kevin on 100 flowers
kevin on 100 flowers
jun 2020 – Decentralized Economic Coordination: Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
https://c4ss.org/content/52947
I will state up-front that I am an agnostic on the question of whether non-market forms of coordination could be as or more effective than market pricing. I am also an agnostic on the question of whether economic coordination or rational decision-making could exist at all without market pricing, although I am somewhat inclined to say yes.
barely into human scale.. but from what i’ve read so far.. i think a big piece of getting/grokking human scale.. is letting go of things out of a humane element (organism as fractal et al).. we keep trying to fit/add things that are not of the (and are cancerous to) human scale.. ie: market; decision making, finite set of choices, property, rights, et al
to me.. (besides killing us) .. all that is f&b wasting our energy/time
One might argue, in Coasean fashion, that the particular set of property rules doesn’t matter so long as they’re tradeable; regardless of how they’re drawn, the market will cause them to gravitate into the most efficient hands.
what if it’s thinking we have to trade/exchange things.. that’s keeping us from knowing what enough is.. perpetuating a non dance
The distribution of income and incentives to produce are vastly different,
yet.. both cancerous.. red flags.. et al
On the other hand capitalist property rights make ideas, techniques, and innovations artificially costly, erect barriers and toll-gates against their adoption, and make cooperation artificially difficult.
and artificially unbelievable..
ie: people don’t believe we could dance like this:‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
so we’ve never let go of the reigns enough to legit see..
we just keep perpetuating tragedy of the non common
on copy rights, patents, property rules, et al clogging us up
If the tenants’ rent is going directly to paying the mortgage on a property, with the landlord acting only as a middleman who receives the money from tenants and in turn passes it on to the bank — and extracting a fee for the “service” of standing between tenant and bank — that says a lot about how irrationally our credit system is organized.
or perhaps.. how irrational/inhuman (not human scale) credit ness is
And management is forced to devote enormous resources to internal surveillance and enforcement of discipline, compared to self-managed enterprises.
inspectors of inspectors.. telling people what to do
So if it’s correct that inputs cannot be allocated efficiently without a rationally designed property system, then Mises’s economic calculation argument is an indictment of the very capitalist system he sought to defend.
deeper.. allocation needs all the people to be free enough to know what enough is.. otherwise.. spinning our wheels.. no matter what calculations and systems and defenses and inputs.. et al
At any rate, it seems plausible at least that a market economy with well-designed property rules — say, with commons-based resource governance, community land trusts, worker-managed firms, and public services set up as stakeholder cooperatives — would function quite efficiently compared to the existing capitalist system.
yeah.. i don’t think legit common\ing has governance – not about the management .. about the human scale (again.. i might be reading sale wrong.. but to me.. the human scale is imperfect/alive/contextual/unpredictable/in-the-moment/unmanageable.. et al
Mises himself conceded, “..[I]t is possible throughout to review the process of production from beginning to end, and to judge all the time whether one or another mode of procedure yields more consumable goods.”
not about yielding consumable goods.. about people legit knowing what they need/want
So in fact calculation in kind or “in natura” is not logically impossible, as one might gather from the framing of the calculation argument, but becomes a practical problem depending on the volume of information
even if we could calculate the volume of info (which i don’t think we ever could – beyond human scale et al – and add to that most if not all info today is non legit – so noise – from whales in sea world) – the dance begs we don’t control/calculate the dance
If we have a household economy in which non-money calculations are clearly possible on the one end of the spectrum, and at the other end a centrally planned economy where it is either impossible or done with a large degree of calculational chaos, the closer the actual state of affairs approaches to the former rather than the latter, the more relatively feasible non-money calculation will become.
what we need is a legit household econ ie: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
the place/space/time .. where all the flowers can bloom
I simply regard with skepticism any claims that non-money economic coordination is impossible. And as I’ll argue at greater length below, I doubt that any particular economic model — whether based on market, non-market, or any particular form of coordination — will serve as a monolithic template around which society is organized.
unless.. perhaps.. we org for all the flowers.. everyday.. ie: 2 convers as infra
so that no one is ever managing/measuring.. too busy blooming
So the question of the comparative efficiency of prices and other coordination mechanisms, as conveyors of large volumes of information, becomes one which is highly technology-dependent.
yes.. but a use for tech we haven’t yet tried.. one to undo our hierarchical listening ie: tech as it could be..
