I think you’d find there would be millions of male porn stars servicing a few thousand female porn stars, millions of female mainstream movie stars, rockers of both sexes, and a smattering of people who like to fix cars and work on plumbing. Especially that nasty plumbing.
Ignoring for a moment that such a system sounds vaguely familiar, or how impractical it would be to just ‘get it up and running’, my question would be what do we do with all the folks who would answer your question of what do they want to do with “Kick back on the couch and eat Doritos”? I mean, what I REALLY like to do is hang out at the beach all day soaking up the sun, go scuba diving and hiking, and generally fuck off whenever I can. Where is the person or persons who enjoy making that happen for me?
My next question would be…how do we get folks to do the jobs no one wants to do? After all, I have serious doubts that anyone really has as their lifes greatest dream the thought of picking up garbage, sweeping streets, sewer worker, picking lettuce or window washer…to name but a few. How will we get those jobs done…or will we just wait around hoping someone decides that, yeah, I REALLY want to gut fish so that you can have some nice fish steaks for din din?
If you are, instead, talking a labor for barter system, i.e. you give me a pig and I’ll hook network your house, I’ll get Joe to butcher the pig by putting in his WiFi system and internet connection, etc etc, then I’m still not seeing it. It will still naturally work out that those with the skills will accumulate more. A doctor, for instance, is going to be able to barter his/her skills for more than a street sweeper or garbage collector. Thats if you could get such a chaotic muddle to work in a modern society anyway. There are a lot of jobs out there that get done to make a modern city work…how do those folks get ‘paid’? Do we collectively give them a fraction of our skilled and unskilled labor? How do they collect? The doctor will see you now Mr Street Sweeper…you have 1.7 min. Welcome to Smiths House of Food Mr. Garbage Collector…you are entitled to 15.78 calories of food or drink. Choose wisely.
-XT
CPA or not, your dad doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
The fundamental problem with your economic system is that there are a lot of jobs that need to be done that people would not neccessarily do without some kind of incentive. Who cleans shit? Who removes the trash? Who digs in the mines? What you would end up is an economy too highly skewed in dabbling in interesting hobbies and not doing actual work that needs to get done. A salaried job market serves a vital purpose by encouraging people into fields that society needs or wants.
A second problem is how resources are allocated. That’s great that some guy likes helping match people with cars. How many cars should he keep in stock. Why can’t I just take any car and just crash them into trees for fun?
I think you’d find there would be millions of male porn stars servicing a few thousand female porn stars, millions of female mainstream movie stars, rockers of both sexes, and a smattering of people who like to fix cars and work on plumbing. Especially that nasty plumbing.
Ignoring for a moment that such a system sounds vaguely familiar, or how impractical it would be to just ‘get it up and running’, my question would be what do we do with all the folks who would answer your question of what do they want to do with “Kick back on the couch and eat Doritos”? I mean, what I REALLY like to do is hang out at the beach all day soaking up the sun, go scuba diving and hiking, and generally fuck off whenever I can. Where is the person or persons who enjoy making that happen for me?
My next question would be…how do we get folks to do the jobs no one wants to do? After all, I have serious doubts that anyone really has as their lifes greatest dream the thought of picking up garbage, sweeping streets, sewer worker, picking lettuce or window washer…to name but a few. How will we get those jobs done…or will we just wait around hoping someone decides that, yeah, I REALLY want to gut fish so that you can have some nice fish steaks for din din?
If you are, instead, talking a labor for barter system, i.e. you give me a pig and I’ll hook network your house, I’ll get Joe to butcher the pig by putting in his WiFi system and internet connection, etc etc, then I’m still not seeing it. It will still naturally work out that those with the skills will accumulate more. A doctor, for instance, is going to be able to barter his/her skills for more than a street sweeper or garbage collector. Thats if you could get such a chaotic muddle to work in a modern society anyway. There are a lot of jobs out there that get done to make a modern city work…how do those folks get ‘paid’? Do we collectively give them a fraction of our skilled and unskilled labor? How do they collect? The doctor will see you now Mr Street Sweeper…you have 1.7 min. Welcome to Smiths House of Food Mr. Garbage Collector…you are entitled to 15.78 calories of food or drink. Choose wisely.
-XT
Sorry about the double post there…gods know what happened in the last 15 min while I tried to submit that.
-XT
Look, the idea that at one point in the past someone found a gold nugget or a coal seam, extracted those resources and became rich, and passed on their wealth to their descendents who are now members of the wealth aristocracy is ludicrous.
Ludicrous because finding that gold nugget or iron ore or whatever is worthless in and of itself. Even if it required no work to develop the resource, even if you could literally pick it up off the ground like a gold nugget from a streambed. Why? Because finding that natural wealth won’t do you a lick of good when some guy with a sword comes along and offers you a deal: you hand over the gold nugget and he won’t hack your head off with his sword. And there’s always a guy with a sword, always, except sometimes they get a little more polite and organized about it. Then we have the feudal system…guys with swords own the farmers and craftsmen, and fight among themselves over who owns exactly which farmers and craftsmen.
And anyway, ancient wealth wasn’t created by stumbling across natural resources, it was created by farming. Everyone has to eat, and you can’t eat gold. Back in ancient times everyone was a hunter-gatherer. Then we get agriculture, and 90% of the population are farmers, 9% are artisans, and 1% are guys with swords who alternate their time between taking stuff from the farmers and artisans they own, or going over and taking stuff from farmers and artisans owned by some other swordsman.
What good would finding “natural resources” do for a farmer in this situation? Nothing. It wasn’t the chance of happening to live on top of a natural resource that made people wealthy, it was the chance of being born into a family of swordsmen who took their wealth from others. That is what made people wealthy.
Ever read old novels, how a nobleman involved in “trade” would have to keep it secret, it was demeaning, even up to the 1800s? Why? Because it meant that he was a schmuck who made his living by producing goods and services rather than a wise guy who made his living by his sword. Yeah, just like Henry Hill, the analogy between aristocrats and mafiosi is exact. And this is the history of the world up until a few hundred years ago.
The idea that there is such a thing as “private property” is a radical one. It means that people can keep the fruits of their labor, rather than handing it over to a swordsman at the swordsman’s pleasure. This is what capitalism is all about, the liberation of mankind from feudalism and slavery. But it doesn’t come about “naturally”, we have to protect ourselves from foreign swordsmen (invading other countries), and native-born organized swordsmen (those who would set themselves up as aristocrats) and freelance swordsmen (thieves and other street criminals).
The alternative to capitalism isn’t a utopia where everyone shares everything, it is slavery where everything and everyone is owned by a few guys with swords.
The hamsters were all kicking back on the couch eating Doritos 
I don’t think general reciprocity is impractical. The main challenges are not so much “what to do about the lazyasses”. See my prior posts on fairness; and just as an exercise, count up:
• All the folks on welfare or otherwise unemployed
• All the folks working in banking
• Whatever percentage of law enforcement you figure is devoted to protecting against or responding to property theft, and also of the judiciary and penal systems
• All the people working at jobs that aren’t accomplishing anything desirable or useful, whether because of union rules or because undesirable or not those accomplishments generate money
• All the stock traders and ancillary-occupation workers
All these folks and anyone else whose job would not exist in a non-money system might as well be sitting on the couch eating Doritos, in the sense that if that’s all that an identical quantity of people were doing in a general reciprocity economy we’re collectively no worse off.
When you’re done with that exercise, consider, for a moment, my observation that sitting on a couch eating Doritos is fucking boring. I would not assume people would be uninterested in working. Working, being productive, doing stuff, can be fun. Working for some jerkoff with a bad attitude, generally not fun. Working at a dead-end job void of creativity, generally not fun.
General reciprocity economies tend to put a lot of emphasis on “face”, social reputation. You would no more want to be thought of as a goof-off not accomplishing anything than you would want, in our current society, to be thought of as a sexually unattractive dweeb that no one would want to couple with.
No, the big challenge for general reciprocity is not motivation versus goofing off, it’s decision-making and organizing. Establishing the priorities and goals. Making the plans. If no one is paying the salary, a willing team of several hundred would-be bridge-builders doesn’t intrinsically have a team-leader, does it?
I don’t know if general reciprocity requires a working anarchy as the decision-making apparatus, but they do dovetail very nicely, ideologically and practically. (Certainly all discussions of anarchy tend sooner or later to call into question the continued role of money or any other specific reciprocity system).
You’re assuming there would always be people with a reason to take from other people by force. That makes sense in a scarcity-based economy such as agriculture. It makes virtually no sense in a non-scarcity-based economy such as the general reciprocity of the hunter-gatherer clans. People might fight with you due to thinking you’re an unlikeable shit, but they probably won’t fight with you over possessions, not when the modality for getting stuff is to go to where the stuff is and get some of it and no one asks you to reciprocate by putting down some other stuff of equal value and so on.
We know that social reputation as a control mechanism more or less works for very small communities. Is there any evidence that such a system is workable in cities with hundreds of thousands or millions of people?
Heh. I agree, if we gave up industry and agriculture and reverted to hunting and gathering we wouldn’t have many guys with swords stealing our stuff. Of course we’d still have intergroup violence over territory and intragroup violence over who had sex with who and who’s an unlikeable shit who needs to get smacked upside the head until they shut their fucking pie-hole. 
Now, I don’t see how this is possible on a planet with 6 billion people. But hey, I’ll agree that with Star Trek style replicators or equivalent nanontechnology capitalism becomes effectively obsolete. Although even then there are going to be things that can’t be replicated. With a replicator everyone can sit in their replicated underwear in their replicated apartment eating replicated doritos and flipping channels on a replicated TV console. In that case people might produce TV shows for free, like I provide fascinating SDMB posts for free, just because I like to. Capitalism is only needed for scarce goods and services, and plenty of people act in amateur drama productions or amatuer music performances or amateur porn that I think there’d be plenty of entertainment product even if most people only got social benefits but no material benefits. But that supposes people with a lot of time on their hands because their basic and even luxury needs are met for free or close to free.
And they sure aren’t making much land anymore, so how do we decide who gets a 5 acre estate on Manhattan island, and who lives in a high-rise apartment on Manhattan island, and who lives on a 500 acre ranch in Montana and who lives in a high-rise apartment in Montana?
Ah, that parts easy. We do it in reverse alphabetical order. So, guys with ZY and X in their names get first dibs on the really juicy estates (and thankfully for me there aren’t all that many guys with Z and Y in their names 
).
This way I can sit on my couch in my luxury 500 acre ranch here in New Mexico eating designer Doritos and watching my big screen plasma TV and surfing the web for all that new amature porn you mentioned…
-XT
As an attempt at a practical way (i.e. no replicators) to take the harsher edge off capitalism, why not make all corporate tax returns public? The reporters whose wet dream is to break the next Enron story would love to delve into all that boring crap to find out (for example) that Microsoft’s owner of record is a Cayman Islands holding corporation.
Well, let’s stir in some pragmatism, shall we?
No one is going to sit on any couches eating Doritos in a general recip economy if no one is willing / interested in producing Doritos. Or couches.
More to the point: the question of whether or not general recip can work with 10 billion people and coexist with modern technology is an important one. One thing is (for me) self-evident though: we aren’t going to destroy capitalism and then try to make general recip work, that just ain’t gonna happen, so insofar as the critiques of capitalism are accurate and relevant (I think they are), the solution to capitalism must necessarily involve experimenting with modalities such as general recip until we derive the formula that will supplant the market economy gradually and make it obsolete.
Dr. Love:
Again, right on target. My gut sense is that it is possible if the general structure is sort of an absolute confederacy: authority and initiative focused on the local level, more people involved only for things that need more people to be involved (project-wise) or as a consequence of decisions themselves being made more expansive and permanent (issue & decision-wise).
- Cayman Island holding companies are not illegal
- Public corporation’s finances are already a matter of public record
- The amount of taxes a corporation pays is found in their financial statements and is also a matter of public record
- You are not going to find some line in their income statement that says "secret 5) All public companies are required to undergo an audit by trained accountants
Cayman Islands bank account - The “boring crap” can consist of tens of millions of emails, paper documents, and other loose files spread across hundreds of locations and thousands of employees.
- My consulting firm’s job is to “delve into all that boring crap”. Our employees are a combination of lawyers, MBAs, CPAs, forensic accountants, and technology experts. We have specialized software and equipment for investigating that much crap. It costs thousands and thousands (if not millions) of dollars to hire us to investigate fraud and other misdeeds. In other words, some wannabe Woodward or Berstein is not going to find an “order to commit fraud” memo in some filing cabinet.
- Someone already created a law to try and enforce more transparancy into corprate financial activities. It’s called Sorbanes-Oxely
http://www.aicpa.org/info/sarbanes_oxley_summary.htm
Okay, I think we’ve found the source of the flaws in capitalism.
msmith isn’t working hard enough!!!
You guys are great. I’d just like to throw that out there. Anyway.
AHunter3 perfectly nailed what I brain-fartedly left out of my no-money model: social stigma. There would have to be extreme social pressure to be productive and useful with one’s time. And yes, I’ll admit it: the idea came from Star Trek.
The problem with your Nerdocracy is that is still doesn’t address the issue of efficiently allocating resources. Ok so everyone is busy doing something. That’s great. But how does anyone know if that something is something society needs? If a certain region needs more housing, by what mechanism do more houses get built? If there’s not enough crops, what tells the guy who likes farming that he needs to farm more?
I think it highlights one of the great things about capitalism. There’s money to be made even from other companies disasterous failures.
msmith537:
Totally agree.
AHunter3 wrote, earlier on this page:
Are you mulling this over? Do you have any ideas? (If not, lack of ideas on your part, or even on my part, do not equate to “therefore this cannot work”. It is, however, a problem that needs solving if capitalism is to be significantly improved upon)
Regarding the organization question, in two parts.
Part I: Addressing the needs of society, as posed by msmith537.
The only thing I can think of offhand is some kind of governmental regulatory commission. Short of drafting people into certain careers (which I think we can all agree is extremely icky and un-freedom-like), the government would issue public service announcements. Also, it might be that the system would regulate itself. In other words, if word gets around that the suburbs of Detroit need more housing, more people go build houses there, attracted by the idea of completing large projects in a newly-opened area.
Part II: Organization within group efforts, as posed by AHunter3.
This is actually an easy problem to resolve, once we abandon our traditional ideas about the necessity of money. In this no-money system, there can still be companies. Groups of people with a heirarchical structure who work together in specific roles to accomplish a larger task. The do-what-you-want-with-your-life idea is tempered by not only social stigma to be productive, but also by job availability. Yes, people will still have “jobs.” Let’s say that I want to work in the field of large scale construction. Bridges, large buildings, etc. I might really want to be the leader of a construction crew, but simply declaring myself that does not make it so, unless I start my own small company. No, if I want a job in large scale construction, a company would agree to take me on first as grunt labor, and I’d work my way up, same as it is now. So if the construction company I work for builds a bridge, there’s most definitely a heirarchy. The people who lead the other workers are identified as such by their superior knowledge/ability and experience, not by a salary.