented to sophomoric bashing of capitalism (and some
token defense).
>
>
> It's a difficult problem though because the entire supply chain that
> goes into supplying "stuff" for hospitals (everything from the
> buildings
> to toe bedpans) is driven by these same neo-darwinian economic drives,
> so are as exploitative as possible... some of the most egregious
> examples of this in the UK being the Public/Private Finance
> Initiatives... where the costs of multi-billion projects are
> inflated by
> factors of 10.
>
Is neo-darwinian your favorite word? It rather lacks nuance. You
want to see price inflation then look at purely public projects. Look
at US military contracts for instance. Or do you think complete
government run industries from top to bottom would be better. If so
then I advise talking it over with some older Russians.
Wake me up when you talk more about actual open manufacturing systems.
- samantha
Kevin Carson
> I can't help but chime in, that most for-profit organizations still need
> to stay competitive. By volunteering, these people are indeed saving the
> hospitals some money. However, stating that said money "goes directly to
> their profit margin". Does not seem to take into consideration that said
> money probably goes straight back out of the profit margin and into
> running the operation. This means that a hospital with many volunteers
> is more capable of staying competitive, because it can funnel more funds
> into equipment, supplies and improved service.
> (If they don't, then they're run by incompetent managers.)
In every hospital I've seen first hand, as in most large corporations,
management operates by the same MBA playbook: gutting human capital,
stripping assets, and hollowing out long-term productive capability in
order to game their own bonuses.
The average large hospital, in particular, isn't really that
competitive. The insurance market itself is heavily cartelized, as
are most occupational specialties, and wages and the prices of
particular services in a locality tend to follow a price-leader
system. And the cartelization of local healthcare markets is further
promoted by the fact that the large hospitals all share the same
pathological institutional culture, and are managed by
resume-carpetbaggers who went to the same business schools and
carpetbagged from managing one organization after another and picking
up the standard organizational culture of the industry.
So any increase in productivity is generally skimmed off the top. In
December 2007, the management of my hospital cancelled all PTOs (paid
time off hours) ostensibly to stave off bankruptcy, because their
finances were supposedly in such bad shape--and three months later,
they announced they had leased a corporate suite at the local baseball
stadium!
Nick Taylor
> I thought this group was about Open Manufacturing. Yet most of the
> volume seem oriented to sophomoric bashing of capitalism (and some
> token defense).
What's the matter sweetie? Disagree with the politics but can't
articulate why?
I'm not bashing capitalism, I'm bashing free-market fundamentalism as
social policy.
I agree that there is more politics than nuts and bolts (for my tastes)
on this list, but what we're talking about is a set of extremely
(potentially) disruptive technologies in a context where global
laissez-faire capitalism is failing on its feet.
So you're going to get conversations around the societal/organisational
impacts of open-manufacturing.
> Is neo-darwinian your favorite word? It rather lacks nuance. You
> want to see price inflation then look at purely public projects. Look
> at US military contracts for instance.
Speaking of nuance, you seem to have missed what I said...
"It's a difficult problem though because the entire supply chain that
goes into supplying "stuff" for hospitals (everything from the buildings
to toe bedpans) is driven by these same neo-darwinian economic drives,
so are as exploitative as possible."
Want to know why US military contracts are so exploitative? Re-read the
sentence above.
Neo-darwinian just happens to be a reasonably apt description of what's
going on. It's Darwinian because it's "survival of the fittest" as
applied to competing organisations, and it's "neo" because it's
not-quite-the-same-as-real-darwinism as it ignores the toxic effects of
frenetic competition on the society that hosts it.
> If so then I advise talking it over with some older Russians.
Ah the old binary argument of the sophomore capitalist/fundamentalist
with his head still firmly stuck up the arse of the 20th century. "If
you don't like it, why don't you go and live in Russia" - as though that
were the only choice.
If you're resorting to that sort of digg-level argument, you might want
to back off. You're not in the company of sophomores here.
Nick
Paul D. Fernhout
> In every hospital I've seen first hand, as in most large corporations,
> management operates by the same MBA playbook: gutting human capital,
> stripping assets, and hollowing out long-term productive capability in
> order to game their own bonuses.
>
> The average large hospital, in particular, isn't really that
> competitive. The insurance market itself is heavily cartelized, as
> are most occupational specialties, and wages and the prices of
> particular services in a locality tend to follow a price-leader
> system. And the cartelization of local healthcare markets is further
> promoted by the fact that the large hospitals all share the same
> pathological institutional culture, and are managed by
> resume-carpetbaggers who went to the same business schools and
> carpetbagged from managing one organization after another and picking
> up the standard organizational culture of the industry.
Most mainstream economics ignores the degree to which a lot of behavior is
cultural. The USA in particular has a dysfunctionally hyper-competitive
culture at this point, which flows into many aspects of US society. (See
Alfie Kohn's writings.) Few places is it in such a shocking contrast to
stated goals as in health care though (well, schooling is another. :-)
> So any increase in productivity is generally skimmed off the top. In
> December 2007, the management of my hospital cancelled all PTOs (paid
> time off hours) ostensibly to stave off bankruptcy, because their
> finances were supposedly in such bad shape--and three months later,
> they announced they had leased a corporate suite at the local baseball
> stadium!
Just for reference, here is what one (liberal-leaning :-) recent Nobel-prize
winning economist (and a co-author) has to say about the healthcare system
in the USA:
"The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It" By Paul Krugman, Robin Wells
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18802
"""
Over the years since the failure of the Clinton health plan, a great deal
of evidence has accumulated on the relative merits of private and public
health insurance. As far as we have been able to ascertain, all of that
evidence indicates that public insurance of the kind available in several
European countries and others such as Taiwan achieves equal or better
results at much lower cost. This conclusion applies to comparisons within
the United States as well as across countries. ... Unfortunately, the US
political system seems unready to do what is both obvious and humane. ...
But in adding a drug benefit to Medicare, the Bush administration and its
allies in Congress were driven both by a desire to appease the insurance and
pharmaceutical lobbies and by an ideology that insists on the superiority of
the private sector even when the public sector has demonstrably lower costs.
...
In a classic 1984 book, Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care,
Henry Aaron and William Schwartz studied the medical choices made by the
British system, which has long operated under tight budget limits that force
it to make hard choices in a way that US medical care does not. Can We Say
No? is an update of that work. It's a valuable survey of the real medical
issues involved in British rationing, and gives a taste of the dilemmas the
US system will eventually face.
The operative word, however, is "eventually." Reading Can We Say No?, one
might come away with the impression that the problem of how to ration care
is the central issue in current health care policy. This impression is
reinforced by Aaron and his co-authors' decision to compare the US system
only with that of Britain, which spends far less on health care than other
advanced countries, and correspondingly is forced to do a lot of rationing.
A comparison with, say, France, which spends far less than the United States
but considerably more than Britain, would give a very different impression:
in many respects France consumes more, not less, health care than the United
States, but it can do so at lower cost because our system is so inefficient.
The result of Aaron et al.'s single-minded focus on the problem of
rationing is a somewhat skewed perspective on current policy issues. Most
notably, they argue that the reason we need universal health coverage is
that a universal system can ration care in a way that private insurance
can't. This seems to miss the two main immediate arguments for universal
care—that it would cover those now uninsured, and that it would be cheaper
than our current system. A national health care system will also be better
at rationing when the time comes, but that hardly seems like the prime
argument for adopting such a system today.
Our Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt, a leading economic expert on health
care, put it this way: our focus right now should be on eliminating the
gross inefficiencies we know exist in the US health care system. If we do
that, we will be able to cover the uninsured while spending less than we do
now. Only then should we address the issue of what not to do; that's
tomorrow's issue, not today's. ...
So what will really happen to American health care? Many people in this
field believe that in the end America will end up with national health
insurance, and perhaps with a lot of direct government provision of health
care, simply because nothing else works. But things may have to get much
worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest
groups and free-market ideology.
"""
Again, that's not me talking. That's a guy who just won a Nobel prize in
economics, even if we both have the same first name. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
Or, to restate that in other terms, by moving beyond selfish ideology and
improving how health care is manufactured in the USA, rationing will be less
of an issue. :-)
Note that healthcare is currently in the USA about 15% of the monetary
economy, and is projected to rise to 30% to 50% over the next few decades.
So, essentially, if that trend held (I feel others will overwhelm it :-),
for manufacturing change to be really significant, it needs to effect how
health care is manufactured. :-) I feel it is absurd, for example, that the
entire US medical records system is not based on some open source software
with open record formats (both with strong privacy protections and strong
data-mining support to do evidence-based medicine). So, the healthcare
system is a very interesting test case from an openness and a common good
perspective.
And of course, there are some very cheap approaches to the health problems
of affluence (like fasting or eating lower on the food chain) which are not
promoted to the degree they could be, in part because they are so cheap as
to interfere with the profit-motive of many. So, I feel that the fundamental
problems in health care long-term are interwoven with other aspects of our
society and will not be entirely resolved separately. For another example,
it's been suggested that half or more cancers relate to environmental
factors whether toxins from proprietary manufacturing processes or
problematical behaviors like smoking. But why should cancer be an external
cost of manufacturing? And many behaviors like smoking or other addictions
are often related to managing the stress of living in a hypercompetitive
economy with not much of a safety net. So, these issues are all tangled
together. But in a life-and-death setting like a hospital, they may come
into focus more easily.
To see the world in a grain of sand... Or one hospital's budget. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
>
>> I thought this group was about Open Manufacturing. Yet most of the
>> volume seem oriented to sophomoric bashing of capitalism (and some
>> token defense).
>
> What's the matter sweetie? Disagree with the politics but can't
> articulate why?
>
> I'm not bashing capitalism, I'm bashing free-market fundamentalism as
> social policy.
>
> I agree that there is more politics than nuts and bolts (for my tastes)
> on this list, but what we're talking about is a set of extremely
> (potentially) disruptive technologies in a context where global
> laissez-faire capitalism is failing on its feet.
>
> So you're going to get conversations around the societal/organisational
> impacts of open-manufacturing.
Nick-
A term like "sweetie" could be seen as a personal attack. We're going to
make more progress here avoiding terms like that. That said, I generally
agree with your points.
I feel in our culture there has developed a big disconnect between the
promise of technology and the social structures and assumptions we are using
along with it.
However, the fact is most people in the USA would probably agree with
Samantha, even with the economy crashing. Putting together a catchy and
persuasive case for alternatives that can get beyond decades of various
groups promoting deregulation and the free market is hard, even with
trillions of dollars going to bailouts recently. To paraphrase Stalin,
wasting one thousand dollars is a tragedy, wasting ten trillion dollars is a
statistic.
The market ideology is woven throughout the fabric of the entire society
that moving green bits of paper around with numbers on them is the way to
solve problems, and the last twenty years has seen an extreme amount of
rhetoric that government is the problem rather than the solution. So, rather
than try to make government accountable or less corrupt, some people try to
dismantle it. Many conservatives suggest that government (especially in the
USA) is not reformable (although they trust it with an army?), but in any
case, somehow we need to move beyond corrupt government.
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
One thing we might want to focus on - to keep this thing moving - is
on _what we can do_ which, by and large, is build shit that people
need, and do research into real solutions.
http://collapsonomics.org enjoy.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 3533 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Nick Taylor
> A term like "sweetie" could be seen as a personal attack.
It was a personal attack.
It was a direct diametric response to "sophomoric" - sorry, I will
always return an insult, it's in my blood. I'm from NZ - which means I'm
almost an Australian.
> The market ideology is woven throughout the fabric of the entire society
> that moving green bits of paper around with numbers on them is the way to
> solve problems, and the last twenty years has seen an extreme amount of
> rhetoric that government is the problem rather than the solution. So, rather
> than try to make government accountable or less corrupt, some people try to
> dismantle it. Many conservatives suggest that government (especially in the
> USA) is not reformable (although they trust it with an army?), but in any
> case, somehow we need to move beyond corrupt government.
The small government meme has been carefully crafted and propagated by a
massive propaganda machine which was created off the back of this:
http://mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=21
back in the 70s. There's been this nation-wide unsolicited experiment in
social engineering - and really people should be incredibly angry, but
instead, they're merely conservative.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml
(back to hospital organisation and the movement of bits of green paper)...
... this is why I said the hospital situation was "difficult" rather
than flat wrong - because the only alternatives I can think of would
require a radical shift in the whole culture - a move away from what is
currently so ingrained as to be considered "common sense", ie: the
linear demands of profit/loss. A reassessment of the type of
"efficiency" that reduces human beings (who love to sit in the sun, and
play and chatter to each other) to mere components. "Resource" they used
to call us.
