MetaFilter posts tagged with community and economics

"Whereas the left is always in danger of talking itself into the ground."

The Whelk — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 09:32:37 -0800

What's also obvious is that this phase of Occupy, with talk of credit unions and occupying the SEC, while eminently worthy, is also kind of boring, especially when compared to the thrill of Occupy's park phase. Some, though, are ready to move on. "It's easy to go back to the park occupation and fetishize it, in a way," says Occupy Chicago's Brian Bean. "I prefer not to run a mini-society – I want to run society." - The Battle For The Soul Of Occupy Wall Street - Rolling Stone - Mark Binelli.

the dawn of a Star Trek generation

kliuless — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:43:20 -0800

In Praise of Leisure - "Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called 'Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.' Its thesis was simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all... He thought this condition might be reached in about 100 years — that is, by 2030." (via)

Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot just go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we? ... Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was "an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals." He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done. But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty... Why, despite the surprising accuracy of his growth forecasts, are most of us, almost 100 years on, still working about as hard as we were when he wrote his futuristic essay? The answer is that a free-market economy both gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work and inflames our innate tendency toward competitive, status-driven consumption. Keynes was well aware of the evils of capitalism but assumed that they would wither away once their work of wealth creation was done. He did not foresee that they might become permanently entrenched, obscuring the very ideal they were initially intended to serve... The irony, however, is that now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly... If scarcity is always with us, then efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources, and economics, the science that teaches us efficiency, will always be necessary... scarcity, as most people understand it, has diminished greatly in most societies over the last 200 years. People in rich and even medium-rich countries no longer starve to death. All this implies that the social importance of efficiency has declined, and with it the utility of economics... the problem is that a competitive, monetized economy puts us under continual pressure to want more and more. The 'scarcity' discerned by economists is increasingly an artifact of this pressure. Considered in relation to our vital needs, our state is one not of scarcity but rather of extreme abundance.

How Much Is Enough? What Is It For? "It was the shift to a market-based philosophy of growth that inflamed the insatiability of wants -- by abandoning any interest in the social outcome of growth. The market was bound by the rule of law, but there was no longer any moral, political or cultural restraint on the individual pursuit of wealth. Keynes's notion of satiety had no place. Such a system cannot work according to plan. It is both economically and morally inefficient. The Anglo-American system of the past 30 years, dominated by the financial-services industry, has been retained for the benefit of a predatory plutocracy that creams off the riches in the name of freedom and globalization. So, what intellectual, moral and political resources still exist in Western societies to reverse the onslaught of insatiability and redirect our purposes toward the good life?" Saving State Parks: The End Of Public Funding? "[A]cting one by one by one, they set into motion this dynamic... where suddenly we're not acting collaboratively or collectively as a public. We're acting individually as philanthropists to benefit the thing we're most passionate about. And suddenly we don't have a civic sphere anymore. We don't have political participation. We don't have an 'us.' We have a bunch of 'I's.' "

sovereignty and taxation

kliuless — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 14:46:51 -0800

David Graeber: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit (via)

Mandel had argued that humanity stood at the verge of a "third technological revolution," as profound as the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, in which computers, robots, new energy sources, and new information technologies would replace industrial labor – the "end of work" as it soon came to be called – reducing us all to designers and computer technicians coming up with crazy visions that cybernetic factories would produce. End of work arguments were popular in the late seventies and early eighties as social thinkers pondered what would happen to the traditional working-class-led popular struggle once the working class no longer existed. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

Daron Acemoglu: The world our grandchildren will inherit - "The last century has been the age of political rights. Never in our history have so many people taken part in choosing their leaders and having a say in how their societies are governed. To be sure, this unparalleled expansion of civil and political rights remains incomplete. Yet it is profoundly significant, not only due to its transformative impact on the lives of billions, but also because so many other phenomena in recent history are connected to it. The rights revolution is intertwined with diverse trends such as the development of technology; sustained yet uneven economic growth; a general decline in war within recent decades; and a population explosion placing new pressures on our resources and environment." Anatole Kaletsky: A New Capitalism

Seabright engages in some fascinating speculations on anthropology and biology. He posits a form of "group selection" – natural selection operating within entire societies rather than individuals... His conclusion – which is quite pessimistic – is that over millions of years humans have evolved to operate quite successfully in limited and well-defined groups. But we're now moving into a world where the social group that is relevant to the future success, maybe even survival, of humanity is no longer a tribe, a city or a nation. It is the world as a whole. Once humanity is operating on a global level, people have to cooperate on a far broader scale, and the mechanisms for cooperation which have evolved over thousands of years may break down. He gives the financial crisis and the inability of nation states to control it as one example of this breakdown. Others are climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy depletion and environmental destruction. These are all global challenges for which cooperative social mechanisms have not had time to evolve... If you go back to the roots of the monetarist revolution in the 1970s, you find that all its conclusions depend on the assumption that profit-motivated individuals operating in free and competitive markets will make the best possible decisions about the allocation of resources. Frydman and Goldberg explain that this claim of optimal decisions by the markets is simply untrue, unless we also assume that perfect knowledge of reality is possible, at least in theory – and not just about the present, but about the forces shaping the future. If such perfect knowledge does not exist, even in theory, then the claims about self-stabilising markets at root of most economic policy since the early 1980s are false. And if perfect knowledge did exist, then ironically Communist central planning would work as well as a market system. All you would need is a computer large enough to take into account all this knowledge, and it would be able to plan the economy. The reason you need markets is precisely because it's impossible to know what the future will hold. Therefore, markets are a system of experimentation – and they will only work properly if non-market decisions, made by regulators and ultimately by politicians, set some bounds within which market prices can be allowed to freely fluctuate.* This is a very important and profound insight which will ultimately undermine not just the structure of academic economics, but also the way in which people think about the relationship between markets and government.

Capitalism's risk manager: The philanthropic complex - "We envision a society that values more of what matters – not just more... a new emphasis on non-material values like financial security, fairness, community, health, time,** nature, and fun." The Progressive Consumption Tax - "By pulling a simple tax lever, we could reduce the costs of growing income disparities, while at the same time freeing up several trillion dollars of additional resources each year – more than enough to pay down the federal debt and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure – all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone." Beyond scarcity: The parable of water - "Yet if water abundance is great enough people will look around and see there is no scarcity. They will see they are better off than they have ever been. Eventually, they will understand all the scarcity is artificial. They will also realise they have no need for receptacles, because receptacles have no value. You can live directly off the source. As those with receptacles adjust to the realisation that they have no advantage over those with no receptacles, there is a crisis in the old system. Ultimately, however, more people are provided with access to a constant supply of water than ever before, and on equal terms. The crisis is only for those who used to have an advantage in the system." The end of artificial scarcity - "Without something like a war — or an extra-terrestrial pursuit*** — the system can only be rebalanced by a boom in credit supply and/or artificial scarcity enforced by manufacturers themselves." Debunking goldbugs - "Unlike the gold system, which asks you to put your faith in an inanimate shiny object, a paper 'fiat' system asks you to put faith in relationships, in your neighbours, your community. It asks you to believe that society will honour its debts because it doesn't make sense for it not to – largely because it is just as dependent on you honouring your debts to it, as you are on it honouring its debts to you. It's a system based on quid pro quo relationships. A symbiosis based on trust." Gold's Anti-Social Behaviour Order - "So while gold may be a workable underlier for a redemption option, this doesn't change the fact that at the heart of the system it is faith and faith alone which holds everything together. Whether that faith is reflected in a sovereign's ability to manage the economy on behalf of the group, in the sovereign's guarantee to honour a gold option, or faith in the gold god himself... faith is the constant. Not gold. What's more, while gold encourages anti-social behaviour and hoarding in individuals, a fiat-based system encourages the very opposite: sharing, distribution, collaboration and cooperation." Space opera, beyond finance edition

That includes the notion that in the future there will likely be more currencies not less. "Perhaps even billions of currencies," he says, sketching out a world where every individual and every human network boasts its own unit of exchange. He believes that city-states will become more relevant than nations. And that communities and networks will take control over their own units of account. Virtual currencies such as BitCoin or Facebook credits or others not yet invented, meanwhile, could well start to rival established state-issued money both in private exchange and international trade. And community-led Peer2Peer networks will run alongside more established currency systems. If you thought exchange rates might pose a problem here, Park says technology will provide us with something akin to a "universal translator" for establishing relative values. Real-time and cost efficient. The concept of pricing, meanwhile, will likely to be turned on its head entirely. That's because in the future Park believes prices will become a function of who you are just as much as broader supply and demand fundamentals. One reason why reputation tracking will once again become critical to business, investment and even daily exchange of goods. Just like when a gentleman's word used to be his bond.

previously :P --- *gzip the universe: "I feel we look at matter and information and we see the dichotomy because it's semiotcratic to do so. Just as we look at particles and see fermions (things that can't be in the same place at the same time) and bosons (things that can be so). Perhaps it's just an artefact of our measuring equipment. It's all string vibrations, further down. And rooms and corridors. Buildings and streets (tell that to those in Catalhoyuk!). And objects and textures, of course, animate/inanimate, background/attended. Mesh/tree, mesh-becoming/tree-becoming, branching/canalising, push/pull. But we've talked about that, or we will. We've created an arboreal world, we've also been created. We can't assign causality, only proximity. Does it makes sense to talk about any thing if everything is every thing?" or look at the world in terms of affordances, viz. Hans Rosling: Religions and babies **Paul Ford: 10 Timeframes - 'we're asking people to spend their heartbeats on things we make'

The time you spend is not your own. You are, as a class of human beings, responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else. You spent two years learning, focusing, exploring, but that was your time; now you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user’s? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont? There is an immense opportunity—maybe it’s even a business opportunity—to look at our temporal world and think about calendars and clocks and human behavior, to think about each interaction as a specific unit, to take careful note of how we parcel out moments. Whether a mouse moving across a screen or the progress of a Facebook post through a thousand different servers, the way we value time seems to have altered, as if the earth tilted on its axis, as if the seasons are different and new. So that is my question for all of you: What is the new calendar? What are the new seasons? The new weeks and months and decades? As a class of individuals, we make the schedule. What can we do to help others understand it? If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats—if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

***cf. John Hodgman: Design, explained & Reggie Watts disorients you in the most entertaining way

Sacred Economics and Beyond

velvet winter — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:16:51 -0800

"It’s a very ancient idea that the universe runs by the principles of the gift...in fact the purpose for our existence, the reason why we’re here, is to give." Writer Charles Eisenstein speaks on his book Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition.

Grouponomics

kliuless — Thu, 05 May 2011 14:56:15 -0800

The Sharing Economy (via) BONUS -Rachel Botsman explains how technology is enabling trust between strangers -Lisa Gansky talks about the future of sharing -Grouponomics -The overpayers' club: we underutilize equity arrangements at every level of our society

We have made an error, from which we need to backtrack, that can be summed up by the word 'commodification'. In the name of a false efficiency, we have struggled to cram everything from corn to cars to financial and legal relationships into the mold of widgets that can be competitively produced, objectively characterized, and then priced in fixed numeraire at arms-length by open markets. If only this could work... But it can't work. Pretending is killing us. Commodification is a reasonable framework for managing trade in corn and manufactured goods, but is an inappropriate for anything or practice whose quality is revealed over time. Commodities are appropriately priced in money and financed by debt. Goods and services that are not commodities require more complex forms of exchange than what's imagined by an introductory economics textbook. What we must 'buy and sell', most of what matters, is relationships. Managing relationships is mysterious, a difficult problem. But we know more than nothing. Just as commodities are naturally exchanged for debt and money, relationship finance naturally takes the form of equity arrangements, in which cash flows are contingent upon variable outcomes.

The Woman Who Just Might Save the Planet and Our Pocketbooks

kliuless — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:41:13 -0800

What if our economy was not built on competition? Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom talks about her work on cooperation in economics. No Funny Business: Social Norms and Joke Theft

Rules are ideas about how people interact with each other. They are the formal laws and social norms that govern daily life. The legitimacy of formal laws often depends on their compatibility with social norms. Social norms can complement formal laws and, in some cases, stand in when formal legal enforcement is absent or inefficient. In a guest post for the Freakonomics blog, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman write about social norms among stand-up comedians... In a related post, Rajiv Sethi explores other situations in which social norms operate as substitutes for formal laws. He points to Elinor Ostrom's work on self-governance among groups of people with collective rights to natural resources... Sethi also points out that social norms can enforce bad equilibria, citing oppressive attitudes about race, gender, or caste. A related issue is the extent to which formal laws and enforcement can change social norms about acceptable attitudes and behavior.

Social Capital and Community Governance

Social capital generally refers to trust, concern for one's associates, a willingness to live by the norms of one's community, and to punish those who do not. While essential to good governance, these behaviors and dispositions appear to conflict with the fundamental behavioral assumptions of economics whose archetypal individual--"Homo economicus"--is entirely self-regarding. We regard these behaviors and dispositions as aspects of what we term community governance. We suggest that (i) community governance addresses some common market and state failures but typically relies on insider-outsider distinctions that may be morally repugnant; (ii) the individual motivations supporting community governance are not captured by either the conventional self-interested preferences of "Homo economicus" or by unconditional altruism towards one's fellow community members; (iii) well-designed institutions make communities, markets, and states complements, not substitutes; (iv) with poorly designed institutions, markets and states can crowd out community governance; (v) some distributions of property rights are better than others at fostering community governance and assuring complementarity among communities, states, and markets; and (vi) far from representing holdovers from a premodern era, the small-scale local interactions that characterize communities are likely to increase in importance as the economic problems that community governance handles relatively well become more important.

