[P2P-F] Falling transaction costs

Mon Oct 24 16:47:51 CEST 2011

Even if we had distributed ownership, I think that it will go back into an
unequal distribution. That is a much better question, the tendency question.

If we allow only consumers to own the means of production, then it seems to
me that inequality will be created in the form of loans to create those
means of production.

The only freedom that I give each participant is that of trading their own
work with the work of others.

 At first, each persons wealth will gain goods based on his skills and how
much his product is needed. Due to small differences in skill or demand, a
small amount of excess wealth will be in the hands of few.

Imagine now that consumers want a specific product and that a specific means
of production would cut the costs significantly. They would prefer to make
the loan than pay the costs of the old means of production.

It seems to me that this will create unbounded inequalities, where old
'dead' work will be exchanged with more amounts of future work. The skills
of the worker or the demand of his work will not be as important as his
previous accumulated work which he has exchanded with future work that
others need. That will create a class of people that will not need to work.

We need to find a way to bound those inequalities, but that would ultimately
be against the basic liberty of trading your own labor.

If anyone has found a way i would be happy to hear it. (if someone proposes
a loan in money without interest, I would be happy if he transformed this
amount of money into future  work as the same amount of money represent
different things in the future)

One idea is to disallow  contracts of work or the means of production to be
inherited. That would limit the time interval for inequalites to expand to
at most 100 years.

(Please excuse the fact that I prefer to think in commodites or contracts of
work rather than money)

2011/10/24 Sandwichman <lumpoflabor at gmail.com>

> 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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>>> http://www.p2pfoundation.net
>>> https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Sandwichman
>
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-- 

Sincerely yours,

     Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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