I agree entirely. It's simply "too bad" that the very nature of our economy makes it necessary to have to "earn" a living in such a way as to prevent most people from finding and performing work they like. Such is the nature of money. Could you imagine an entire society where people got to do what interests them? Where they were supported with the education and opportunities to perform what they would both enjoy and excell at? I know many people think that this would lead to a bunch of selfish entertainment-driven leeches, but isn't that what our current society has produced today with our consumerist attitudes?
I think instead that if you had an enducation system that regularly assessed people's strengths and weaknesses, took into consideration their interests, and then showed them ALL of the opportunities in society where they could pursue and excell at what they enjoyed, that you would not need material, external motivators at all, and thus make a moneyless society like Technocracy possible. I thought that this was really well explained in this article which explains the difference between external "incentives", and internal "initiative". Basically what you were talking about, except applied to a whole society!
I have to agree with this one here, I've been using TC since it was still called Windows Commander (after Norton Commander) but M$ sent them a "nasty" letter about using the word "windows". Rather than fight them at all they just changed the name because they felt that it was limiting them anyway, so now they can go cross-platform. I love it when someone can turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Best ability you can have in life!
One feature you didn't mention was the wicked FTP client. Since the program is two-pane, the ftp client works virtually identical to your local files. Not to mention the file sorting tools, the multi-rename tools, MIME en/decoders, etc. And the built-in packer treats zip and arj files like directories. Thus, I don't need Win Explorer, WinZip, or an FTP client. All combined in one easy package!
We pollute the atmosphere because it's cheaper than to filter out all harmful elements - we do have the technology to cut emissions to almost nothing, but money is in the way.
So, I have a feeling that money will continue to be a barrier to the well being of the planet and its inhabitants for decades (if not centuries) to come.
I agree with you completely there. Money stops us from doing so much by maintaining scarcity where there is none naturally. Ever ask why we don't have good health care? Not because our med tech sucks, or there are not enough doctors; it's not enough money. Bad education: Not enough teachers? We don't know how to teach well? Nope, it's not enough money. This is true for basically all problems in North America. And since money is scarce, there can never be enough, no matter how you manage or re-distribute it.
This won't change until either the system collapses for some reason (and there are many), or we switch to a system that doesn't use money, and doesn't replace it with any other kind of artificial scarcity mechanisms. So far, only a Technocracy is able to do that.
Well, you raise a good point there. Nanotech manufacturing will only magnify the scale however. We've been able to elliminate scarcity in North America since the '30s, and indeed that is what caused the Great Depression (as in, automated manufacturing raises production, hence supply, while decreasing employment, hence demand; both lower price until it crashes).
But if those in charge and want to maintain the current system get their way, they will ensure that this technology never gets to do that, by "owning" the patents and "regulating" their use. They have to maintain scarcity artificially in order to stay in power. They've been doing it since the '30s, so they know what they are doing when they are keeping all this abundance from us.
Seriously though, this is the only system I've seen that completely replaces corporations and their underlying economic framework (scarcity, money, etc.) with a completely scientific method of distribution. Aside from the other "benefits" such as no lawyers or politicians to screw things up, there would be no need for patents or IP in the sense that people need to "make money" from their inventions. If you "invented" something in a Technocracy, whether it be a new device, a peice of artwork, or a computer program, you'd either keep it to yourself, or it gets shared with everyone that wants it. The only laws necessary are the ones ensuring that proper credit goes to the right person, but we do a pretty fair job of that now... when money's not involved anyway.:p
That's one of the reasons I love this idea. It's the perfect society for any free/open software/information advocate. No more *IAA breathing down anyone's neck; no one trying to get rich off of every little thing that happens on or off the 'net; what are we waiting for? It only hasn't happened yet because not enough people know about it. Let's get changing that!
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury. I present to you now the most serious threat to human life and liberty today. It is a Chemical Weapon of Mass Destruction that is more pervasive and insideous than any other known today. It exists in every country, and can even be found in modern homes. It is a major componant of acid rain, and is found in large quantities in ALL forms of cancerous tissue. It is colorless, oderless, and deadly when inhaled. I submit that humankind will not be safe until every molocule of this toxic substance is permentantly destroyed.
