Another similarity between an RBE and communism could be the pressure for uniformity. This does not seem to be so clear cut. At yesterday's series of talks for Z-day and the Friends' Meeing House in Euston, London, Peter Joseph seemed to emphasise the point that aesthetic or personal preference attributes need to take a back seat to sustainability.
The speaker from the design team spoke of the need for standardisation, as it is efficient, and mentioned the fact that in an RBE, with no money, no need to work and no ownership, people would just go where they wished and live where they wish when they wish. This is workable with enough standardisation, but the speaker from the design team (echoing Jacque Fresco) said that people's individual tastes / requirements could be accommodated into the designs of their homes, which seems to undermine the standardisation imperative, and re-introduce the idea of ownership insofar as if something is personalised for me how can someone else use it it ad hoc - this would deprive me of its use.
So how can we absorb the variation that individuality calls for, whilst eschewing the idea of ownership and accruing the benefits of standardisation
I think technology would absorb a lot of the required variation. I presume when we enter residential accommodation in an RBE, we will somehow be identified to the tech that runs the house. Our music tastes (say) would be accessible by the playlists associated with our identity, and whatever a bed had become would be adjusted to achieve the equivalent of our preferred mattress firmness and body shape (a la memory foam). That said, currently we seem to be able to tolerate a hotel room without being able to completely personalise it, but I suppose if we are moving around a lot, our personal taste may need accommodating "on the fly".
The example given by the speaker was of someone who liked cooking and entertaining guests with the food. He seemed to suggest that one's house could be designed with that in mind, but how then can that house be communal?
I would suggest that the dining room and associated kitchen would not be part of a particular home for exclusive use, but available communally just like pretty much everything else. The host would reserve use of the facilities for the duration of his dinner party, but at other times it would be available for others to use for the same or similar ventures.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Work - a systems approach
In my previous post I cited the defence that someone who has worked hard to get something should not have it taken from them. On the face of it, that seems fair, but let's analyse a bit further.
If we could enumerate all work on a standard scale of standard units, we could perhaps consider a system in which the reward was commensurate with the work. Even if we could work out a single scale for all work, there are problems with this arrangement. Would we want people competing to do more and more work for more and more reward? Or would we say that reward would be commensurate with the proportion of work done.
To know what proportion of work someone has done, we need to know what the total work done is, but either way, we have to face the question of what work we want done. You don't want someone to break your window so that it needs to be fixed. These two pieces of work cancel out, ideally. We seem to have no problem with this concept in our homes, where we work together and conserve our resources, or in our organisations, so why is it different at a planetary level? Perhaps it was because we couldn't organise ourselves on a planetary level, but with the internet this is clearly becoming something we can do, if it has not actually become so.
Returning to our homes and the broken window analogy, we would presumably want a society where no-one had an incentive to break your window deliberately, and your window would be designed and constructed in such a way that the possibility of it being accidentally broken was minimised. That makes perfect sense at the level of your home, but of you are a glazier you might quite like the idea that windows get broken as it's work for you.
So, again, logic seems to dictate that we should minimise the total amount of work that needs doing, at a planetary level and this requires co-operation in not deliberately making work for ourselves or others. The reward being commensurate with the proportion of work done seems workable and fair - so far.
A big problem seems to be that at the moment we reward more work, in most cases. More windows fixed = more money to the glazier. How are we going to reward people according to the proportion of work that they do? Is this as impractical as having a unified scale of work so that it can be all be equated? What if we arranged it so that no work needed doing? What if there were people who couldn't do any of the work that needed doing either ever, or at a particular period of their life (too young or too old)? Rather than deal with these complexities, why not just let people have at least the means to survival without the need for them to have "banked" (or to have the potential to bank) any work?
If we could enumerate all work on a standard scale of standard units, we could perhaps consider a system in which the reward was commensurate with the work. Even if we could work out a single scale for all work, there are problems with this arrangement. Would we want people competing to do more and more work for more and more reward? Or would we say that reward would be commensurate with the proportion of work done.
To know what proportion of work someone has done, we need to know what the total work done is, but either way, we have to face the question of what work we want done. You don't want someone to break your window so that it needs to be fixed. These two pieces of work cancel out, ideally. We seem to have no problem with this concept in our homes, where we work together and conserve our resources, or in our organisations, so why is it different at a planetary level? Perhaps it was because we couldn't organise ourselves on a planetary level, but with the internet this is clearly becoming something we can do, if it has not actually become so.
