On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Karl Robillard <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't see how the alternative currency experiments like Bitcoin do anything to help us move to a more egalitarian, steady-state economy.
An economist will tell you that "price is information", but I'm not sure how they justify that. An ounce of crack, a few hours of music lessons, a lawn mower, or a couple hours of labor might all be $100. None of these can remotely be considered the same, but yet the dollar value is identical. Any mechanism which equates these is an absurd abstraction which eliminates a great deal of useful information. This dearth of relational data is a fundamental feature of money which turns the economy into a valuation game. Over time, the wealth gap between those who game the system well and those that don't becomes so great that a jubilee or a revolution is needed.
Karl, this indeed is a great criticism. I think that "price" is one systemic way to work in human systems. But it should not be applied to everything. Janine Beynus has some useful thoughts about the pace of systems in her book "Biomimicry". She talks about how comparatively more homogeneous and fast growing natural ecologies respond after a forest fire, then over time "stocks and flows" in the system diversify, and so do species. We need a diversification in how we deal with wealth in our societies. We need systems that afford sharing, at least.
I see open source production and modern information technology as powerful tools which allow us to more fully value things. They are important because they help make money (just a primitive form of information technology, IMO) obsolete. I just don't understand why people want to continue to treat the economy as a game.
-Karl
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