Hospitals have what appears to be a hierarchical bureaucracy trying to
cater to very fluid demand. (something that networks (rather than
hierarchies) are specifically designed to be better at adjusting to)
I'm particularly interested in hospitals with regards
localised-manufacturing - because they go through a phenomenal
amount/variety of physical consumables - and as I've said elsewhere...
what they really need is to be able to "print" rooms... so an entire
room becomes a consumable... and the hospital's size can
contract/increase according to demand. They've actually started to
deploy Hangover Hotels up in Newcastle UK... for people who overdo it on
Friday / Saturday night.
(I mean have you *seen* a British hospital waiting room on a Friday /
Saturday night? Holy Crap (I'm British as well. I was the one who
invented binge-drinking))
But that's consumables - and although the drive of "game-theory" (which
IMHO belongs in the same dustbin as eugenics) would treat staff as
consumables, they're not, and systems where they treated as such tend to
calcify under the weight of the extra layers of bean-counters that are
required.
This is a major problem with the British system. They've bought into
"turning everything into a market" big-time.
When I sit there full of tubes and morphine and oxygen masks and things
and watch all these staff rushing around etc - it seems like what needs
to happen is that hospitals need to employ twice as many people... but
have them spending 1/2 their time doing jobs that are not directly
related to their part in the hospital-machine. EG: Research, or
gardening, or new-tool design, or just sitting there reading a book or
talking to their kids etc etc. There needs to be redundancy built into
the system to cope with fluctuations of demand... but the redundancy
need not be... how you say? Unprofitable... so a transition from a
system built around the needs of money/scarcity to one built around the
needs of people might not be too strenuous.
In an ideal world, money has no place in health-care. Period. It's an
assiduously-persistent corrupting influence.
Nick
Joseph Jackson
thoughts on why things are so broken even in the case of Medical
Imaging where we would expect something like Moore's law to apply. I
don't think an "Open CT Scan/MRI" machine would help much as the cost
of the hardware seems totally unrelated to what they charge. I'll
spare you the details of my ongoing medical saga but the summary is
that I'm 2 yrs into dealing with a chronic problem from an injury and
have been seeing how broken the US system is firsthand. I have
insurance but they keep excluding tests as not under the plan (finally
got a May 2008 claim settled after writing multiple appeal letters).
It would be cheaper to fly to India and pay cash. In 08 I had a CAT
scan billed at 4K, with $600 for a barium smoothie. I found this
great post but I still can't believe these comparisons:
http://www.catscanman.net/blog/2007/10/why-does-a-ct-scan-cost-so-much-in-the-usa/
"What prompted this post was a visit to The Blog That Ate Manhattan
late last night and this post in particular.
TBTAM writes…
A young college student presents to the ER with abdominal pain.
She gets a CT scan. The CT scan shows an ovarian cyst. Dad, who is an
MD, gets the bill for over $8,000, most of which is for the CT. Dad
goes on CBS says his daughter should have had an ultrasound because it
was cheaper. He says it is because the ER docs were practicing
defensive medicine.
What piqued my curiosity was the sentence “Dad, who is an MD, gets the
bill for over $8,000, most of which is for the CT. ”
That cannot be right, I thought. Maybe TBTAM made a mistake in the
numbers. So I checked the CBS news article that she got the story from
and had linked to.
Here is the pertinent extract from the news article (emphases are mine)
…
It started as a simple stomach ache, but Alexandra Varipapa, a
sophomore at the University of Richmond, decided to go to the
emergency room. There, doctors ordered a full CT scan, a radiation
imaging test, which found a harmless ovarian cyst. She never
questioned the CT scan, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports.
But her father did - when he got the $8,500 bill, $6,500 of which
was that CT scan. “I was pretty flabbergasted,” said Robert Varipapa,
himself a physician. Varipapa says his daughter’s pain could have been
diagnosed far more easily and cheaply with a $1,400 ultrasound. “A
history, a pelvic examination and probably an ultrasound,” he said.
And he would have started with the ultrasound.
$6,500 for an abdominal CT scan!!!
Dr. Varipapa had a right to be flabbergasted. After all, he footed the
bill.
I am speechless.
Well, almost.
Once I give you the reasons, I am sure most of you will be dumbfounded
too.
They probably did a plain CT scan of the whole Abdomen on a multislice
CT scanner (aka multidetector row CT / MDCT) as that is the usual
emergency protocol for acute abdominal pain. This is usually adequate
to diagnose appendicitis and to rule out the usual mimics of
appendicitis (here is a good online article with lots of pictures).
A complete contrast CT scan (with oral or rectal contrast and
intravenous contrast) would give more information, but this is
unlikely to be done in an emergency.
A basic MDCT scanner (6 or 8 detector rows) costs about 2 to 2.5 crore
rupees here in India (INR 20 to 25 million = US $ 500,000 to 630,000).
I learnt from a source in the industry that the cost of the scanner is
about 40% subsidized for the Indian market (compared to its cost in
the North American & European markets). So the same basic multislice
CT scanner would cost about $ 900,000 in the US.
We have a basic four-slice MDCT scanner in our hospital. A patient
would be charged Rs. 3500 ($ 90, yes ninety dollars) for a plain CT
scan or Rs. 4500 ($ 115) for a contrast CT scan of the whole abdomen.
Ours is a small city. The charges are likely to be as high as Rs. 8000
or Rs. 9000 ($ 200 to 230) in the bigger metros like Chennai, Mumbai
or Delhi.
An ultrasound scan of the whole abdomen is usually done by the
radiologist (me) or another doctor who has a good deal of experience
in ultrasonography. We do not have sonography technicians here in
India. We have a fairly decent basic colour Doppler scanner which is
more than sufficient for routine work. An abdomen scan at my
department costs Rs. 350 (about $ 9 - yes nine dollars). We most often
do not charge anything extra for an abdomen scan that goes on to
become a transvaginal scan - as it would in case it turns out to be
something like an ovarian cyst. So the lady gets two scans for the
price of one.
The costs quoted in the CBS news article are ginormous. It reminds of
the $456 Billion Meme that I did a few months ago.
Here’s a quick break-up…..
With the $ 6500 that was charged for one CT abdomen; I could do a
contrast CT of the abdomen for fifty-six patients or a plain CT scan
of the abdomen for seventy-three patients here in my radiology
department in Salem.
With the $ 1400 that would have been charged for an ultrasound scan of
the abdomen (if it had been done); I could do ultrasound scans of the
abdomen for one hundred and fifty seven patients in my department.
Or think of it this way…
The CT scan is worth as much as six MacBooks or twenty iPod Touchs.
Steve Jobs would probably have a fit if he saw this.
I do not understand the numbers. We pay just 40% less than the
Americans for the same equipment. But we charge peanuts compared to
their charges.
The argument that the quality of work is better in the US to justify
the high costs would not apply to radiology. The technology and
knowledge gap between radiology-as-practiced in the US and radiology-
as-practiced in India isn’t all that wide.
I cannot imagine how these kind of costs can be justified.
Coming back to TBTAM’s post, there were some interesting comments. I
agree completely with this one by geez…
I’m actually shocked, not living in the USA, that a ultra-sound in
a hospital costs 1400$. Even given the US machine you can get for
100K, and assuming you use it on one patient a day (surely I’ve given
us at least an 100x factor here), surely you’re paying the doctor or
her boss at least 500$ too much for these 15 minutes. Am I missing
something?"
The comments under the post are worth reading--one horror story after
another of patients being billed 6-8K for scans and other tests that
were probably not necessary. Here is one I found interesting:
"
The bottom line: US health care is privatized and insurance companies
are for-profit organizations, including those that are classified by
the IRS as NPO’s. (non-profit).
The administrative cost of health care in the US is about 40% of the
billed amount.
Most health care insurance providers bill an amount that is roughly
double of what they expect to actually get paid.
The biggest secret in health care billing is that when you get billed
4,000 for some procedure and pay only 2.000 you may just get away with
it. you have to keep proving somehow that you cant afford to pay it
all.
if Hillary Clinton’s single-payer system would actually be
implemented, 30% of those 40% of admin. costs would evaporate. it
would also make the business of health care provision essentially
unprofitable. This is why it will never go through congress no matter
who is president.
I expect a dramatic shift in how US health care is maanged starting in
2015-2020 due to the extremely high percentage of US population in
retirement age at that time. the cost-structure will spiral completely
out of control, and serious changes will have to occur.
The end effect will be that US doctors will be paid substantially less
than they are now, which will attract less talent into the
universities, less money spent in research, and an increase in over-
the-counter drug use in lieu of professinoal treatment.
The winners are pharmaceutical companies with existing patents. The
losers are health insurance companies, hospitals, and ultimately the
sick patients."
I don't agree with this pessimistic conclusion because I think this
inevitable collapse is what can finally allow us to competitively
provision services close to the actual cost. I think Open
Manufacturing could have a role to play in lowering the cost of
imaging tech, but it seems the main barriers are systemic.
On Apr 18, 4:47 pm, Vinay Gupta <hexay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing we might want to focus on - to keep this thing moving - is
> on _what we can do_ which, by and large, is build shit that people
> need, and do research into real solutions.
>
> http://collapsonomics.orgenjoy.
>
> Vinay
>
> --
> Vinay Gupta
> Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
>
>
> http://hexayurt.com- free/open next generation human shelteringhttp://hexayurt.com/plan- the whole systems, big picture vision
> Twitter: @hexayurthttp://twitter.com/hexayurt
> UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 3533 / USA VOIP(+1) 775-743-1851
Nick Taylor
> On the topic of medical expenses, I am interested to hear people's
> thoughts on why things are so broken even in the case of Medical
> Imaging where we would expect something like Moore's law to apply. I
> don't think an "Open CT Scan/MRI" machine would help much as the cost
> of the hardware seems totally unrelated to what they charge. I'll
> spare you the details of my ongoing medical saga but the summary is
> that I'm 2 yrs into dealing with a chronic problem from an injury and
> have been seeing how broken the US system is firsthand. I have
> insurance but they keep excluding tests as not under the plan (finally
> got a May 2008 claim settled after writing multiple appeal letters).
> It would be cheaper to fly to India and pay cash. In 08 I had a CAT
> scan billed at 4K, with $600 for a barium smoothie. I found this
> great post but I still can't believe these comparisons:
> http://www.catscanman.net/blog/2007/10/why-does-a-ct-scan-cost-so-much-in-the-usa/
Holy crap. I had one of those a couple of weeks back and it cost me
precisely zero... just took it for granted that it was a standard part
of whatever it was that they were doing, and grumbled a bit at having to
drink all that barium.
You need to get something sorted out - what's happening isn't fair.
Nick
Vinay Gupta
Insurance companies are so able to pay that hospitals soak them, and
are in turn soaked by medical manufactures.
You have to either socialize it, or totally deregulate it. The half-
way position is simply an excuse for regulatory capture and attendant
looting.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 3533 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Nick Taylor
> Insurance companies are so able to pay that hospitals soak them, and
> are in turn soaked by medical manufactures.
>
> You have to either socialize it, or totally deregulate it. The half-
> way position is simply an excuse for regulatory capture and attendant
> looting.
Do you have any examples of total deregulation working anywhere else?
n
Vinay Gupta
Software.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://guptaoption.com/map - social project connection map
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt
Twitter: @hexayurt http://twitter.com/hexayurt
UK Cell : +44 (0) 0795 425 3533 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Kevin Carson
Total deregulation has never been tried, for the same reason that we
haven't had a society since the rise of the state in which the state
wasn't the enforcement arm of a ruling class. "Regulation" (in the
sense of enforcing privileges based on artificial scarcity) is what
states do.
What we've actually seen is *selective* deregulation, based on what
the dominant capitalist firms in the industry in question regard as
the optimal mix of regulation and market forces. A classic example is
so-called "free trade," which is if anything is more protectionist
than the Smoot-Hawley regime. It just defines "intellectual property"
as a normal property right, rather than as the government
protectionism it is. What the neoliberals call "free markets" is like
one of those old "automatic" chess-playing machines that had a dwarf
on the inside pulling levers.
The neoliberal misappropriation of "free market" rhetoric is a bit
like Stalin misappropriating the rhetoric of classical socialism, in
the sense of total worker control of an economy.
Nick Taylor
>
Well that's certainly the shortest and most thought-provoking reply that
I've had to that question.
Do you think that meritocratic feudalism is an optimal social structure
then?
Nick Taylor
> Total deregulation has never been tried, for the same reason that we
> haven't had a society since the rise of the state in which the state
> wasn't the enforcement arm of a ruling class. "Regulation" (in the
> sense of enforcing privileges based on artificial scarcity) is what
> states do.
The only instance that I can think of is around 36 minutes into this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8396912652575372609&hl=en
whether that's an accurate reflection of what went on, I couldn't say.
I have a friend from Estonia who lived under soviet rule... the insanity
of that system went so far beyond simple "state ownership of industry"
that as an argument against state ownership, it's actually a bit misleading.
