Discuss: New economic model(s) for practical/sustainable civilization

I was thinking of how to effectively measure losses in my field - information security - and figured, a dollar value for this stuff is far too flexible. We should at least have some kind of fixed variable - and I decided on time.

so I'm thinking like this: there's about 525,000 minutes in a year, every year, for everyone. In a perfect pinko utopia, all of those minutes for every person would be spent engaged in leisure activities while the solar-powered robots bring the drinks. Any time that isn't free time is cost. You assign whatever currency multiplier to each minute, but the minute itself remains static, the new gold standard.

This creates a new goal - the pinko utopia - which has the nice property of being pretty much unattainable (zeno's paradox for real ha ha).

This also creates new standards of nation-state and personal wealth which are more sustainable - how much did everybody have to work last year? wow that's a lot, I'm sorry.

It also serves as a much better model for the information age, imo, since something as abstract as "the data I need" is much easier to quantify in terms of how long it took to get it and process it than in $$$-utility. In fact, this gives us a new way of measuring utility that leaves out the $$$ fudging completely. How long did it take you? Five minutes. Are you satisfied? Yes/No. Not "How much do you think that was worth?" Let somebody else decide.

Lastly before I open up for questions - if our goal in the big green future is to recycle our raw materials, decrease the need for extracting things out of the ground, maintain our population, and all that - blah blah background club of rome 1972 limits of growth etc. - this gives us a way to avoid a traditional recession, if the new model for wealth can be based on an unattainable year of no work for every human, instead of how much $ you can squeeze out of labor applied to raw materials.

Why am I dumb? This is totally undoable! Who else had this idea already, why were they shot down, etc. New Answers!

im not sure, in practice, people really consider free time that valuable, though they may claim to. what people want is not free time but lot's of money for that "free time" they never really want to use!

i'm not completely sure what your getting at, but have you heard of josiah warren and his time store? it was a kind of spin off from the owenites which he thought failed because they were too communistic. along w/marx and proudhon he independently came up w/the idea that cost is the limit of price. labor notes in his mutualist system are for time you worked not time you didn't though which is what i assume you are getting at. anyway once we got the robots they'll figure this all out for us. personally i dont see work and leisure as mutually exclusive.

isn't a basic problem we have already that some people's time is worth more than others', and isn't really transferable between people? if you have trouble making ends meet because you work for minimum wage, the amount of free time you have to spend getting more money for food and rent is pretty limited. is the plan to somehow get rid of money? you are too radical for me to comprehend!

anyway as we all know from star trek the next generation there is still plenty to do after endless supplies of energy and replicators are at our disposal

btw someone pass the weed over here

im not sure, in practice, people really consider free time that valuable, though they may claim to. what people want is not free time but lot's of money for that "free time" they never really want to use!

isn't a basic problem we have already that some people's time is worth more than others'

http://www.laundry-and-dishwasher-info.com/images/Small-commercial-dishwasher.jpg

It's a dishwasher...OF THE FUTURE.

Where do I sign up for one?

im not sure that a photo of a dishwasher makes sense as an answer to those objections

it saves rich people's time as much as it saves poor people's time performing its task - in more modern terms, steve jobs' iphone is the device and does all the same things for him as my coworkers' iphones (or hank paulson's blackberry vs some $50K a year junior sales rep's blackberry) (or the old rich folks hot water is the same hot water you get everywhere)

plus the dishwasher is fairly ubiquitous, a situation that seems at odds with people not valuing their free time as much as they value money. I'm trying to argue that the conveniences of not having to spend time is a better metric for progress in the modern era than the old materialist model

is the SAME device

Your time metric would be a good measure if we had a stated agreed objective of attaining a new "Leisure Age'. Whatever happened to that idea?

the dishwasher is fairly ubiquitous

Not at my house. :((((

yeah I was about to put lol NYC

and there's an upper limit to what people spend on these conveniences - you might have aspirational mod cons like Viking gas ovens or Sub-zero glass fridges but generally you don't see people spending six figures for a super-premium Roomba or even a super-premium laptop really - the most expensive laptops you can buy remain pretty firmly stuck at a fraction of median income

Your time metric would be a good measure if we had a stated agreed objective of attaining a new "Leisure Age'. Whatever happened to that idea?

― Bob Six, Thursday, 4 December 2008 22:47 (46 minutes ago)

Saved time from "conveniences" just gets eaten up by "increased productivity." The proliferation of microwaves and fast food service just led to shorter lunch breaks, people not going home for lunch, and even people working through lunch.

And that's very much a part of our economic model. Competitive pressure means anything that saves time must lead to more production, not more leisure.

yeah which is BALLS

it is a problem of defining an acceptable leisure lifestyle, to some extent, but also I think we need to start considering that money is some seriously fungible bullshit. With any luck there's a few more intelligent people thinking in that direction than there used to be (thanks, real estate).

Tom, the problem is possibly that it's impossible to differentiate between the free time of a dishwasher and the free time of not having dishes, or the free time of kicking back enjoying robot drinks versus the free time of sitting staring at a withered dust-bowl of a field while starving to death. "Time" would only work as a currency if quality of life itself were not a variable -- if you were asserting some basic standard of living that everyone were going to experience.

