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http://www.technocracy.org/stu...

Written mostly during the 1930s by M. King Hubbert of peak oil infamy. Describes a sustainable society directed by science instead of wishful thinking.

The 1930s technocracy movement outlined a society without money, thinking that it and "The Price System" inevitably lead to overconsumption and collapse. They suggested replacing it with energy chits equally distributed among the population, valid for one year to prevent debt accumulation.

http://www.technocracy.org/study-guide

There will eventually be a tipping point, where the predictions of Technocracy of the first stages of collapse will come true. Originally it was thought that this stage was occurring in the 1930's, it is now believed that fully automated manufacturing and an information-centric and highly connected society is the trigger for this massive change in our society. There are some helpful videos available at Technocracy 101.

Do you think society will collapse with a massive unemployed class who can no longer work and therefor will be unable to consume goods?
Or will society move past the price system and work out a real solution?

An alternative is the debt jubilee http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/05/could-national-debt-forgiveness-help-kickstart-the-american-economy/

I subscribe to the technocrat view of money, their 1930s study guide was mostly written by M. King Hubbert of peak oil fame.
http://www.technocracy.org/study-guide

This sees the money and price system as self-destructive by way of inherently building a mounting debt against the future. The solution is to cap overall wealth by replacing money with energy chits; these expire every couple of years so no lien can build up against future energy supply.

This is exactly what Technocracy has been saying for over 80 years. They were the first to "treat the economy like a physics problem", the only difference is that they saw it coming and warned us way back when it was far easier to do something about it. Now, whether we can do something about it without too much pain is in question, but if we can then we have to do something about it now while we still can. Like one commenter said here earlier, "The only way out is a radical reform of the fundemental way our economy is _defined_". Technocracy has provided a logical answer to this too that is worth checking out. It needs a bit of updating since the movement is so small right now, but the underlying basis for it all is still quite sound. If you want a good scientific way of looking at our economy, and how it relates to our environment, then this is the place to start. I'm glad to see more modern research being done that confirms this.

analysis of the cause of the great depression

another explanation of how the US recovered from the depression

analysis of the cause of the great depression

another explanation of how the US recovered from the depression

abandon capitalism and adopt a system that isnt so anachronistic and inappropriate to the modern world.

There's a word for that...

Actually, micro-bots aren't even needed for this. It's been possible in North America since the 1930's. I just thought you'd want to know.

Actually, micro-bots aren't even needed for this. It's been possible in North America since the 1930's. I just thought you'd want to know.

Geeze, this is what Technocrats have been saying for years! It's time to embrace the only rational system based on facts. I mean really, virtually everyone hates politicians anyway, and suspects politics itself as being problematic. We only accept it because we don't know of anything else to use. Well, now there is: Technocracy!

Geeze, this is what Technocrats have been saying for years! It's time to embrace the only rational system based on facts. I mean really, virtually everyone hates politicians anyway, and suspects politics itself as being problematic. We only accept it because we don't know of anything else to use. Well, now there is: Technocracy!

The only reason we don't have an economy of abundance right now is because scarcity is enforced. That's right, technology in manufacturing became sufficeint to undermine the purchasing power to validate scarcity pricing during the Great Depression. Look at this this chart; production skyrockets due to everyone using more and better automated equipment, therefor supply increases. This same equipment requires fewer and fewer people to do the same job (man-hours per unit of production), putting people out of work, so they spend less, therfor demand dwindles. Anyone with any basic economics knows that both these factors will reduce price, and in this case a lot! Hence, crash of 1929 and Great Depression. Our distributive mechanism failed to keep up with the times.

Of course, we've appeared to recover since then, but only through massively regulating the economy, as well as, and more importantly, going massively into debt. Scarcity economies require constant growth, especially ones on life support like ours. You have to keep the people working somehow. This is why we have such a huge service industry, as well as workers in monumentally inefficient jobs! We can have machines build a good quality house in a day, and cheaply, but still I see two guys working on one for over 8 months just so they can have paychecks.

It's not neccessary anymore! Even Jeremy Rifkin has pointed out that work as we know it is obsolete, too bad he couldn't see that reforming a dead system won't save it. The trick, once you have an economy of abundance, is to give it away. No lie, it's just freedom of information and peer-to-peer and OSS and all that. Of course, you need a mechanism to do that, and one that will allow people to keep the system operating, and thankfully that's already been done. Technocracy is a purely scientific means of measuring the productive capacity of a nation and optimising the efficiency to a) increase production and therefor income and standard of living, and b) decrease the amount of physical labor involved to produce that abundance. Back in the 1930's it was calculated that we had sufficient productive capacity to provide everyone in North America with a quite high standard of living (some estimates as high as $70,000/year modern equivilent) while only having to work 16 hours a week at a job you like, with benefits such as free education (all levels) and free health care. Imagine what we could do today! They didn't even have computers back then! It was definately an idea ahead of it's time (at least as far as acceptance goes).

It's quite a well thought out and detailed system, despite the brief introduction I can give. But it's worth looking into. It's not really a new political system (in fact it doesn't use politics at all), but more of a technology.

Here are some good short bits about Technocracy, for a good starter. There's also plenty of other info (including FAQ and forums) on that site, as well as lots of archival material here.

All we have to do is make the conscious decision to make this move, and our lives will benefit tremendously. It's the perfect governemnt for all OSS and P2P supporters! All we're doing right now is letting the corps get even more rich and powerful and waiting for the next time the economy collapses. It can't keep growing forever, after all.

Of course I wholeheartedly beleive that artists deserve something for their work, and certainly deserve a decent living (don't we all?) The fact that they either have to use their art to make money or get an unrelated job that impinges on their artistic efforts is simply a symptom of our ever-present scarcity economics. Wouldn't it be nice if artists (and programmers, and others) could live without economic insecurity, simply giving to the community as is their basic impulse to do so? This would make the need to make an income from their work irrelevant, because most of these people do not do it for the money (at least not as the primary motivation). I'm sure many of the people here, more than most places, understand this. This would solve issues like Napster and Kazaa, since the free flow of information (and sharing of files, whether they be art, music, or software) could proceed without any harm to anyone. If an author doen't want his work shared, he simply need only keep it, or give it to people he trusts. Perhaps there could even be a copywrite law that gives the artist/whoever the power to decide how "free" his/her work is, but there would still be no need to do so to earn a living, i.e. artificial scarcity.

So how could this be done? Scarcity, we are told, is forever with us, an unsolvable problem. But is it really? People like Jeremy Rifkin (The End of Work) have shown us that work as we know it is obsolete. Machines and automation can do most if not all of the tedious tasks that make life dull, freeing up human society for more creative persuits. So scarcity no longer exists, except that we continue to impose it on ourselves because we know of no other way of doing things. And this creates its own set of problems, believe me!

The only thing missing now is a workable system of economic distribution that does not employ scarcity, and its tools like money and debt. If this could be done, all crime due to poverty would vanish. There would be no point to stealing something you could very easily afford yourself (pathology aside). Millions of property and litigation laws would also become obsolete, releiving the justice system of a huge infrastructure. Banks, stocks, all business related to money need no longer exist, and what results is a huge outpouring of people to now share what little work need be done. Thus, with secured incomes, people need not work more than a few hours each week, and could have a standard of living that far exceeds what we have now.

It's too bad more people aren't trying to think of ways of doing this, because it is possible. It would be a world were programs like Linux would be the norm, and no one could make shoddy MS-like products (or they could, but no one would have to use them). So far the only serious research group with any credibility that has devised such a non-scarcity economic system is Technocracy. They've been working on this idea since the 1920's, so they have a pretty detailed and workable plan. I hope we one day switch to a society they they propose.

Why does it always seem like it's the most worthwhile projects that are forced to come to an end by lack of funding? Who decides that these endeavors aren't important enough? Humanity in general is held back by large corporations...

You're right there. Machines cost just pennies per kw/h, work day and night, and require very little in the way of "benefits". They have been replacing people in virtually every industry since 1900, and this is what caused the crash of '29. Robots produced more, but less people worked, and therefor had no money with which to buy the new abundance of stuff. Simple economics: supply goes up, demand goes down, price goes WAY down, hence, crash. The only reason we've stabilized since then (if you call this stable) is because of *amazing* economic legislating (ever compare the complexity of economics these days to 1900?), and the huge debt creation during WW2 and since. Essentially we have an economy on life support, waiting for the debt to catch up with us. We can no longer afford to enforce a scarcity and try to use machines to produce abundance at the same time. One of them has got to go, and since I think most of us would rather not give up our technological living, we have to find an economy that does not enforce scarcity. To date, I have only ever found one that does this, developed by a group called Technocracy.

Here is a detailed explaination of what I just said, based on their research. For those who don't like math, here's a shorter explaination.

You're right there. Machines cost just pennies per kw/h, work day and night, and require very little in the way of "benefits". They have been replacing people in virtually every industry since 1900, and this is what caused the crash of '29. Robots produced more, but less people worked, and therefor had no money with which to buy the new abundance of stuff. Simple economics: supply goes up, demand goes down, price goes WAY down, hence, crash. The only reason we've stabilized since then (if you call this stable) is because of *amazing* economic legislating (ever compare the complexity of economics these days to 1900?), and the huge debt creation during WW2 and since. Essentially we have an economy on life support, waiting for the debt to catch up with us. We can no longer afford to enforce a scarcity and try to use machines to produce abundance at the same time. One of them has got to go, and since I think most of us would rather not give up our technological living, we have to find an economy that does not enforce scarcity. To date, I have only ever found one that does this, developed by a group called Technocracy.

Here is a detailed explaination of what I just said, based on their research. For those who don't like math, here's a shorter explaination.