Hi Kevin, I wonder if you'd have some time to explore anagorism, a non-market approach the passage also quotes a science-fiction about distributing labor, see Anagorism From P2P Foundation Jump to: navigation <http://p2pfoundation.net/Anagorism#mw-head>, search<http://p2pfoundation.net/Anagorism#p-search> = Anagorism is the notion that the exchange paradigm can be overcome; that cooperation can supplant competition. [1]<https://anagory.wordpress.com/about/> [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Anagorism?title=Anagorism&action=edit§ion=1> ] Discussion [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Anagorism?title=Anagorism&action=edit§ion=2> ] Anagorism and Labor/Employment "Anagorism, of course, seeks an alternative to property and markets, not just to employers and employees. How to implement an alternative to market employment? One tool I envision is One Big Database for matching people to “jobs.” One science fiction implementation is “Divab” in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed. They key element to such a scheme, as I see it, is transparency. The most odious burden the status quo labor market places on me is the necessity of networking, or maintaining the type of social contacts to know where at least some of the “unadvertised” openings are. The statist approach, of course, would be to require public posting of all vacancies. A dual power approach might start with the approach of acknowledging that for now, information about available jobs is insider information, but instead of seeking to become an insider through networking, seek to expose the information through crowdsourcing. If One Big Database can’t be created, at least a sort of distributed database should be possible; hopefully indexing a larger fraction of the labor market than proprietary engines such as monster.com, which makes people jump through countless hoops of saying “no, thank you” to for-profit “universities” in exchange for access to mostly low-value information. I’m not sure what might be the ultimate goal of anagorism when it comes to matters of employment or alternatives to it. Sufficiently cheap technologies of automated manufacturing might mean total economic self-sufficiency for each individual, without the interdependence which necessitates push-and-shove venues such as trading in the market economy. High-tech modification of the humyn form might result in people getting by with physical inputs small enough to allow being self-supporting even on Mechanical Turk wages. Perhaps we will settle for a soft anagorism in which the market still operates, but more humanely, perhaps through extreme transparency, or better yet, partial satisfaction of needs through non-market activity." ( https://anagory.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/is-100-self-employment-either-reali...) -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens