Libertarianism vs an RBE

http://managainstthestate.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/2nd-post-to-ben-mcleish.html

Ben McLeish of the Zeitgeist Movement and Graham Wright, author of the above blog, are having an interesting debate on the merits (or not) of an RBE cf the libertarian Austrian Economics model.

There are surprising points of agreement, which make me wonder whether AE isn't closer to an RBE than the current economic system.

But I have lighted on Wright's response to a comment on his blog, here separtaed into individual points with my thoughts:

•  "Economics is the study of the logical consequences of human action". Maybe. As many know, economics is more literally something like household management, and I prefer that as a definition or starting point.
  
• "Political philosophy is about devising a set of principles for ownership (i.e. who has ultimate decision-making jurisdiction over which resources)". In an RBE there is no need for ownership, only access. As to decision-making, decisions would be arrived at by applying the scientific method.
• "economics can teach what consequences we can expect from different ownership principles being used in societies". Maybe it can, but in an RBE we are not interested in "ownership models".
• " Economics is the body of knowledge that can tell us whether resources will be used more efficiently for satisfying human desire [in one or another system]". In economics the word 'want' covers what would commonly be distinguished as 'need' and if 'desire' is used in the same sense as 'want' it has the same problem as far as I am concerned.

What is the overarching aim of a system for operating planet earth (which is what economics should be about)? Ownership isn't a first principle. You own something so that you can exclusive and unlimited access it - thus access underlies ownership and it is what an RBE seeks to optimise.

Somewhere in their discussion, McLeish differentiates 'good' growth from 'bad' growth and Wright asks him to explain/clarify. I don't know if he has done so, but Robert Kennedy's critique of GDP/GNP will serve (see http://www2.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/michael.brandl/main%20page%20items/Kennedy%20on%20GNP.htm):

"Our gross national product ... counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. .... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

So, we are looking for growth in the good things Kennedy lists here. I'm sure that's a close enough description of 'good growth' for McLeish.

As appealing as quality of life and/or happiness are as indicators, they are tricky to enumerate. If you are healthy and happy you will presumably live longer. Maybe life length is a good enough proxy for 'good growth'. That said, if people live longer there will be more of us on the planet. Maybe populatiin is the simplest proxy for good growth? Obviously, there is a limit to how many people the planet can sustain. If our resource efficiency is optimal, we will be sustaining as much population as those resources can allow.

Prison works?

I'm grateful to Ben McLeish for introducing me (and I suppose many others) to the Stanford Prison Experiment in his talk 'Out of the box' at The Friends Meeting House in Euston on Saturday 10/3/12. I will post more details of Ben's talk when available.

The experient used innocent volunteers to be both guards and inmates at a specially constructructed test prison.  The outcomes astounded the experimenters and will astound you.

http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/29

This link goes to the conclusions section of the experiment's website.

Politicians and government

At this year's Zeitgeist Day (my third, unbelievably), there was some Q&A about the role of government in transitioning to an RBE. Some say we should try to get govenment on board, and others that that is far too optimistic as government is far too venal. For the moment, my thought is that we can't leave government to politicians.

On thetrain travelling home, I read an editorial by Jeremy O'Grady, editor-in-chief of The Week. It is apposite. He wrote: "democracies create all kinds of devices- elcctions every five years, First Past The Post, the European Court of Human Rights -  to ensure that the will of the people is not given too much of a look in. Whisper it quietly, but that's a good thing."

So there you have it - a news editor condoning constraints on democracy. Don't get me wrong, opinion, especially if uninformed, is worthless. It's just that we're played along, and given just enough input to the democratic process to make some people think that our input/opinion actually counts.

Firing Back - The case against money, and the case for a resource-based economic system

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rsBTGkdo08

Video of a talk given by Ben McLeish of the UK part of The Zeitgeist Movement. Unfortunately it can be a little difficult to hear some of what he says - the audio seems to have been captured somewhere in the auditorium rather than from the microphone Ben was speaking into, but it is still well worth listening to. As usual, Ben has new insights and new examples to refresh what for TZMers is now fairly familiar material. One example, albeit of a rather workaday matter, was the fact that individuals don't own their own shopping trolleys (shopping carts). They use one provided in/by the supermarket whilst they need it, and then pool it for others to use. There is a gradual move to towards this access or service model and away from the ownership model in which we retain a physical thing for our exclusive use, the most obvious example being the private car. Technology helps it become more and more possible to access what we need when we need it without outright ownership.