And in regard to this issue, I believe that the advocates of non-market coordination mechanisms are correct that more recent generations of cybernetics technology are at least capable of coordinating a working economic system on a rational, functional basis.
esp because the coord would be much simpler.. (letting go of all the irrelevants)
coordinating whales in sea world has been the complicated/overwhelming task
legit listening to 8b soul itches.. everyday.. a complex simplicity .. we totally have the means for that (to me that’s human scale)
Whether non-market coordination can process the volume and complexity of data equally well with market pricing is a different question — one on which, again, I am agnostic.
why would we want anything ‘equally well’ to what we have now..? ridiculous ness
It does seem that there is an increasing set of technical possibilities for non-market coordination. A number of projects use blockchain ledgers for coordination, like Ethereum and Sensorica.
as much as i can tell.. neither of those are legit non market
While such projects still involve some market elements in assigning value to their production flows, they also to varying degrees use open value accounting systems to assign value based on other judgements as well.
yeah.. all red flags we’re doing it (life) wrong
In The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen survey the possibilities for a model of economic valuation that takes ethical issues into account in ways not done by traditional market pricing methods.
before we can take ethical issues into account.. need to wake all the people up
monika is another person who’s devoted considerable interest to the use of blockchain and other digital mechanisms to coordinate productive activities outside the market.
oh my.. i forgot about this.. (that explains why i didn’t do a separate page for this before..)
original page’s of using blockchain: for hlb, for www, .. ie: io dance/hosting life bits (blockchain/stack ness: replace server farms – chip energy efficient – dna\ness)ps in the open (idiosyncratic jargon)decision making/B redefined via self-talk as data et al
if we focus on (load blockchain with) data from curiosity rather decision making – that’s what let’s all the flowers bloom.. ie: the finite set of choices in decision making.. is killing/limiting us.. keeping us from knowing what enough is
I am not only an agnostic on the question of which particular forms of coordination are more efficient. I also refrain, as a matter of principle, from prescribing any particular form of coordination or privileging it over alternative forms. I consider myself an anarchist without adjectives, and I think it’s a near certainty that post-state, post-capitalist society will be an anarchy without adjectives. Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, as the saying goes. Like David Graeber, I am open to whatever expedients that groups of people come up with and agree to, *dealing with one another as equals. . t
yeah.. i think we’ve been trying that.. (to me that’s part\ial ness.. and that incremental ness of the partial.. is keeping us out of sync.. so the dance will never fully dance.. we’ll just end up with 100 flowers.. instead of all of us).. and now that we have the means to facil/listen-to 8b people .. everyday.. we can’t keep doing part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake
i think the key (that we keep missing) is that there is a means to have one org/infra for all of us.. that doesn’t adjectivize any of us.. that doesn’t keep any of us from our fittingness.. that allows all of us to *deal w one another as equals..
and i think the key/means is to org around what is essential to humanity.. to human scale perhaps.. ie: maté basic needs 2018.. (rock or flower ness)
obviously..
huge
to me..
and i think what got me to the conclusion is our biggest hinderance is our our hierarchical listening (you/i can’t hear me now)
our findings:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b free people
However, I will venture a few predictions. I think we can assume that a hundred flowers will, in fact, bloom. There will be an eclectic, ad hoc mix of expedients for ownership and coordination, growing out of the diverse collection of seeds of the future society that are sprouting among us right now.
no doubt.. but i think what humanity/human-scale humanity needs (and we can now facil) is a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
And I believe that markets will almost certainly be one of them, simply because eliminating them would require the establishment of some uniform organizing model that would prohibit or crowd them out as a matter of principle.
markets will be one of them.. to our demise.. to our perpetuating of tragedy of the non common.. if we keep trying part\ial ness
And I don’t believe post-capitalist society will be organized according to any such template. It will be an emergent phenomenon.
god i hope..
everyone in sync law – dancing the dance
At the same time, I believe market exchange and prices will be a much, much smaller part of the mix than they are now.
still poison – 10-day-care-center\ness et al.. still anti human scale
It strikes me as extremely likely that, in the face of failing state- and employer-based social safety nets, and as rising unemployment and underemployment make direct production for use a necessity, people will increasingly aggregate into larger primary social units like extended family or multi-family compounds, cohousing units, micro-villages and the like. These social units will provide mechanisms for the pooling of risk and costs, along with whatever outside incomes some members bring in, and their members will meet a large share of their consumption units through commonly owned workshops and gardens. Their guarantees of food, shelter, and support against infirmity will be something like the “irreducible minimum” offered by hunter-gatherer groups, as described by Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom.
yeah.. i don’t think we’ll get at ‘min’ (i’d say enough ness) anything .. until we do this first – free people.. enough.. so that we can all hear what our souls/others/nature want us to hear..