Returning to our homes and the broken window analogy, we would presumably want a society where no-one had an incentive to break your window deliberately, and your window would be designed and constructed in such a way that the possibility of it being accidentally broken was minimised. That makes perfect sense at the level of your home, but of you are a glazier you might quite like the idea that windows get broken as it's work for you.
So, again, logic seems to dictate that we should minimise the total amount of work that needs doing, at a planetary level and this requires co-operation in not deliberately making work for ourselves or others. The reward being commensurate with the proportion of work done seems workable and fair - so far.
A big problem seems to be that at the moment we reward more work, in most cases. More windows fixed = more money to the glazier. How are we going to reward people according to the proportion of work that they do? Is this as impractical as having a unified scale of work so that it can be all be equated? What if we arranged it so that no work needed doing? What if there were people who couldn't do any of the work that needed doing either ever, or at a particular period of their life (too young or too old)? Rather than deal with these complexities, why not just let people have at least the means to survival without the need for them to have "banked" (or to have the potential to bank) any work?
Communism with robots
One pithy criticism of the RBE is that it's communism with robots. Here we're supposed to take communism to be wrong/bad, and because the RBE shares one or more attributes with communism, it must also be wrong/bad. I hope you can already see what a cheap shot it is just to stick a label on something and assume that can take the place of a proper logical critique of it.
Nevertheless, I want to examine what the RBE does have in common with communism and see what if anything is wrong with that / those attribute(s). The RBE says that the planet's resources should be declared the common heritage of all humans living on the planet (or words to that effect). Everything belongs to everybody. This doesn't sit well with the argument that someone has worked hard etc, to get what they've got and why should they give it away.
First, does everyone get a share of the planet's resources based on how hard they work? I think the answer is obviously not. Let's compare:
(a) a super rich person who has everything s/he needs and probably everything s/he wants (such that money can buy). S/he may be highly skilled at gambling his/her spare money in the financial markets and coming out with more money.
(b) Someone in a third world country working in a sweat shop for not enough money to acquire the basics of life, or perhaps someone who has to walk miles each day just to get water.
Whilst there maybe a correlation between how hard someone has worked and what they've got, it is plain that there is not a single baseline from which everyone started. If there were, maybe the work more, have more model would stand up.
For an extreme example, let's also look at a burglar. S/he 'works' nights (unsocial hours), and is highly skilled in a stress filled "job". So, s/he's worked hard to get what s/he's got, and why should s/he give it away?
We have to examine what the work that's being done is. The work in example (a) is not socially constructive. The extra money that (a) gets must either be taken from someone else, or created out of thin air. In example (b) we see work that is technically unnecessary. Clearly it is technically possible to pipe water to all otherwise habitable places and the use of sweat shops reduces humans to below the rank of machines. They have to do the work more cheaply than it can be done by a machine, otherwise it would be done by a machine.
What work is the burglar doing? He (let's assume it's he), is presumably forcing entry into someone's home, causing damage that will need repairing. He may well make a mess looking for valuables, creating work tidying it up. He also creates work for the police investigating the burglary, and for the insurance company who will pay out to reimburse the burgled householder. Here we see how the notion of private ownership creates work for the people who secure it (locks, alarms, etc), those who insure it, those who try to acquire it (burglars) and those who try to stop them (police). In short there is a whole industry around getting and hanging onto stuff.
In my ramblings, I haven't yet made any ethical point about innate equality or birthright to a fair share of the planet's resources.
What benefit does someone directly derive from ownership of something to the exclusion of others? It is clear what disbenefits it has - they must secure it, insure it, and pay taxes to have a police force to enforce the ownership system. If someone steals your car, the most immediate problem for you is that you lose the utility that the car brings, but if someone steals your jewellery, what have you actually lost? There's no real utility in it. OK you've lost the money you spent on it, but that money is only as good as the utility it brings you.
The underlying psychology in possessing things is the mentality of scarcity - there isn't enough to go round so I have to grab what I want and stop other people from getting it. But let's look at cars again. At any one time, most of them are parked, bringing no utility to anyone. Some of them are not yet owned by anyone. There plainly is no scarcity of cars (in the developed world) - in fact the opposite is true in many places, in that owners have to pay money to park their cars.
Thus we have a whole industry of traffic wardens, parking tickets, appeals tribunals, parking meters, car alarms, car repairs, garages, garage alarms, car insurance, and so on, all to achieve the aim of a car owner having exclusive rights to using a car that for most of the time s/he doesn't need or want to use.
