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Anything to do with 'Systematic Inventive Thinking':
https://www.google.com/webhp?q...

This book - "Inside the Box" - is a good introduction:
http://www.insidetheboxinnovat...

Also, "Get back in the box" (haven't fully read it yet):
http://www.rushkoff.com/books/...

Coercion, by Douglas Rushkoff
http://www.rushkoff.com/coercion/

Trust Us, We're Experts, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
http://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html

Anonymous Coward wrote: "The US economy ("What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine.");"

Thanks, AC, as that is insightful. I've thought on and off about related issues, but you put it very succinctly.

In general, the issue you raise is the economy of "imperialism", or "theft", or "parasitism", or perhaps, to some degree depending on the circumstances, "rent".

For example on "rent" being tricky, the "enclosure" acts in the past take land away from native people and then sometimes rent it or other land back to them, and feudal estates and castles also had aspects of that (where castles were used as military fortresses to enforce "rents" from the locals). Much (but not all) of the way material wealth is distributed in our post-industrial society still links back to a degree to feudalism and who was a (land) lord or child of a lord back then. Still, rent in a slippery issue because it gets at the issue of "ownership", and ultimately ownership of the land or materials taken from it has a strong component of "finders keepers" and "might makes right" (beyond any other social negotiation). There is a degree of exchange in rental transactions too, for the upkeep of property, or for taking on risk related to the market. A lot of it has to do with the social consequences and who got privileged access to resources and why and what other options there are in terms of a level playing field. See also:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/

One can fit imperialism, theft, and parasitism into the other four categories, but it is a stretch. For example:
* Imperialism includes subsisting off of other people's land and other people's labor (including through both physical slavery and wage slavery), rather than taking resources from the land around you and doing the work yourself.
* Imperialism gives gifts of stolen or misappropriated goods (including misdirected taxes) to the friends and enforcers of empire.
* Imperialism generally has a strong planning component (like the US "Defense" budget is up to around $1,2 trillion dollars annually or more when you include everything including interest and future obligations, which is approaching 10% of the US economy, and it sets the tone for economies around the globe).
* Imperialism generally offers an "exchange" in terms of "protection", like the Mafia, so, if you give imperialists what they demand, they promise to not hurt you very much in other ways.

Now, there are shades of gray in all this (one reason I tend to say these economies are "interwoven"). For example, planning is often backed up by some kind of penalty, such as imprisonment for not paying taxes or social ostracism for not cooperating. Gift economies have some aspect of exchange, in the sense that those why give a lot in them tend to get social status. Often what is exchanges is something that someone collected from the environment in a subsistence way. And so on.

So, I might add a fifth item then that is more like:

* The theft economy ("What is yours is mine because I can take it with relative impunity because I am more powerful in some important way.")

Or maybe it needs some pithy example ("Give me that or I'll break your legs.") Although that misuses the notion of "giving" and a "gift".

Where more "powerful" may mean bigger, stronger, faster, cleverer, more informed, more socially connected, sneakier, more deceptive, meaner, better at propaganda, readier access to weapons, and so on. However, power in a society can still shift as what matters shifts (being personally bigger and stronger does not mean as much now as it did in the past, where the bankers and speculators are able to hire armed guards as they have a strong control of propaganda apparatus). Related:
"The Mythology of Wealth"

"There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose."

In theory. In practice, the chain of command from a boss on up ensures that resources will be directed to the chain of command, even if the means doing things less efficiently. Anything on management in the real world suggests that compensation of managers is based on how many people they manage. This can lead to vast inefficiencies in any bureaucracy. But the organizations persist because their success is more dependent on things like market position, a concentration of capital, market barriers to entry, and state-granted monopolies than innovation or efficiency.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html

From the last: "This book discusses chronic patterns of organizational malfunction that I have observed personally many times while working for computer firms (4 years at Hewlett-Packard and 6 years at Tandem, among others). "

"A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade."

