[P2P-F] Falling transaction costs

Mon Oct 24 04:15:19 CEST 2011

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-cost.html

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 <michel at p2pfoundation.net>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 <krobillard at san.rr.com>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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>
>
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