So here we have something that's not scarce, but that is treated as though it is, and that generates work managing the "scarcity". What is going on? Why are we pretending something is scarce when it isn't? In worse cases, we make something actually scarce even though it doesn't have to be - for example paying farmers not to grow food (set aside). Do we have some deep-seated desire to have something that someone else does not have, even to the extent that we will actually make an effort to ensure there isn't enough to go round, or is this a genuine fear of scarcity, an over-developed survival instinct?
It's undeniably true that the planet's resources are finite, and therefore it is logically true that there could be some things that are genuinely scarce. Surely this must be where our attention should be focussed, and not on creating scarcity, or pretending there's scarcity where there isn't? Isn't this just logic rather than communism?
Nevertheless, I want to examine what the RBE does have in common with communism and see what if anything is wrong with that / those attribute(s). The RBE says that the planet's resources should be declared the common heritage of all humans living on the planet (or words to that effect). Everything belongs to everybody. This doesn't sit well with the argument that someone has worked hard etc, to get what they've got and why should they give it away.
First, does everyone get a share of the planet's resources based on how hard they work? I think the answer is obviously not. Let's compare:
(a) a super rich person who has everything s/he needs and probably everything s/he wants (such that money can buy). S/he may be highly skilled at gambling his/her spare money in the financial markets and coming out with more money.
(b) Someone in a third world country working in a sweat shop for not enough money to acquire the basics of life, or perhaps someone who has to walk miles each day just to get water.
Whilst there maybe a correlation between how hard someone has worked and what they've got, it is plain that there is not a single baseline from which everyone started. If there were, maybe the work more, have more model would stand up.
For an extreme example, let's also look at a burglar. S/he 'works' nights (unsocial hours), and is highly skilled in a stress filled "job". So, s/he's worked hard to get what s/he's got, and why should s/he give it away?
We have to examine what the work that's being done is. The work in example (a) is not socially constructive. The extra money that (a) gets must either be taken from someone else, or created out of thin air. In example (b) we see work that is technically unnecessary. Clearly it is technically possible to pipe water to all otherwise habitable places and the use of sweat shops reduces humans to below the rank of machines. They have to do the work more cheaply than it can be done by a machine, otherwise it would be done by a machine.
What work is the burglar doing? He (let's assume it's he), is presumably forcing entry into someone's home, causing damage that will need repairing. He may well make a mess looking for valuables, creating work tidying it up. He also creates work for the police investigating the burglary, and for the insurance company who will pay out to reimburse the burgled householder. Here we see how the notion of private ownership creates work for the people who secure it (locks, alarms, etc), those who insure it, those who try to acquire it (burglars) and those who try to stop them (police). In short there is a whole industry around getting and hanging onto stuff.
In my ramblings, I haven't yet made any ethical point about innate equality or birthright to a fair share of the planet's resources.
What benefit does someone directly derive from ownership of something to the exclusion of others? It is clear what disbenefits it has - they must secure it, insure it, and pay taxes to have a police force to enforce the ownership system. If someone steals your car, the most immediate problem for you is that you lose the utility that the car brings, but if someone steals your jewellery, what have you actually lost? There's no real utility in it. OK you've lost the money you spent on it, but that money is only as good as the utility it brings you.
The underlying psychology in possessing things is the mentality of scarcity - there isn't enough to go round so I have to grab what I want and stop other people from getting it. But let's look at cars again. At any one time, most of them are parked, bringing no utility to anyone. Some of them are not yet owned by anyone. There plainly is no scarcity of cars (in the developed world) - in fact the opposite is true in many places, in that owners have to pay money to park their cars.
Thus we have a whole industry of traffic wardens, parking tickets, appeals tribunals, parking meters, car alarms, car repairs, garages, garage alarms, car insurance, and so on, all to achieve the aim of a car owner having exclusive rights to using a car that for most of the time s/he doesn't need or want to use.
So here we have something that's not scarce, but that is treated as though it is, and that generates work managing the "scarcity". What is going on? Why are we pretending something is scarce when it isn't? In worse cases, we make something actually scarce even though it doesn't have to be - for example paying farmers not to grow food (set aside). Do we have some deep-seated desire to have something that someone else does not have, even to the extent that we will actually make an effort to ensure there isn't enough to go round, or is this a genuine fear of scarcity, an over-developed survival instinct?
It's undeniably true that the planet's resources are finite, and therefore it is logically true that there could be some things that are genuinely scarce. Surely this must be where our attention should be focussed, and not on creating scarcity, or pretending there's scarcity where there isn't? Isn't this just logic rather than communism?
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Q&A with Peter Joseph
An excellent Q&A session with Peter Joseph, director (etc) of Zeitgeist Moving Forward and founder of The Zeitgeist Movement. Peter nearly always manages to squeeze an answer out of practically any question, but always says if he doesn't have an answer - a rare occurrence. Each answer is always a mini talk, and I don't think those who didn't get to ask a question would have been disappointed.