Herbert Snorrason
Hash: SHA1
Kevin Carson wrote:
> The neoliberal misappropriation of "free market" rhetoric is a bit
> like Stalin misappropriating the rhetoric of classical socialism, in
> the sense of total worker control of an economy.
Noam Chomsky once commented that the Soviet Union's claim of being
socialist was accepted because it was a lie that suited the elites of
both the USSR and the western powers; the soviets could say "but we
embody the beauty of socialism" while elites in the west could point
there and say "look what socialism does to you".
It's a very good point, but it misses exactly what you're getting at
here. It also cuts the other way: The western 'democracies' also get
away with their rhetoric because it served both parties. Western elites
make eloquent references to Enlightenment ideals and all that; their
opponents, soviet and loony left alike, instead point at the copious
horrors and say "look what the free market/capitalism/liberalism does to
you!"
The utility of these lies is even greater than it looks at first, too.
It's not only that they can be used to justify the status quo, but they
also direct dissident and protest activity into predictable and easily
countered channels. And even when confronted with an opponent who
doesn't fit that model … well, who cares? Just use the standard
dismissal and most people won't ever bother to look. "Why don't you just
move to Russia?"
Oh, and as for talking to older Russians: How old, exactly? Because my
(russian) teachers seem to have rather fond memories of the Soviet
period. Mikhail Gorbachyov is disliked in Russia, because he's blamed
for the disintegration of the union. Maybe the dissidents are the only
trustworthy Russians? But then, shouldn't I also listen to the western
dissidents?
With greetings,
Herbert Snorrason
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Paul D. Fernhout
As someone who has spent a lot of time writing software, I would like to
chime in on that. :-)
There are at least four broad classes of software (maybe more :-):
* Embedded software that runs things like heart pacemakers and car brakes
and the space shuttle and airplanes.
* Custom software that implements business models (most of the $1 trillion
in annual IT spending is here).
* Online services software (like Google groups).
* Desktop software you buy in a store or online (or get for free).
Embedded software tends to be *indirectly* highly regulated by the nature of
the device. Maybe software in toys gets little regulation or other
oversight, but software running heart pacemakers or nuclear power plants get
a lot. Product liability regulations and laws affect a lot of this too.
Custom software running big companies also has regulation that flows through
from the business related issues. For example, over a decade ago, I worked
on software for an insurance company that asked questions related to medical
history (:-(), and all the content had to be approved by state regulators.
The software had to show *exactly* what was approved in exactly the
situation it was approved (talking to a person residing in a specific state).
Online service sites are also effected by legal regulation of social
behavior and content. They also have complex social dynamics that govern
their development.
Desktop software has little regulation, it's true. It is the most freeform
in possibilities. The observation probably applies best in that category,
and to a lesser extent to online service software.
But even there, Microsoft's use of illegal trade practices (building on top
of IBM's previous antitrust actions) to create a desktop monopoly has hurt
people in a lot of ways. Someone once did an estimate of the time people
spent staring at "blue screen of death" when Microsoft software crashed and
rebooted and estimated that as costing thousands of human life-years per
year of wasted time. So much time has been lost in the past to dealing with
all sorts of nonsense. For example, for a few pennies more in resistors,
IBM's original PC design could have had autoconfiguring hardware slots which
would have saved a vast amount of people's time troubleshooting IRQ issues.
And of course, copyrights and patents that underly how much of software has
developed (or not) are forms of regulation. Personally, I feel the free
software and content world might benefit immensely from a law that somehow
just states all the major free software licenses of all versions are
compatible with each other. :-) Yes, I know the GPL would be hurt by this,
becoming like the LGPL, but overall I feel everyone would benefit immensely
as all free software could be intermingled with less time costs spent
dealing with licensing issues.
The fact seems to be that even as hardware gets cheaper, actually writing
new software remains pretty expensive. Part of that is a law of diminishing
returns from all the time one needs to spend to stay on top of a complex
software landscape and deal with the vast proliferation of "standards".
Anyway, presumably what was meant was that distributed software on the
desktop has gotten cheap or free (like GNU/Linux), but the reality is only
some software has gotten cheap or free, and even that still has other costs
associated with it (both as in "free like a puppy" software that takes a lot
of time to understand and also the time spent dealing with social processes
around free software).
--Paul Fernhout
Kevin Carson
> Noam Chomsky once commented that the Soviet Union's claim of being
> socialist was accepted because it was a lie that suited the elites of
> both the USSR and the western powers; the soviets could say "but we
> embody the beauty of socialism" while elites in the west could point
> there and say "look what socialism does to you".
>
> It's a very good point, but it misses exactly what you're getting at
> here. It also cuts the other way: The western 'democracies' also get
> away with their rhetoric because it served both parties.
Yes! And the misappropriation of "free markets" also benefits both
sides in American politics. There's a common, mirror-image interest
involved: the conservatives can claim that big business got that way
through superior virtue in a "free market," and the liberals can claim
that big business will inevitably emerge from a free market unless
people like them are empowered to prevent it happening.
> Oh, and as for talking to older Russians: How old, exactly? Because my
> (russian) teachers seem to have rather fond memories of the Soviet
> period. Mikhail Gorbachyov is disliked in Russia, because he's blamed
> for the disintegration of the union. Maybe the dissidents are the only
> trustworthy Russians? But then, shouldn't I also listen to the western
> dissidents?
If anything, Gorbachev might have taken the Soviet Union on a path
toward more genuine free market reform. A central part of his
strategy was to privatize the economy by transforming state industry
into self-managed worker cooperatives, and reorganize state services
as consumer cooperatives. Yeltsin, on the other hand, "privatized"
the economy by selling it off in a massive insider deal to corporate
looters and handing the country over to a kleptocracy.
Smári McCarthy
Hash: SHA1
in effect are, in order of importance:
1. Market lock-ins
2. File format lock-ins
3. Protocol lock-ins
4. Knowledge-transfer monopolies
5. Software patents
People may disagree on this ordering, but software patents, for example,
while definitely being the most contentious, don't exist in Yurop and
are overturned fairly liberally in Merry-Ka.
Knowledge-transfer monopolies are a bitch, it's essentially keeping
alternative software out of schools, making sure that the market
lock-ins are supported by an ignorant user base.
- Smári
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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LR4AnidbtBXV6MGp7Icctc/MOM9QMMj5
=FahH
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Paul D. Fernhout
>> Oh, and as for talking to older Russians: How old, exactly? Because my
>> (russian) teachers seem to have rather fond memories of the Soviet
>> period. Mikhail Gorbachyov is disliked in Russia, because he's blamed
>> for the disintegration of the union. Maybe the dissidents are the only
>> trustworthy Russians? But then, shouldn't I also listen to the western
>> dissidents?
>
> If anything, Gorbachev might have taken the Soviet Union on a path
> toward more genuine free market reform. A central part of his
> strategy was to privatize the economy by transforming state industry
> into self-managed worker cooperatives, and reorganize state services
> as consumer cooperatives. Yeltsin, on the other hand, "privatized"
> the economy by selling it off in a massive insider deal to corporate
> looters and handing the country over to a kleptocracy.
Around the time of Gorbachev and Perestroika and after, I had a housemate
who was doing a PhD in economics at Princeton on the subject of how best to
privatize the USSR. In general, conservative US economics were advising the
Soviets on things like to privatize everything and give stock to the people
(who did not know what to do with it, never seeing such things before, and
generally sold it for immediate cash for survival). Ideas like creating the
equivalent of an Alaska Permanent Fund (state ownership of the stock with
regular dividends to the people as a guaranteed basic income) probably never
came up. So, maybe some of the blame for Russia's current state also rests
with US capitalists and their apologists? (That grad student was a really
nice guy, and I feel some of the stuff going on in that department
conflicted with his personal beliefs and values.)
What amazed me most about Perestroika was, having grown up attending US
schools being told how virtuous the USA was and how evil the USSR was, was,
wondering why did the US not help with that in a serious way? The USA can
spend (what is it now, ten trillion dollars?) on a bank bailout in the USA,
but why could we not provide a trillion dollars in aid (even loans) to the
USSR to help with their restructuring as a free-er society and one less
threatening to the USA. But I saw newspaper article after newspaper article
about discussion in the US Congress over whether to loan like a billion
dollars or some other relatively small amount compared to helping turn and
adversary into a friend. In some ways, watching that happen was when I
really started to suspect much of that political rhetoric of our society was
fraudulent and misguided. The same thing has happened in Afghanistan and
Iraq; it would have been far cheaper in the long run to just show up those
places with lots of gifts than to launch wars and maintain a huge military
presence that will stretch forever and just harms the US image abroad. It's
in part that scarcity mythology at work.
--Paul Fernhout