People may be interested in the "conventional economic theory" about transaction costs. I've done a bit of work on this in response to reviewer comments on a paper I wrote. The reviewer suggested that I should contextualize my analysis (of working time and productivity) as to how it related to mainstream theory. This struck me as somewhat odd because I am dealing with what I have already identified as a gaping hole in conventional theory. Be that as it may, I traced the broken threads of mainstream theory back to where they were cut and I think the result is a blistering, albeit calmly presented, indictment of the mainstream. http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/p/problem-with-problem-of-social-cos... Essentially, mainstream economic models are constructed on the premise that things like transaction costs, overhead costs, external economies and social costs are "incidentals" that can be assumed away as a simplification and then added back into the equation at a later stage in the analysis. On the contrary, these things are central to the economic processes of production and exchange in a market economy. Furthermore, this centrality was well known to pioneers of neoclassical economic analysis and was a keystone of their methodology. On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>wrote:
what I find interesting about it is that it gives an objective grounding to the trend towards distributed ownership.
While I'm not opposed to collective pr*operty and obviously not to the commons, I think that distributed individual property of productive forces will be an important part of a future social order, as it extends the contributory logic of p2p to the physical world.*
That an individual can freely constitute collective capital by aggregating and disaggregating his own 'citizen share' of the productive forces has everything to do with peer production and the commons, since it opens the possibility of fr*eely creating 'common stock' comm**ons.
I h*ave no knowledge of current possibilities of having access to productive forces for free ? * Michel *
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Karl Robillard <[email protected]>wrote:
Michel,
Your blog posting of Matt Cropp's ideas about the fall in transaction costs states in bold:
"THIS IS A MOST IMPORTANT ARGUMENT AND CRUCIAL ASPECT OF THE ‘P2P Revolution’!!"
Why do you think it's so important? Currency systems are about tracking ownership and subjective value perception rather than providing open access and accurately tracking production inputs and outputs. It seems to me it has almost nothing to do with open source, the commons, or peer production.
Why would anyone want to "micro-own" parts of something when they could get access to the whole for free? Matt closes by saying that technology "could be paving the way towards the age of the co-operative". This is history already - there is no "could be" about it.
-Karl
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