It's chemical name in scientific circles is... Dihydrogen Monoxide, and it must be stopped.
Sorry that it took a while to respond. Busy long weekend! Anyway, I hope this still gets read by someone...
Have you read Utopia, by Thomas More? That Technocracy idea (I only read the 11 quick reasons to believe it) resembles that book in some ways, somewhat like a modern version of it.
No, I haven't read it, but my nephew in university has recently. I'll ask him more about it.
I have some doubts about the system.
Good, that means you're actually thinking about it. And you ask some pretty intelligent questions too, which I will do my best to answer. However, please keep in mind that this is actually a new technology and requires that you understand the full process of how it works rather than just some surface notes like I can give you here. Think of it like trying to learn a new process for cold fusion. I can tell you that we smash borium atoms and yttrium atoms together and get 1.21 GW of power, but that doesn't explain why it works. This is why we actually teach a course in Technocracy. It's 22 lessons long, but you don't need to go quite that far to get the basics. Plus it's not exactly taught in major universities (or even minor ones for that matter). So we have short "basics" book called "Technocracy: Technological Continental Design" available from chq@technocracy.org . I'm working on getting it in pdf format, and it's in beta right now. I'll be posting on the technocracy.ca site when it's done.
Anyway, on to your questions.
About product qualitly. That was an extreme case, granted, but served to illustrate the point. The reason why it's just as easy to make a 3 year blade as a 3 day one has to do with the metallurgy involved. Originally, over a hundred years ago, people made long-lasting blades, seeking the best alloy ratio to keep the sharpest edge. Later, someone figured out that if you adjust the ratio just a bit, the blade dulled faster, and hence they could sell more in a given period of time. Over the course of the years/decades, they've made them progressively worse, subtly so people don't notice very often. Then they start advertising the "convenience" and "cheap price" of disposable razors, and the program becomes complete. This sort of planned obsolesence happens in most products, and hence affects product quality. If you wanted to average out the quality of all products it would easily be below 50%. Hence production by this one techniqu alone could double our productive capability, likely more.
About energy credits: There are several reasons why they are different from money, most of which are listed here. Here is a brief look at the inadequacy of money:
Money Is Inadequate
Suppose, for instance, that we attempt to distribute by means of money the goods and services produced. Suppose that it were decided that 200 billion dollars' worth of goods and services were to be produced in a given year, and suppose further that 200 billion dollars' were distributed to the population during that time with which to purchase these goods and services. Immediately the foregoing properties of money would create trouble. Due to the fact that money is not a physical measure of goods and services, there is no assurance that prices would not change during the year, and that 200 billion dollars' issued for use in a given year would be used in that year. If it were not used this would immediately begin to curtail production and start oscillations. The fact remains that money is negotiable, and that certain human beings, by hook or crook, have a facility for getting it away from other human beings. This would defeat the requirement that distribution must reach all people. A further consequence of the negotiability of money is that it can be used very effectively for purposes of bribery. Hence the most successful accumulators of money would be able to eventually not only disrupt the flow line, but also buy a control
I think that you mostly got it right there, and Star Trek is an excellent analogy. They don't use money because of replicators. This technology makes anything, even money, abundant (opposite of scarce) and therefor without "value". Hence, you can't use money, but everyone's happy anyway (except the Ferengi, of course). The very essence of Technocracy.:)
But ditch the capitalism part at the end there. It's not needed, and what little good you do get from it you get far more of in a Technocracy anyway.
Actually, this requires a bit of discussion, more than I can do here, because you need to understand certain premises before you really understand the answer. You can find quick answers in the Technocracy FAQ here and here.
But for a short (and incomplete) answer, I can say this. First of all, no system is perfectly invulnerable to this kind of thing, but there are two reasons why it would be more unlikely and harder to acheive in a Technate (technocratic society). 1) Taking away the tools. By removing scarcity tools such as politics and money, it becomes a whole lot harder to exert "social control" over anyone. Remember that Technocracy is about controlling technology, not people. People cannot be "bribed," and they don't receive any real "power" over others by attaining higher positions. Since all the desicions of the administration are technical (the non-technical ones being relegated to democratic processes), the results are confirmable, and easily monitored. It's like if a bus driver suddenly decided to take his own route one day instead of the one he was supposed to, or if a power plant technician decided to turn of his girlfriend's city block out of spite. This would get noticed, and he'd be dealt with, probably replaced.