Some questioners were tempted into giving their own little talks, but the MC would direct them to ask a question. Inevitably the questions tended to be asking PJ to do things, or if he was going to do things. "I am doing my best!" was his amenable answer. The other question that is always asked is (in various guises) "how are we going to get from where we are now to a Resource Based Economy?" The proverbial million dollar question
Some questioners were tempted into giving their own little talks, but the MC would direct them to ask a question. Inevitably the questions tended to be asking PJ to do things, or if he was going to do things. "I am doing my best!" was his amenable answer. The other question that is always asked is (in various guises) "how are we going to get from where we are now to a Resource Based Economy?" The proverbial million dollar question
Nature is a dictatorship; cooperation
I hope you won't think it glib or distasteful for me to comment that the devastating earthquake in Japan and the resultant terrifying tsunamis in the region show us above all else how powerless we are in the face of nature. Politics is useless in that you can't vote against an earthquake and so is money insofar as you can't buy or sell an earthquake.
Money will be needed to clear up the mess, and paradoxically this counts as economic growth, but the other thing that the aftermath of disasters (natural or man made) shows up is how we tend to co-operate at such times. The question is why do we revert to competing during more settled times?
Money will be needed to clear up the mess, and paradoxically this counts as economic growth, but the other thing that the aftermath of disasters (natural or man made) shows up is how we tend to co-operate at such times. The question is why do we revert to competing during more settled times?
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Protests against cuts ... and job losses?
Working in the public sector I share the anxiety that services are not (or not just) being made more efficient, but are being reduced. I don't share all the protesters' values though.
I want services to be more efficient. I don't want to create jobs, I want less work for humans. This was the big promise of technology, and we could do it.
What needs doing? How can we do it most efficiently now, and more efficiently in the future (answer: technology in the majority of cases)? There may be work left over for humans to do, but as little as possible, preferably.
Those in futile, pointless, socially destructive jobs, and jobs that can be done by technology are basically being paid for doing something that doesn't need doing by a human, or shouldn't be done at all, so they can get money to access the means to survive. Why not just arrange for everyone to have the means to survive directly, instead of creating pointless work (or worse still destructive work). Then people are freed from shackles and excel at what they are good at, benefitting humanity and themselves. Nothing else will do.
I want services to be more efficient. I don't want to create jobs, I want less work for humans. This was the big promise of technology, and we could do it.
What needs doing? How can we do it most efficiently now, and more efficiently in the future (answer: technology in the majority of cases)? There may be work left over for humans to do, but as little as possible, preferably.
Those in futile, pointless, socially destructive jobs, and jobs that can be done by technology are basically being paid for doing something that doesn't need doing by a human, or shouldn't be done at all, so they can get money to access the means to survive. Why not just arrange for everyone to have the means to survive directly, instead of creating pointless work (or worse still destructive work). Then people are freed from shackles and excel at what they are good at, benefitting humanity and themselves. Nothing else will do.
Plumbers
I'm not having a go at this trade in particular - plumbers are victims of the monetary system. It's just that my boiler is playing up and I was thinking about the call out cost of plumbers (perhaps heating engineers) - the money you pay them before they actually start fixing anything. In our current system making a boiler that doesn't play up would be impossible, because most people would not have or be prepared to part with enough money to buy one, and they would have to cost a lot of money because there would be no need for servicing / repair, and that's money and jobs.
And the job of plumber / heating engineer is so specialised and its practitioners so scarce they can proverbially "charge what they like".
We'd be one step nearer sanity if we knew the lifetime costs of things - in this example all the parts and labour expense (plus of course fuel and water) as well as the up front cost of buying and installing the system. But total sanity only comes when we systems think. The boiler should be built to last. The home should be built to conserve heat, so that it needs a smaller boiler, if any.
In our homes we don't want to pay the plumber and we don't want to create work in the home for us or anyone else. Why do we want to do this at country and planetary level?
And the job of plumber / heating engineer is so specialised and its practitioners so scarce they can proverbially "charge what they like".
We'd be one step nearer sanity if we knew the lifetime costs of things - in this example all the parts and labour expense (plus of course fuel and water) as well as the up front cost of buying and installing the system. But total sanity only comes when we systems think. The boiler should be built to last. The home should be built to conserve heat, so that it needs a smaller boiler, if any.
In our homes we don't want to pay the plumber and we don't want to create work in the home for us or anyone else. Why do we want to do this at country and planetary level?
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