[I also saw separately  a montage of contributions by Jacque Fresco and George Carlin. In Jacque's 1974 Larry King interview, he observes how telephones were built to last so that the phone company didn't need to maintain or replace them too often. This was beneficial to the subscriber (as we used to call them) too - they don't want the phone to break. ]

I will try to get a link to the presentation material that Ben was talking to.


The explanation of fractional reserve banking isn't the clearest one I've come across, but the fact that money is created by banks out of thin air as debt is real, and doesn't need to be understood in detail to be shocking.

Autonomous Auto

http://searchengineland.com/google-working-on-auto-driving-cars-52646

Google, whose mission is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" have created a car that is autonomous, using satnav, cameras, sensors etc to operate the car in a real world driving situation. The aim of this project is to reduce collisions.

The idea that machines can do things more reliably and safely than humans is a hard one to accept, as witnessed by Ben McLeish's story about the woman who was terrified in a Docklands Light Railway train in London (trains which have been computer driven since 1987) and was only consoled when a human "driver" was put in place (he just pretended).

In an RBE, we would extend our capabilities as much as possible using technology. If this saved us doing work, we would welcome it. Why do we want to do something a machine can do. And if tech can produce cars that don't crash, can't crash, then safety laws become irrelevant.

The future of economics

Ben McLeish, one of the leading lights in the UK Zeitgeist movement has given rousing concluding speeches at his talks. I'm including the text of one here:

Perhaps you think that surpassing the monetary system is too radical. It’s pie in the sky. It’s too “futuristic". You know what I think is radical? Designing and presiding over a system based on infinite growth and which relies upon inefficiency and duplicated efforts and inferior throwaway products in a finite world. We have to sell more, buy more, accrue more debt, and produce more and more tons of waste in order for this system to function, and not only that – the successful function of the current system inherently means the few get richer while the many get poor.

Who will buy your products when there is so little work that the majority of humanity is unemployed? Who will use your services when most of us are starving? Yet we cannot keep producing more and more in a world with ever shrinking resources and limited societal development, developmentally hamstrung by the need for every institution to preserve its status quo. That is the most radical thing I have ever heard of. It is demonstrably unsustainable. It is inhuman. It is anti-human.

And while we have heard the word “unsustainable” over-used and abused by the media many times, let me remind you again what exactly it means. It means that our global society, based on deliberate inefficiency, waste, pollution and massive social stratification - the things we do right now, will reach a point where it will not support human life. We must re-orientate our structures to support the population we have, and are about to have. We are only a successful society if we take a hard look at the only thing which has ever been important, and that is the survival of the species as a whole, and align our operations within the necessary laws and balances that nature requires. That is the true meaning of evolution.

I refuse to live in a society like this. I refuse to sit in the top 10% of this world, standing by while billions of mirror-images of myself suffer and die for no good reason other than profit and artificial boundaries. No longer do I quietly tolerate the suffering of almost all of the only race I am a member of, on the only planet in the known universe I can presently inhabit. I do not accept that this is as good as it gets. This is as bad as it gets. I call upon you to roundly reject this paralysing, limiting, divisionary [sic], fraudulent mess we laughingly refer to as economics. It is irrelevant and in fact in direct opposition to our survival and it is stunting to our staggering and subtle, [expletive deleted] fantastic, unlimited potential creativity. I’m sorry. It’ll have to go.

You know, if you consider yourself forward-thinking you have to learn to be able to [look] back at the present from the future. The future population of this earth can look back one day at our present tense [sic] and see one of two things. They could see that we recklessly destroyed ourselves and each other, or they can see that we made it. In the future they are already looking at our living group. And I want them to see that we did make it. We have to make it.

Thanks Ben!