The second reason is that there would simply be little profit in it. You can't hoard energy credits like money, and you already have a significant income anyway. Given the difficulty in trying to acheive such power, the pay-off would be quite small (like consumer utility). And even it you did acheive dictitorial power, there would be no way to maintain that power and functionally operate a Technate, because you'd need to limit too many things. Quality of life would drastically diminish and you'd have one angry population on your hands.
Again, I stress that this is not proof, only a summery of the results. Technocracy requires a little bit of study, but it's not hard. If you want to know why, it's because it is more like a technology than a political system.
I understand where you are comming from, because I've done a great deal of learing about communism in the past few months myself. Of course, what you and many others call "communism" is not what most people (yes, thanks to propaganda) think about it. So, being that there are many different definitions of communism depending who you ask, I decided to direct my last comment to those who understand the "common" or "popular" definition, rather than explaining first what communism is, then Technocracy. Heck, the second part is hard enough!
But I am more than happy to discuss the differences as you would see them with you (or anyone) in the Technocracy forums, located at www.technocracy.ca . If I were to start talking about the similarities I see between the two here, I think that it would only confuse people more.
I know that on the surface it is easy to see similarities between the two, but please re-read the fable of the blind men and the elephant. If all you do is look at one part and make your conclusions from there, you're lost, my friend.
As for the important differences, there are many. The first would be that communism still works as an scarcity economy. It cannot distribute an abundance of goods an services produced by high technology to its people, just like every other scarcity system. It still uses money, and that is damning right there. Only a solid measurement like Energy Accounting can distribute such wealth without collapsing.
Second of all, all decisions in a communist state are made politically. Sure, some science might creep in there from time to time, but it is not the rule. In a Technocracy, all technical decisions are made by the Technate, which works no different than the technical portion of any technology company, by engineers and technicians rather than politicians, except that instead of the goals being profit and higher stock prices, they are for the benefit of society. Political decisions, ones that cannot be determined scientifically, will be handled in a easy and accurate democratic way. More on this process is explained in Step 2 of this presentation.
Again, I'll say that there is far more to it than this, and this is but an introduction that will hopefully interest people into looking into this further.
Wow, that was the most logical argument I've ever seen./sarcasm
Actually if you cared to read my post a little closer you'd see that it actually validates "supply and demand", which is in itself a construct or measure of scarcity. But I'll explain it again for those that seem to have missed it. Companies like to install bigger equipment that will do labor jobs far cheaper, quicker, and more accurately than humans can whenever possible. This has two effects: 1) Raising productive capacity (and hence profit, if it is all actually bought), and 2) laying off workers. This of course saves the company all sorts of money and makes good economic sense, right? When this is done en masse, however, as in the time period of 1900-1929, how does this effect supply and demand? Supply goes up due to more production, and demand goes down, as people lose their jobs and start saving money. What does each of these factors have to do with price? That's right, price drops. And when they both work together, in vast amounts, you get a crash. Sound familiar? 1929? That's what happened.
So what we are left with is an economic system that can produce more than enough (abundance) for everyone to have a high standard of living (due to high production, with little labor required to produce it), but no way to actually distribute that abundance to the people. Doesn't that seem wrong to anyone? Today, we maintain our scarcity by limiting production, guaranteeing poverty, and making many useless jobs that could easily be done by machines far cheaper and better than people can, just so they can have an income!
Technocracy is a completely different method of actually distributing that abundance to people without requiring a burdensome workload from them to make it. Machines are the new slaves. Let take advantage, and enjoy ourselves!
Please try to read a little more about this before making wild conclusions like this. When I say 70K I mean in today's US dollars. Since a Technocracy wouldn't actually use money, conversions will have to be made depending on when the statement is made.
And the wealth that would be available to us if we freed up machines to do useful works rather than wasting it on low load factors, inefficient processes, poor product quality, planned obsolesence, and other profit-maximizing ideas, would just plain be stagerring. One only has to look at the numbers. Here's a good look at what kind of production portential could be freed up, keeping in mind of course that it is not a full explanation of how it can be accomplished. You may also want to look at how Energy Accounting works. It's a well thought out idea.
Egads! You're evaluation of what little you read was the equivalent of trying to understand the prinicples of internal combustion by reading a sales brochure for a Honda. Technocracy is far from some "new-fangled terms for communism." It has no basis in any political theory at all. It is a technology, developed scientifically and applied continentally. If you truly wanted to understand that, you'd investigate the idea a little deeper, rather than only looking at the "sales brochures" that are only meant to encourage you look deeper, and get a firm understanding of the idea.
Isn't it great then that with Technocracy's plan, you can do both? In fact, your income wouldn't be low, like 10K, in fact, most updaded estimates hover around 70K a year. With all the boring, menial, and (most) dangerous jobs automated, that frees everyone up to more expansive and fullfilling persuits, such as art (like has been mentioned), science, technology, education, and entertainment. No longer will we have people like J. K. Rowling wasting their time and energy in some dead-end service job just to earn an income when they could be producing widely apreciated works of art. Imagine if all the OSS programmers didn't have to worry about an unrelated "day-job" and could work on their projects with virtually no restrictions?
I imagine human progress would increase by bounds, culturally and scientifically. Of course, these new technologies and advances would no longer be in the hands of war-mongering politicians, or profit-seeking corporations. That makes me feel a lot better about techs like bio-engineering, genetics, and nano-tech.
But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.
The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.
So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?
There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein
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 $70,000/year modern equivilent) while only having to work 16 hours a week at a job you like, with benefits such as free education (all levels) and free health care. Imagine what we could do today! They didn't even have computers back then! It was definately an idea ahead of it's time (at least as far as acceptance goes).
It's quite a well thought out and detailed system, despite the brief introduction I can give. But it's worth looking into. It's not really a new political system (in fact it doesn't use politics at all), but more of a technology.
Here are some good short bits about Technocracy, for a good starter. There's also plenty of other info (including FAQ and forums) on that site, as well as lots of archival material here.
All we have to do is make the conscious decision to make this move, and our lives will benefit tremendously. It's the perfect governemnt for all OSS and P2P supporters! All we're doing right now is letting the corps get even more rich and powerful and waiting for the next time the economy collapses. It can't keep growing forever, after all.
Hearing that M$ went out of the way to block TRON from being used on this side of the pond brought back found memories of said movie. Give that program one of those cool disks from the movie and see what happens...
If only M$ had that lovely Single Point of Failure that the MCP seemed to have at the base of the cone, then that might work. If only the Users could help us!
Of course the whole reason companies are trying to shut stuff like this down is because it is "stealing". A lot of us don't care because these same companies are so rich that any *actual* losses they incur (as opposed to their *projected* losses that assume that if everyone who pirated music were to buy it they would make), are negligable at best. Then comes the arguement that the artists are losing out, and so on.
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...
Which is why I think that we should be rid of them entirely. Unfortunately, no one has come up with a way to run a high-tech society without them. Except for the Technocrats, of course. But then things would be too nice.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I think instead that if you had an enducation system that regularly assessed people's strengths and weaknesses, took into consideration their interests, and then showed them ALL of the opportunities in society where they could pursue and excell at what they enjoyed, that you would not need material, external motivators at all, and thus make a moneyless society like Technocracy possible. I thought that this was really well explained in this article which explains the difference between external "incentives", and internal "initiative". Basically what you were talking about, except applied to a whole society!
Funny though how in space this attractiveness doesn't depend on looks...
Hey, if I had that in my city, now that I have Skype on my PocketPC Axim, it'd be just like a cell phone, but with cheap/free long distance! Woot!
Set up the world's biggest popcorn stand?
I have to agree with this one here, I've been using TC since it was still called Windows Commander (after Norton Commander) but M$ sent them a "nasty" letter about using the word "windows". Rather than fight them at all they just changed the name because they felt that it was limiting them anyway, so now they can go cross-platform. I love it when someone can turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Best ability you can have in life!
One feature you didn't mention was the wicked FTP client. Since the program is two-pane, the ftp client works virtually identical to your local files. Not to mention the file sorting tools, the multi-rename tools, MIME en/decoders, etc. And the built-in packer treats zip and arj files like directories. Thus, I don't need Win Explorer, WinZip, or an FTP client. All combined in one easy package!
And btw you can get it here.
Well, I can guarantee that the Enterprise is the safest shuttle of all of them. Unless you'd like to go and bomb the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
I agree with you completely there. Money stops us from doing so much by maintaining scarcity where there is none naturally. Ever ask why we don't have good health care? Not because our med tech sucks, or there are not enough doctors; it's not enough money. Bad education: Not enough teachers? We don't know how to teach well? Nope, it's not enough money. This is true for basically all problems in North America. And since money is scarce, there can never be enough, no matter how you manage or re-distribute it.
This won't change until either the system collapses for some reason (and there are many), or we switch to a system that doesn't use money, and doesn't replace it with any other kind of artificial scarcity mechanisms. So far, only a Technocracy is able to do that.
Well, you raise a good point there. Nanotech manufacturing will only magnify the scale however. We've been able to elliminate scarcity in North America since the '30s, and indeed that is what caused the Great Depression (as in, automated manufacturing raises production, hence supply, while decreasing employment, hence demand; both lower price until it crashes).
But if those in charge and want to maintain the current system get their way, they will ensure that this technology never gets to do that, by "owning" the patents and "regulating" their use. They have to maintain scarcity artificially in order to stay in power. They've been doing it since the '30s, so they know what they are doing when they are keeping all this abundance from us.
Perhaps you might like to discuss this in the Technocracy Forums.
Corporate-free techno-utopia... where have I heard of this before?
Seriously though, this is the only system I've seen that completely replaces corporations and their underlying economic framework (scarcity, money, etc.) with a completely scientific method of distribution. Aside from the other "benefits" such as no lawyers or politicians to screw things up, there would be no need for patents or IP in the sense that people need to "make money" from their inventions. If you "invented" something in a Technocracy, whether it be a new device, a peice of artwork, or a computer program, you'd either keep it to yourself, or it gets shared with everyone that wants it. The only laws necessary are the ones ensuring that proper credit goes to the right person, but we do a pretty fair job of that now... when money's not involved anyway. :p
That's one of the reasons I love this idea. It's the perfect society for any free/open software/information advocate. No more *IAA breathing down anyone's neck; no one trying to get rich off of every little thing that happens on or off the 'net; what are we waiting for? It only hasn't happened yet because not enough people know about it. Let's get changing that!
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury. I present to you now the most serious threat to human life and liberty today. It is a Chemical Weapon of Mass Destruction that is more pervasive and insideous than any other known today. It exists in every country, and can even be found in modern homes. It is a major componant of acid rain, and is found in large quantities in ALL forms of cancerous tissue. It is colorless, oderless, and deadly when inhaled. I submit that humankind will not be safe until every molocule of this toxic substance is permentantly destroyed.
It's chemical name in scientific circles is... Dihydrogen Monoxide, and it must be stopped.
Thank you.
Sorry that it took a while to respond. Busy long weekend! Anyway, I hope this still gets read by someone...
No, I haven't read it, but my nephew in university has recently. I'll ask him more about it.
Good, that means you're actually thinking about it. And you ask some pretty intelligent questions too, which I will do my best to answer. However, please keep in mind that this is actually a new technology and requires that you understand the full process of how it works rather than just some surface notes like I can give you here. Think of it like trying to learn a new process for cold fusion. I can tell you that we smash borium atoms and yttrium atoms together and get 1.21 GW of power, but that doesn't explain why it works. This is why we actually teach a course in Technocracy. It's 22 lessons long, but you don't need to go quite that far to get the basics. Plus it's not exactly taught in major universities (or even minor ones for that matter). So we have short "basics" book called "Technocracy: Technological Continental Design" available from chq@technocracy.org . I'm working on getting it in pdf format, and it's in beta right now. I'll be posting on the technocracy.ca site when it's done.
Anyway, on to your questions.
About product qualitly. That was an extreme case, granted, but served to illustrate the point. The reason why it's just as easy to make a 3 year blade as a 3 day one has to do with the metallurgy involved. Originally, over a hundred years ago, people made long-lasting blades, seeking the best alloy ratio to keep the sharpest edge. Later, someone figured out that if you adjust the ratio just a bit, the blade dulled faster, and hence they could sell more in a given period of time. Over the course of the years/decades, they've made them progressively worse, subtly so people don't notice very often. Then they start advertising the "convenience" and "cheap price" of disposable razors, and the program becomes complete. This sort of planned obsolesence happens in most products, and hence affects product quality. If you wanted to average out the quality of all products it would easily be below 50%. Hence production by this one techniqu alone could double our productive capability, likely more.
About energy credits: There are several reasons why they are different from money, most of which are listed here. Here is a brief look at the inadequacy of money:
I think that you mostly got it right there, and Star Trek is an excellent analogy. They don't use money because of replicators. This technology makes anything, even money, abundant (opposite of scarce) and therefor without "value". Hence, you can't use money, but everyone's happy anyway (except the Ferengi, of course). The very essence of Technocracy. :)
But ditch the capitalism part at the end there. It's not needed, and what little good you do get from it you get far more of in a Technocracy anyway.
Enjoy the site, and visit the forums!
Actually, this requires a bit of discussion, more than I can do here, because you need to understand certain premises before you really understand the answer. You can find quick answers in the Technocracy FAQ here and here.
But for a short (and incomplete) answer, I can say this. First of all, no system is perfectly invulnerable to this kind of thing, but there are two reasons why it would be more unlikely and harder to acheive in a Technate (technocratic society). 1) Taking away the tools. By removing scarcity tools such as politics and money, it becomes a whole lot harder to exert "social control" over anyone. Remember that Technocracy is about controlling technology, not people. People cannot be "bribed," and they don't receive any real "power" over others by attaining higher positions. Since all the desicions of the administration are technical (the non-technical ones being relegated to democratic processes), the results are confirmable, and easily monitored. It's like if a bus driver suddenly decided to take his own route one day instead of the one he was supposed to, or if a power plant technician decided to turn of his girlfriend's city block out of spite. This would get noticed, and he'd be dealt with, probably replaced.
The second reason is that there would simply be little profit in it. You can't hoard energy credits like money, and you already have a significant income anyway. Given the difficulty in trying to acheive such power, the pay-off would be quite small (like consumer utility). And even it you did acheive dictitorial power, there would be no way to maintain that power and functionally operate a Technate, because you'd need to limit too many things. Quality of life would drastically diminish and you'd have one angry population on your hands.
Again, I stress that this is not proof, only a summery of the results. Technocracy requires a little bit of study, but it's not hard. If you want to know why, it's because it is more like a technology than a political system.
I understand where you are comming from, because I've done a great deal of learing about communism in the past few months myself. Of course, what you and many others call "communism" is not what most people (yes, thanks to propaganda) think about it. So, being that there are many different definitions of communism depending who you ask, I decided to direct my last comment to those who understand the "common" or "popular" definition, rather than explaining first what communism is, then Technocracy. Heck, the second part is hard enough!
But I am more than happy to discuss the differences as you would see them with you (or anyone) in the Technocracy forums, located at www.technocracy.ca . If I were to start talking about the similarities I see between the two here, I think that it would only confuse people more.
I know that on the surface it is easy to see similarities between the two, but please re-read the fable of the blind men and the elephant. If all you do is look at one part and make your conclusions from there, you're lost, my friend.
As for the important differences, there are many. The first would be that communism still works as an scarcity economy. It cannot distribute an abundance of goods an services produced by high technology to its people, just like every other scarcity system. It still uses money, and that is damning right there. Only a solid measurement like Energy Accounting can distribute such wealth without collapsing.
Second of all, all decisions in a communist state are made politically. Sure, some science might creep in there from time to time, but it is not the rule. In a Technocracy, all technical decisions are made by the Technate, which works no different than the technical portion of any technology company, by engineers and technicians rather than politicians, except that instead of the goals being profit and higher stock prices, they are for the benefit of society. Political decisions, ones that cannot be determined scientifically, will be handled in a easy and accurate democratic way. More on this process is explained in Step 2 of this presentation.
Again, I'll say that there is far more to it than this, and this is but an introduction that will hopefully interest people into looking into this further.
T.i.n.c.?