Oh wait, sorry, I think you're partly acknowledging that in your previous post

And, to be completely fair, that is kind of the hard thing that sustainability sometimes seems to ask of us -- instead of an ever-upward cycle of more wealth, productivity, and resource-consumption, there are places where it depends on arbitrarily fixing a point, declaring a sort of baseline of resource-consumption at which we should be contented and stop, even if our economic system is based around trying to maximize things further.

yeah there's more than a little bit of socialism here. but as globalization takes hold and we realize how much less people in other parts of the world will part with their labor and skills for compared to what we ask in most of north america or western europe, I think a lot of folks are going to realize that socializing more of our necessities is far preferable to the bottom falling out. the floating currency figure as the final arbiter of value is going to become obsolete, I really believe that.

this thread reminds me of the class i took in college where we read walden 2

five
five minute
five minute footloooonnng

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16058-prophesy-of-economic-collapse-coming-true.html

tom have you read

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31ZS1QE6WAL._SL500_.jpg

from the mit catalog summary:

What if modern society put a priority on the material security of its citizens and the ecological integrity of its resource base? What if it took ecological constraint as a given, not a hindrance but a source of long-term economic security? How would it organize itself, structure its industry, shape its consumption?

Have you read it? I'm putting it on my wishlist, thanks!

(btw yes the whole point of this thread is to begin the journey that ends in writing a $50+ book)

i've read in it. one of those things i keep on the nightstand. it's pretty interesting. he's better on diagnosis than prescription, like a lot of people, but there's a lot of ideas in it.

haha this thing:
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9085/appleimocar3pm6.jpg
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/appleimocar3pm6.jpg/1/w650.png

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/12/apple-flavored.htm

imagine these as a public utility like the podcar idea, one size fits all, point to point transit with no wasted time spent sitting in man-made traffic.

stupid imageshack ad

assume that a general disclaimer applies to all posts here e.g. I have my usual degree of skepticism towards all this stuff but nevertheless feel a nurge to air these ideas out -

I think that life as we know it is pretty much doomed. Either the human race leaves behind the economics of scarcity or it ceases to exist, quite possibly in the near term (less than a century) - is this a fairly safe assumption, given modern climate research, food science, overall energy consumption etc? Even leaving out the cataclysmic possibilities, epidemics, mutually assured destruction scenarios, etc.

I keep thinking we either have to start moving in the direction of a more redistributive model, where more and more "wealth" is available with the equivalent of a planet earth public library card, or we are forced by circumstance to regress to some kind of feudalism over drinking water etc. I'm not coming up with much as far as middle options are concerned. I may just not be thinking hard enough or haven't read the right books yet.

lol "feel a nurge"

feel a nurge etc

The FT's Tim Harford wrote a column pertinent to this thread recently:

We earn—this is a very rough average—twice what our parents did when they were our age. When today’s teenagers are in their 40s, there is no reason why they shouldn’t decide to enjoy their increased prosperity by working less instead of earning more. Rather than being twice as rich as their parents, they could be no richer but start their weekends on Wednesday afternoon.

[...]

Here’s the big question of the season, then: Why don’t we do as countless moralists urge every year and focus less on money and more on leisure (or spiritual concerns, if you must)? Why haven’t we all decided to work less, spend less, and consume less?

[...]

A[n] answer is that we work hard because income is linked to our desire for status, which is collectively insatiable, because status is largely relative. A famous survey by economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway found that many Harvard students (although few Harvard staff members) would rather have an income of $50,000 in a world where most people were poorer than an income of $100,000 in a world where most people were richer. The survey has arguably been overinterpreted in the 10 years since it was published, but it does seem to point to an important truth: It matters to us how much money other people have.

Is anyone earning twice as much as their parents in terms of relative wealth i.e. in terms of the spending power of what you earn. In the UK, at least, house prices are many more multiples of the yearly wage than they used to be?

This Harvard study gets cited in every popular book on happiness recently. Is our work model really as simple as being down to status? Isn't an answer that we work hard because it's the dominant socio-economic model, that's almost impossible to step out of unilaterally.

Amongst the 40s and 50s that I know, the collective sense I get is of how good it would be to be able to retire early and step out of work - not how urgent it is to maintain status.

many Harvard students (although few Harvard staff members) would rather have an income of $50,000 in a world where most people were poorer than an income of $100,000 in a world where most people were richer

doesn't this makes perfect sense in a scarce-commodity worldview? linked to the point Bob Six made about how much relative income people have.

Bob - the housing multiple has got out of hand very quickly, though. If you bought you property more than about five years ago, the multiple was within typical historical bands

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v417/albaalba/ilx/UK_HP_v_Av_Earnings2.jpg

Also, even for recent housebuyers, consumer goods that were once expensive luxuries are now riduculously cheap. Remember how video recorders cost hundreds of pounds (probably over a grand in real terms) in the early 80s?

that's a case of new technology coming down in price, rather than just a huge sudden fall in all consumer goods though.

But they were expensive (and yet widely purchased) for years. And consumer goods did become outrageously, suddenly, much cheaper some around the turn of the millennium, thanks to globalisation, I guess. As did clothing.

As for the raw disposable income figures:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/images/charts/1005.gif

figure for 2008 will be a doozy.

One of the reasons people don't work less at the moment is that the current model is so uncertain (boom and bust). There's a feeling if you slow down on the treadmill, you might lose your job all together.

A leisure-based economic model needs a lot more work and development. Weren't there some theories in the 50s and 60s about how the economy would change towards people being paid for work done on their behalf by machines. People moving onto unemployment is a horrible parody of this model.

im not sure, in practice, people really consider free time that valuable, though they may claim to. what people want is not free time but lot's of money for that "free time" they never really want to use!

this is a very american way of thinking - in europe free time is much more the valuable thing. in france for instance people really look forward to retirement as the time when they can start to live "properly"

the french have it about right, but in any instance retirement isn't the same as free/leisure time during your working life.

they tend to have that too!

the whole phenomenon of the go-getter who never takes a day of vacation is basically unheard of there, and the rare people who fit that description are shunned

re: relative income, I'd reiterate the points made above re: dishwashers, iphones, etc. Certainly real estate is always going to have a scarcity factor, and that particular aspect of wealth/status will never really go away. on the other hand, I think more and more people, even americans, are leaning towards the lower square footage/shorter or car-less commute end of the property trade-off, which would imply more value placed in leisure time over other things

xpost

well, that's the protestant reformations for you.

until recently people would point to france's high (youth) unemployment as the downside, but i guess not so much now.

tradeoffs between leisure/wealth seem like a red herring in this debate

i mean its a debate to have but still just kind of fuckin' with utility functions - its not a new model or an escape from the valuation trap.

I am moving to a different apartment only because of free time! It will allow me to walk to places I need to go, mostly, instead of riding the bus (saving me around 1.5 hours a day on average (tho I do get to read/play vid games on the bus (but really I'd rather do those things at my leisure and not just bcz I have to take forever being on some bus))). BUT mostly and most importantly because place the new has:

A DISHWASHER.

Which will not only save TIME but also curb the main argument plaguing my spouse & me.

rolling ilc shantytown thread 2008

There's 24 hours in a day
I used to spilt it 8, 8, 8
8 work
8 sleep
8 for play
Now I give it all it takes

The dishwasher and washing machine are in fact the most valuable appliances in your home, this is a fact. Except for, if you're a knowledge worker who gets to telecommute, the laptop - that's probably finally a bigger deal than the washers.

Anyway, I thought this was really interesting and I don't know where else to put it so I'm putting it here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/nobel-factor-offer-soderberg/503186/

If I recall my reading correctly, a washing machine was generally the first major electrical appliance purchased for the home among Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, before a non-wood-burning oven, a refrigerator, or a radio. Only autos spread faster. The benefits of a wringer-washer were obvious and enormous.

I was just listening to an interview with Dan Barber (Blue Hill chef, author of "The Third Plate," big sustainable food thinker). Fucking fascinating.

One thing I was wondering -- is there anyone out there who has written about sustainable food from a "mass" perspective, i.e. sustainable agriculture and food culture that is scaleable and doesn't focus on expensive and precious heirloom crops? I don't mean this as a knock on Barber because I think his approach (using the restaurant and farm and his resulting celebrity as a tool to spread his ideas among the well off and educated) works very well, but I'm wondering who has worked on this stuff from a "feed the whole world" perspective.

Seems obvious to me that the "green revolution" agriculture relies on mining, both the mining of water out of aquifers and the mining of the raw materials for fertilizer inputs. This doesn't even factor in fossil energy inputs. Since this form of agriculture is credited with feeding at least a billion additional people, the first step toward sustainable mass agriculture would be reducing population to a sustainable level.

Another big problem to address would be the high levels of species extinction happening globally due mostly to habitat loss, which is largely driven by the expansion of agriculture and grazing. Since we cannot create new land masses, the only way to arrest and reverse this is to reduce acreage under cultivation and grazing, reducing the potential food supply.

If 'sustainable' is to be taken as a condition that implies millennia, not decades, then population reduction must be a primary tool for achieving that.

I think we should destroy work and the economy and western civ in general but thats just me

Whenever I contemplate utopian scenarios like this, I also think about the time when the admin centre I used to work in decided that it would be best practice to standardize and depersonalize all the workstations. All of our drawer contents had to be ready to move to a new desk at a moments notice (and they made sure to move us lest we became too settled), only one photo allowed on the desk, nothing else attached to the cubicle dividers. Everyone had the same computer, same chair, same staplers. It was awful.

what was the rationale for that??

that sounds like some top down bullshit to me

As they told us, mostly for efficiency and fairness (some desks were by windows). End effect was we were repressed and replaceable though.

As they told us

Management often has that kind of sense of humor.

On growth and degrowth.

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/growth-degrowth-kohei-saito-susskind/