Tell me why, I don't like Mondays

The Song of the Shirt
Thomas Hood, 1843

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread –
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt’.

“Work! work! work!

While the cock is crowing aloof!

And work – work – work,

Till the stars shine through the roof!

It’s Oh! to be a slave

Along with the barbarous Turk,

Where woman has never a soul to save,

If this is Christian work!

“Work – work – work

Till the brain begins to swim:

Work – work – work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!

Seam, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!”

These are only the first three of the twelve stanzas that comprise the poem, but it’s clear what is being expressed. We of the civilised world know it well, and hear its echoes in Bob Black’s diatribe against work, which begins: “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.” Whence this cultural antipathy to something as universal and necessary as work? Is the infamous capitalism to blame?

In The Empathic Civilization (2009: 290ff), Jeremy Rifkin spends some time tracing the demise of guilds and the emergence of a labour class. “In the sixteenth century in England, an independent merchant class was beginning to challenge the guilds’ control”. Generally, great changes were afoot, in particular the enclosures, which loosed peasants from the land, creating an exploitable labour force. Advances in transportation using rivers and canals sped trade up. These factors enabled merchants to bring cheaper goods to market, which made them enemies of the guilds. Eventually, 

the old social economy, based on controlling production, fixing prices, and excluding competition from the outside, was too provincial to accommodate the range of new technologies that were making possible greater exchange of goods and services between more people over longer distances. The new technologies gave birth to a capitalist class hell-bent on exploiting their full potential. They found their commercial mode in self-regulating free markets. 

Work became a commodity, along with almost everything else.

That human work became an exchangeable commodity subject to the forces of the ‘free market’, is, I feel, perhaps the prime reason work is as hated as it is today. This governing of work by the price system, in conjunction with mechanisation and the industrial revolution, led inexorably to the state of affairs we have today, and have had for many decades. Work-for-wage at any job at all is a matter of survival. How can we have pride in our work if it is most often for another person’s profit, if we are mere cogs in the machinery of a profit-seeking monolith that cares only about its own (endless) growth?

Charlie Chaplin ‘slaved’ over his films. He wrote them, directed them, acted in them, wrote the music for some of them, edited them, but would not have called that (at times highly repetitive) work “evil”, nor the long hours. I work hard on my blog posts. People everywhere work hard on their own labours of love. But even the ironing, the vacuum cleaning, washing the dishes, changing nappies, none of these things are hateful when we recognise them as necessary elements of a healthy and pleasant life. Then we can say “whistle while you work”, and mean it warmly. Perhaps the distinction is that these forms of work are self-directed and more or less freely chosen.

If capitalism is about capital – as it must be –, and if work is one form of capital that can be exploited in pursuit of profit, and if profit is almost exclusively monetary in nature, then work must be stripped of its potential nobility and grace by capitalism over time. This is, I assert, exactly what we have witnessed. As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe this model is sustainable, for reasons of technological unemployment, planetary carrying capacity, and good old fashioned change. Jeremy Rifkin is similarly critical of this dynamic, as are many other thinkers,  but anticipates an evolution towards what he calls “distributed capitalism”. By this he appears to mean a transition from rigid hierarchy towards flatter, more anarchic arrangements (I don’t recall him using the word “anarchic” though!). In very broad brush strokes, his prediction crudely mirrors some of the aspects of how I envision a resource-based economy gathering steam. Regardless, from where we are now, culturally relearning the grace and nobility of work via transition presents us with a number of challenges.

1. We are still children of the industrial revolution, and this is nowhere more evident than in state education. Grades, large class sizes controlled by a single authority figure tasked with pumping into those malleable minds as much of the state-sanctioned curriculum as possible to sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’, clearly demarcated subjects, lessons begun and ended with the ringing of bells, are all design consequences derived from industry needs. Factory workers are not permitted to be imaginative, critical thinkers. They must be unquestioning drones who are also easy-to-addict consumers. Money, industrialism’s god, requires a constant supply of such humans to grow and grow. Money-as-wealth, money-as-profit, can only see humans as capital to be exploited in its own interest, for its own eternal glory. This is a centuries-old socio-cultural dynamic, so we will not escape it quickly. In other words, we are industrialised, mind and body, yet tasked with changing the system which shaped us, and thus changing ourselves. We are blind, immature and unprepared, yet we must act. The transition can only be bumpy.

