Peer2Politics

Recently a friend in a reading group suggested that we read The Critical Net Critic. While the piece is somewhat long and meandering it is also very good at helping to answer some of those fundamental questions about what is changing in the present economy and how we should understand (Information Technology) IT in relation to the rest of the productive economy.

Well-framed, well-crafted and often repeated, the austerity story is the dominant political narrative in Britain today. It shapes how most of us think and talk about the economy.

Would the ordinary person regard how economics students are educated as a significant political issue? Probably not, but the way economics students are educated has much wider implications for society than is commonly imagined.

"On my trip to Thailand in August I had the pleasure to meet Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and interviewed him about Peer-to-Peer Economy. In many ways, I tried to “extract” all his knowledge in 15 min which was definitely not easy at all :-) . But I’m sure that you will learn something by watching this interview, especially if you have an interest in Economics :-)

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

John Michael Greer (“The Flight to the Ephemeral,” The Archdruid Report, Oct. 2) was kind enough to address an earlier post of mine on this blog a few weeks back (“When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell From Catabolic Collapse,” P2P Foundation Blog, Sept. 19). Here are my responses, in no particular order of importance.

"Economics, and indeed human civilization, can only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings.  Everything in economics has to be adjusted for people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people, capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead of compassion."

Daniel Estrada is a big fan of the Attention Economy, which he describes as one part Augmented Reality, one part Internet of Things, one part Use-Theory of Value, and one part Cognitive Surplus. I am utterly convinced that an attention-economic system will ultimately replace both money and centralized governance as the dominant method for large-scale organizational management.

Economists always ask us to ‘imagine’ how things must have worked before the advent of money. What such examples bring home more than anything else is just how limited their imaginations really are. When one is dealing with a world unfamiliar with money and markets, even on those rare occasions when strangers did meet explicitly in order to exchange goods, they are rarely thinking exclusively about the value of the goods. This not only demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person—basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy thinking only about marginal rates of return—but that what economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as the purported reason for the invention of money and markets themselves. Logically, this makes about as much sense as saying that the game of chess was invented to allow people to fulfill a pre-existing desire to checkmate their opponent’s king.

"The term “econophysics” was introduced by analogy with similar terms, such as astrophysics, geophysics, and biophysics, which describe applications of physics to different fields. Particularly important is the parallel with biophysics, which studies living creatures, which still obey the laws of physics. It should be emphasized that econophysics does not literally apply the laws of physics, such as Newton’s laws or quantum mechanics, to humans, but rather uses mathematical methods developed in statistical physics to study statistical properties of complex economic systems consisting of a large number of humans. So, it may be considered as a branch of applied theory of probabilities. However, statistical physics is distinctly different from mathematical statistics in its focus, methods, and results.

Workplace regimes are the complexes of formal and informal relations and institutions that structure the organisation of work in modern societies. A comparative understanding of their structure and significance is indispensable to socio-economics, for the organisation of work shapes not only the experience of life on the job but the material conditions and competitive prospects of workers and firms, the interests underpinning macro-level political bargains, and the prospects for social solidarity more generally. It is impossible to understand the varieties of capitalism, or their non-capitalist rivals and predecessors, without a firm understanding of the politics and practices of workplace regimes. But sociologists of work and comparative political economists tend to talk past each other, leaving potentially profitable opportunities for mutual dialogue unexploited. 

"How is the present monetary system affecting the economy and thereby society and nature, and why is it failing? I will outline the interconnected malfunctions of the globally prevailing monetary system in ten points.

“When it comes to the “Homebrew” dream of an actual desktop factory, the most promising current development is the Fab Lab. The concept started with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. The original version of the Fab Lab included CNC laser cutters and milling machines, and a 3-D printer, for a total cost of around $50,000.

"To benefit all of society, an economy needs to be based on service to all of society. In today’s economy, service is bought and sold as a good; instead goods must be provided as a service. An economy benefitting all of society should include service to ourselves, service to others and service to society at large. An elderly person who keeps themselves healthy and fulfilled or an addict working to conquer their addiction may be giving only to themselves but both are making society a much better place and lessening the work for others. To create a giving economy instead of a gift economy, currency is not exchanged between two trading partners but societal approval is awarded from all of society to the giver. Societal approval and trust then entitles each member of a society to receive benefit from that society, through a living and immediate social contract. As a reputation economy allows you to participate in trade, an approval economy allows you to become part of a society.

"In English, buen vivir loosely translates "good living" or "well living", although neither term sits well with Eduardo Gudynas, a leading scholar on the subject. Both sit too close to western notions of wellbeing or welfare, he says: "These are not equivalents at all. With buen vivir, the subject of wellbeing is not [about the] individual, but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation."

Today, social responses to peoples' needs are being pushed to the margin by the reframing of all tasks in terms of economic gain. But the development of human capabilities depends on relationships. A different set of values is needed. 

LAST night 40,000 people rented accommodation from a service that offers 250,000 rooms in 30,000 cities in 192 countries. They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it—2.5m of them in 2012 alone. It is the most prominent example of a huge new “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet.