[P2P-F] Fwd: Post Monetary Economics on Quora

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 3:33 PM
Subject: Post Monetary Economics on Quora
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com


http://www.quora.com/Post-Monetary-Economics


Flemming Funch <http://www.quora.com/Flemming-Funch>, Futurist
*7* votes by Sean Owczarek <http://www.quora.com/Sean-Owczarek>, Dan
Loewenherz <http://www.quora.com/Dan-Loewenherz>, Curtis
Faith<http://www.quora.com/Curtis-Faith>
, (more<http://www.quora.com/Post-Monetary-Economics/How-could-and-should-a-resource-based-economy-be-implemented#>
)
 Surprisingly, the best way of implementing a resource-based economy might
well be a truly free market.

First, notice that you'd be hard pressed to find any free market on this
planet at this time. You might be used to the double-speak that equates free
markets with capitalism, but the truth is really quite the opposite.
Capitalism involves a monopoly on money creation in the hands of banks. The
way of doing really well in capitalism, if one isn't the bank itself, is to
maneuver oneself into a monopoly position in some other field, where people
are more or less forced to pay whatever one asks, because there's no
competition. Often this is because one has bribed politicians to secure
one's position, or because one has "intellectual property," or because one's
multi-national corporation can operate outside the law of most
jurisdictions, but still act as a legal "person" within them. This all has
nothing to do with free markets.

The ideal in free market economics is that perfectly informed participants
will make perfect decisions about value. When something is valuable, there's
more incentive to produce more of it, because one will be rewarded for doing
so. When something is not found valuable, production of it would decrease.
The ideal vision that many economists hold is that there's a collective
intelligence that emerges from the informed value decisions of many
individuals, even if those decisions are made in a "selfish" way. One might
choose an activity based simply on it increasing in perceived value, and one
therefore being likely to be well rewarded. If the value was correctly
determined, it doesn't matter. It will contribute to a self-adjusting
mechanism that is good for the whole. There's an "invisible hand" which
optimizes everything. The thing is, this isn't crazy at all. Ironically,
this vision is as much a socialist utopia as it is a libertarian one.

Centralized planning of vast resources has traditionally worked badly.
That's what they did in the Soviet Union. The result was that everybody has
a place to live and a job, but it was only barely above poverty level, and
there was only a few hours of work to do per day, because nobody really
cared, and personal initiative and motivation had been taken totally out of
the equation (where they really should be key ingredients).
*
What is needed is a self-organizing bottom-up network of very well-informed,
free individuals working together to solve the problems at hand. *

Each individual is the closest to make judgments about what they find
important and valuable in their local area. They can see what needs to be
done, and go work on it. They can see what is missing, and look for where
that might be found. *If everybody indeed is very well-informed, they will
(of course) choose to work on the most important things there are to work
on, which they're capable of and interested in doing.* And they will (of
course) acquire the very best products, the very best methods, and the very
best partners. If some product is crappy or unnecessarily expensive, nobody
will use it. If some person acts like a selfish asshole, nobody will work
with him. If they're well-informed, that is. If society is transparent and
correct information is available, correct decisions in the small will tend
to scale into correct decisions at bigger levels. *A complex,
self-organizing system can operate at a much higher degree of synergy and
efficiency than a simplistic, centralized system.*

The key component of a resource-based economy is a collaborative information
system that can't be tampered with. You see some of the elements of this on
the Internet today. For example, instead of relying on what an ad says about
a product, you might find a website that compares all the products in that
category in great detail and tells you which one is best, based on the input
from thousands of people who have tried them. This isn't yet perfect, as you
can also find mountains of mis-information on the Internet (and people can
game the system with fake reviews, etc.), but you get the idea.

*What is needed is an information system that can be shared by millions of
people, capable of aggregating the available information and decisions from
all participants, showing patterns in this information. Critically, in an
incorruptible manner. A system that can't be tricked or bought or threatened
or legislated into spreading lies.*

Most likely, to truly get there, *the rules will first need to be changed so
that multi-national mega corporations are no longer possible, corporate
personhood revoked, intellectual property abolished, and privately-owned
central banking abandoned.* But even if none of those happen first, a
sufficiently sophisticated shared information system can help gradually
remove all of those, if it would become visible what these institutions
actually do and what their real value is and isn't.

To summarize: the resource-based economy will be driven by a distributed
information system. It will be a market economy, an informed interaction
between free participants, not any centrally planned dictatorship. It will
allow everybody to make meaningful decisions and to contribute to the
collective value, in part by maximizing the productive use of all available
resources.
Via Sean Owczarek <http://www.quora.com/Sean-Owczarek>.
 9 Comments<http://www.quora.com/Post-Monetary-Economics/How-could-and-should-a-resource-based-economy-be-implemented#>
 • Aug 23, 2011<http://www.quora.com/Post-Monetary-Economics/How-could-and-should-a-resource-based-economy-be-implemented/answer/Flemming-Funch>





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