To come up with new policies aimed at widely shared prosperity

His academic work is focused on identifying government's appropriate role — through regulations, taxes, or spending — in a market economy. He is currently engaged in a project to estimate the economic costs of climate change and has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act. He argues that government environmental regulation has improved air quality, leading to reductions in infant mortality rates and higher housing values, while also imposing costs through reducing the scale of manufacturing activity. Greenstone also has done research on topics ranging from the beneficial impacts of mandatory disclosure laws on stock prices to the role of antidiscrimination laws in reducing African-American infant mortality rates.

Complexity and doom

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn't these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn't regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—"[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response", to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

Do we need a bubble? There are two sorts of world. In a normal world, the equilibrium rate of interest is above the growth rate of the economy. In a weird world, the equilibrium rate of interest is below the growth rate of the economy. What's weird about a weird world is that it needs a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, a chain-letter swindle, for the economy to work well. Utility, The Deus Ex Machina of Economics Nicholas Bernoulli came up with the St. Petersburg Paradox, a position that stands in stark contradiction to Pascal's Wager, arguing that there is no limit to the amount you should be prepared to gamble in quest of a greater fortune... The classical solution to the paradox was proposed by Daniel Bernoulli who argued that the problem was that a dollar isn't a dollar for everyone. What he suggested was that the value of any given amount of money reduced as you became richer... He called this relative value 'utility'. Taking Hope in the Long View For the first time, more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry, enough shelter not to be wet, enough clothing not to be cold, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and most of their children will die prematurely of micro-parasites. The big problems for most of humanity will be to find enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and leisure lives to avoid being bored, and enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows... How did this miracle come about? The World's Free Virtual School: an interview with Salman Khan Salman Khan is the man behind Khan Academy, a 2009 Tech Award winning site with 12+ million views and 1200+ 10-minute "videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance". We talked with him about building "the world's free virtual school", the potential of open-access learning, using the format for sustainability debates, and challenges in growing a non-profit from zero to global impact. A Short Survey of Network Economics This paper surveys a variety of topics related to network economics. Topics covered include: consumer demand under network effects, compatibility decisions and standardization, technology advances in network industries, two-sided markets, information networks and intellectual property, and social influence. Trust networks The general idea is that there are numerous examples of networks of people who share substantial interests in common, and who have a high level of trust in one another that permits them to undertake risky joint activities. Privilege Is Driving a Smooth Road And Not Even Knowing It People with more privilege, in contrast, can easily imagine that they are independent. A big mark of privilege is that social and economic networks tend to facilitate goals, rather than block them. This makes it easier to ignore the social and economic networks around us; and it makes it easier for the privileged to imagine their accomplishments are the result of their own pure merit... No one is independent; we all rely on a network of social and economic ties to tens of thousands of strangers, just to get through a single day. What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Corporations Brian Murphy, a history professor at Baruch College in New York, knows a whole lot about corporations in the early days of the American republic. When the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on political spending by corporations in January, the ruling struck him as dramatically at odds with how the Founding Fathers saw the role of the corporation. Objects into people, people into objects, business value That is: your species has another skill. Just like you're good at turning objects into people, you're good at turning people into objects. It's easy for you to subordinate actual humans to the beauty of a System. You're terribly prone to slip into ideology, to elevate objects to totems-to-be-deferred-to. "Business Value" is, I fear, becoming one such totem. The Natural World Vanishes: How Species Cease To Matter Once, on both sides of the Atlantic, fish such as salmon, eels, and, shad were abundant and played an important role in society, feeding millions and providing a livelihood for tens of thousands. But as these fish have steadily dwindled, humans have lost sight of their significance, with each generation accepting a diminished environment as the new norm. The Future of Cities We live in an urban age. The Future of Cities is a series in which the FT explores the appeal of the city and the problems that come with rapid urbanisation, such as health challenges, conflict, development and conservation. The determinants of state fragility The causes and implications of state fragility – also known as state failure – are not yet well understood. This column explores the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa and finds that institutions – as measured by civil liberties and the number of revolutions – are the main drivers. It says institutions trump economic, geographic, and historical factors.

building nothing out of something? or...

kliuless — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:21:22 -0800

Rebuilding Something Better by Barack Obama: "this week, I'll be talking about how we give our workers the skills they need to compete... Part of this goal will be met by helping Americans better afford a college education. But part of it will also be strengthening our network of community colleges..." BONUS -Zakaria: A Capitalist Manifesto -Cowen: Vaticanomics -The X-shaped recovery -Debt, Class Warfare and Entrepreneurship -America's Fiscal Train Wreck and Cassandra's Curse -Skidelsky: Economists clash on shifting sands -Skidelsky: The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission -Skidelsky: The Lost Continent -Obama: A New Moment of Promise in Africa -Sullivan: Barack Obama keeps his cool