Wow, that was the most logical argument I've ever seen. /sarcasm
Actually if you cared to read my post a little closer you'd see that it actually validates "supply and demand", which is in itself a construct or measure of scarcity. But I'll explain it again for those that seem to have missed it. Companies like to install bigger equipment that will do labor jobs far cheaper, quicker, and more accurately than humans can whenever possible. This has two effects: 1) Raising productive capacity (and hence profit, if it is all actually bought), and 2) laying off workers. This of course saves the company all sorts of money and makes good economic sense, right? When this is done en masse, however, as in the time period of 1900-1929, how does this effect supply and demand? Supply goes up due to more production, and demand goes down, as people lose their jobs and start saving money. What does each of these factors have to do with price? That's right, price drops. And when they both work together, in vast amounts, you get a crash. Sound familiar? 1929? That's what happened.
So what we are left with is an economic system that can produce more than enough (abundance) for everyone to have a high standard of living (due to high production, with little labor required to produce it), but no way to actually distribute that abundance to the people. Doesn't that seem wrong to anyone? Today, we maintain our scarcity by limiting production, guaranteeing poverty, and making many useless jobs that could easily be done by machines far cheaper and better than people can, just so they can have an income!
Technocracy is a completely different method of actually distributing that abundance to people without requiring a burdensome workload from them to make it. Machines are the new slaves. Let take advantage, and enjoy ourselves!
Please try to read a little more about this before making wild conclusions like this. When I say 70K I mean in today's US dollars. Since a Technocracy wouldn't actually use money, conversions will have to be made depending on when the statement is made.
And the wealth that would be available to us if we freed up machines to do useful works rather than wasting it on low load factors, inefficient processes, poor product quality, planned obsolesence, and other profit-maximizing ideas, would just plain be stagerring. One only has to look at the numbers. Here's a good look at what kind of production portential could be freed up, keeping in mind of course that it is not a full explanation of how it can be accomplished. You may also want to look at how Energy Accounting works. It's a well thought out idea.
Egads! You're evaluation of what little you read was the equivalent of trying to understand the prinicples of internal combustion by reading a sales brochure for a Honda. Technocracy is far from some "new-fangled terms for communism." It has no basis in any political theory at all. It is a technology, developed scientifically and applied continentally. If you truly wanted to understand that, you'd investigate the idea a little deeper, rather than only looking at the "sales brochures" that are only meant to encourage you look deeper, and get a firm understanding of the idea.
Isn't it great then that with Technocracy's plan, you can do both? In fact, your income wouldn't be low, like 10K, in fact, most updaded estimates hover around 70K a year. With all the boring, menial, and (most) dangerous jobs automated, that frees everyone up to more expansive and fullfilling persuits, such as art (like has been mentioned), science, technology, education, and entertainment. No longer will we have people like J. K. Rowling wasting their time and energy in some dead-end service job just to earn an income when they could be producing widely apreciated works of art. Imagine if all the OSS programmers didn't have to worry about an unrelated "day-job" and could work on their projects with virtually no restrictions?
I imagine human progress would increase by bounds, culturally and scientifically. Of course, these new technologies and advances would no longer be in the hands of war-mongering politicians, or profit-seeking corporations. That makes me feel a lot better about techs like bio-engineering, genetics, and nano-tech.
But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.
The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.
So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?
There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein
Whoops, I meant to start with this quote:
"More importantly what are the implications for our society as we move out of an age of scarcity to an age of plenty ?"
Hopefully that makes a little more sense. :o
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 $70,000/year modern equivilent) while only having to work 16 hours a week at a job you like, with benefits such as free education (all levels) and free health care. Imagine what we could do today! They didn't even have computers back then! It was definately an idea ahead of it's time (at least as far as acceptance goes).
It's quite a well thought out and detailed system, despite the brief introduction I can give. But it's worth looking into. It's not really a new political system (in fact it doesn't use politics at all), but more of a technology.
Here are some good short bits about Technocracy, for a good starter. There's also plenty of other info (including FAQ and forums) on that site, as well as lots of archival material here.
All we have to do is make the conscious decision to make this move, and our lives will benefit tremendously. It's the perfect governemnt for all OSS and P2P supporters! All we're doing right now is letting the corps get even more rich and powerful and waiting for the next time the economy collapses. It can't keep growing forever, after all.
If only M$ had that lovely Single Point of Failure that the MCP seemed to have at the base of the cone, then that might work. If only the Users could help us!
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.