In this case, a great deal of production will take place outside the cash nexus, and what market does still occur seems likely to involve mostly machinery and other large-scale producer goods beyond the capability of such communities, natural resources, and the exchange of surpluses between the communities.
i think we have no idea what we could do ‘beyond capability of such communities’.. because we’ve never let them truly be free.. we’ve always enclosed them in some form or another.. so again.. biggest issue is that people don’t know what they legit need/want.. and we end up spinning wheels in excess..
And stipulating that market exchange will exist as some part of the mix, I think it’s safe to say that the property rules will be far from capitalistic. In the case of land, as Graeber argued, it’s hard to imagine the population respecting anyone’s property claim to a large tract of land they fenced off, being willing to work it for them for wages or pay rent to live on it, rather than just ignoring their claim and living on it and cultivating it for themselves.
tragedy of the non common if property ness.. and all the other red flags
The nature of money and credit, likewise, will almost certainly be quite different. Ancap visions of a society in which money is a commodity with a market value — whether precious metals or bitcoin — rather than a simple denominator of value, strike me as especially fanciful. The function of providing credit or liquidity to facilitate the exchange of ongoing production outputs is entirely a matter of flows, and there is no rational basis for requiring the possession of stocks of wealth to issue such flows. And it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that groups of workers exchanging their outputs would willingly rely on the possessor of stocks of wealth to issue credit to facilitate their exchange, and pay interest, when they could simply advance credit to each other as ongoing flows without any backing.
along that line of thinking.. ‘they could simply advance credit to each other as ongoing flows without any backing’ imagine if that wasn’t even on our minds..
if all the flowers are legit blooming.. (if legit art/ists.. who will do anything to give their art away.. who are the exact part of the one body we need them to be)..
in conclusion, I’ll just say I don’t know if an economy could function without money prices and exchange. I don’t know if non-money coordination would be as *efficient as money exchange.
and i’d say.. i don’t know if any legit/awake/alive human/flower can function/bloom if we’re poisoning/enclosing them with money/exchange/measure.. et al..
*efficiency isn’t the point – to humanity/human-scale..
first pages of book quote: le corbusier: ‘units of measure are the first condition of all. the builder takes as his measure what is easiest and most constant; his pace/foot/elbow/finger.. he has created a unit which regs the whole work.. it is in harmony w him.. that is the main point’
I don’t know what mix between money and non-money forms of coordination would sort itself out, if people and groups of producers were free to sort it out among themselves.
yeah.. i don’t see money (any form of measuring/accounting) as part of the mix of legit humanity/human-scale
but i do believe if people (has to be all of us – in sync – or it won’t work/dance) are truly free.. their dance would.. daily.. sort it all out..
otherwise.. yeah.. we need the measures.. but then the 100 flowers turn into 100 weeds/cancers et al.. (ie: start thinking we need/want resources we don’t really need/want)
so what we need is an infra/org to facil 8b free people.. everyday
before we can get to the flowers ness – we need a monolithic/rock/essence first.. ie: maté basic needs (authenticity & attachment – to set/detox and keep people free)
how it would play out.. imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. we might just get to a more antifragile, healthy, thriving world.. the ecosystem we keep longing for..
what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people (beyond 100 flowers)
What we do know is that *authority, hierarchy, power differentials, and artificial property rights create irrationality. They create conflicts of interest. They incentivize information hoarding and conservation of effort. So let’s abolish those things, and let people work out for themselves what they want to replace it with. **Whatever works will be good.
**as long as it legit works for all.. which i don’t think we’ll see until all are legit free.. begs a means to undo our hierarchical listening so that all people get back/to knowing what enough is
so.. yeah.. abolish all those things and let them work for themselves.. but let’s provide at least a temporary/initial org/detox to set/keep free enough to get to the deeper needs/wants
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be you. 