As Jane Jacobs suggests, city economies work best when they have their own local currencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

And before the alliance some suggest of the feudal aristocracy with some of the new factory owners,
http://rushkoff.com/
the direct market economy, based on IOUs, even without currency, worked quite well:
http://www.digitalcoin.info/The_Essence_of_Money.html

"A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money)."

As above, neither large businesses or borrowing money are really needed for most people to have a happy life, or for us to have a very productive economy.

"Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence."

Sure. Except that what about external costs, both positive and negative?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
What about the question of who gets natural resources or fiat dollars first? What about the costs to society of private property claimed in ideas or digital goods that can be easily duplicated? Those are the sort of questions an emphasis on property rights may miss. And that's why, say, taxes and other cost will go down if everyone got a free luxury electric care and single payer health care:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care

"Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies)."

Can you provide examples? If you look at the matriarchal Iroquois, whose constitution provided a model for our own, they had communal land ownership and a mostly egalitarian society. Da

http://www.dccomics.com/comics/?cm=5284

#6, I couldn't find a quick link to the series itself. Rushkoff has been doing a series about this through Vertigo since December, and its quite impressive. One of the best comics I've read in a long time.

http://www.rushkoff.com/comics.html?PHPSESSID=e37a e111faea64e93e76e9c2c57d8bf6

his more ties in with the bible, but its very much about the government and the things going on here.

It's certainly a popular thought right now.

Douglas Ruskoff seems to think so. He also thinks its a good model for religeon.

A person can only intake so much information. Desensitization will play a factor in people caring less about other's raw data. Maybe it will help us look at each other in a different light: what has this person accomplished with their life and who has this person helped or hurt?

I am going to have to go ahead and agreed with you on this.

In psychology we call this "habitutation". There are a lot of things that enter our mind, especially due to the senses alone. Think about all the stuff you could actually be hearing and seeing right now. Instead you've turned off your hearing and are focusing on the computer screen. Focus out for a second and you might suddenly pick up the whine of your computer fan or the drone of some far away television.

The social atmosphere changes with the forces that influence it, and filters out parts that are inconvenient or too powerful to notice. World War One brought on a sweeping change in the way the people think about themselves. People started talking about themselves in terms of form instead of content. Concepts of honor and chilvary made way for personality and style. But great changes in mass psychology are not merely stories in history books. Its not hard to notice that the internet makes information the paramount variable - thats why they call it the information economy. Without content, you have nothing. Thats a lesson the dot-bomb bubble taught us. and this focus on information permeates the way we interact with each other: look at Douglas Rushkoff's idea of information as social currency - he says that information is presupposed in our interactions and those that can offer it have power (not in those words). Information is power. Information dominates our thinking, our interactions, our business, our media, our newspapers, our politics. Its a good thing, because the more we come to realize how important it is, the more we will value it, and the more we will reject those that make false promises and empty threats.

May I refer you to this great article by Doug Rushkoff.

Social Currency

Bottom-line: the "open source" encyclopedias are noble ideas, but they'll never be accepted mainstream. They'll never be institutionalized the way that Britannica has and will continue to be.

"Fight Club" is a production of Fox 2000 Pictures, distributed in the USA by 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, both wholly owned subsidiaries of News Corp.

"American Beauty" is a production of DreamWorks SKG, filmed at Warner Bros. Studios.

"The Matrix" is a production of Village Roadshow Productions, distributed in the USA by Warner Bros., both wholly owned subsidiaries of AOL/Time-Warner.

We'll both be long dead before ownership of these properties reverts to the public domain, if they ever do. Our pop culture is already 0wned. The name of the game is ownership; companies can't ensure a continued revenue stream by allowing you to own anything outright.

However, the same companies depend on the public's acquiescence for their power. If people refuse to merely lease, then the option to buy will remain. Alas, the fewer people choose this option, the more expensive it becomes.

Now's the time when I plug Doug Rushkoff's insightful book on the subject, called "Coercion"

-Isaac