2. Can it be capitalism if there is no exploitation (pursuit of profit at the expense of others)? This is a definitional issue, but an important one. Dan Pink is a behavioural economist whose main area of focus is motivation. He cites experiments that have been repeated across the world showing how menial tasks are indeed well motivated by money, whereas cooperative, creative projects are negatively affected by the promise of financial reward. As automation increasingly takes the menial and the repetitive out of human hands, what is left of economic (or public) work for humans will be cooperative and creative. If in this area monetary reward produces worse results than other forms of motivation (i.e., ‘success is its own reward’, the joy of meaningful accomplishment), no explicit profit as measured by money can be the goal of such endeavours. What does this mean in terms of capitalism? Is “distributed capitalism” a contradiction in terms? If capitalism is fundamentally about the pursuit of profit, or the accumulation of capital in ever-growing amounts as leverage for still further growth, doesn’t the distribution of the fruits of socio-economic endeavour along less profit-oriented lines imply socialism? Again, this is a definitional problem, or perhaps one of vision, but one worthy of our attention I feel. To what ‘ends’ and in whose name will we want to work, if not money?

3. Because of 1. and 2. above, state-based socialism may seem attractive in some areas of the world, perhaps all, though the US is packaging its own brand as Freedom! I feel this would be a dead-end. Replacing the Money God with the State God – a mere slight-of-hand trick –, the beneficent father looking after his weakly and incapable children, would be but a continuation of the patriarchal/industrial mindset, as it was in Russia after 1917.  To not exploit each other, but also not to place our entrepreneurial and inventive potential, our individuality, our creativity in the hands of some all-powerful governing institution, is what our maturation from socio-cultural childhood is about. The immaturity I touched on in 1. above is pervasive; we are all infected with it to some extent. The desperate narcissism of the Internet is clear evidence of this. To evolve towards more distributed social structures requires a mature citizenry. We must grow ourselves up, mature, cut ourselves from new cloth. This is hard work. We hate hard work.

And there’s the Catch 22. Part of what is demanded of us to evolve is a re-embracing of that which we have come to despise.  To love work, to appreciate that success is its own reward, to taste the joys of meaningful accomplishment, requires hard work. But, “hard work” as our own hard work, taken on in a spirit of community and cooperation towards meaningful goals and guided by a vision in which money-based profit is distant anathema. We could well rename this “hard work” hard leisure. But, until we begin in earnest to build this as yet unknowable New, promises of the Twenty Hour Week, the Life of Leisure, will remain promises. Our view of them now is similar to the way we anticipate holidays on the beach. They are well-wrapped sweets to be plucked from an evergreen Christmas Tree, only capable of satisfying us for as long as it takes them to dissolve to nothing in our mouths. For work to be good again, for leisure to be more than an empty distraction, we have to put in the hours.

So roll up your sleeves and get down to it. Do good work!

Technological unemployment: a genuine threat, a great opportunity

Below is my attempt at a journalistic-like article which aims to shift people's thinking about money, cost, value, wealth, work and resources (I know, foolishly ambitious). I sent it to some newspapers, magazines and journalists, but have excited no interest with it. My intention is to broaden the debate, but to do so the ideas the article contains need a better distribution outlet than this humble blog. I strongly believe the broader public is now ready for this debate, and thus that something as simple as this article is appropriate at this time. So, in the absence of anything else, I am using this platform to at least have this formulation out there. Do with it as you will. It is not standard Econosophy format, but it is standard Econosophy argumentation. There's nothing new in it for frequent visitors of this site.

[Edited on 25 October 2014 to improve logical flow]

Recent months have seen many articles tackling the Luddite bugbear of technological unemployment – automation replacing jobs. I welcome this attention. Not because I welcome increased suffering, nor because I see no way out. No, I strongly believe technological unemployment is and always has been an inspiring challenge to humanity’s ideas about work, value and societal contribution. In this challenge I see great opportunity.

However, my impression from these articles and from reader responses to them is that we are not taking Einstein’s famous admonition sufficiently to heart: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Robots taking our jobs is only a problem if we fail to think outside the box in which it must remain a problem.

(Three points undergird this article: firstly, we are not in pursuit of Utopia; there can be no such thing. Secondly, we must ask the right questions to see intractable challenges from fresh perspectives. Thirdly, let’s not lose sight of the kind of world we want to live in.)

Currently, if the economy isn’t growing, it’s collapsing. Wages fall, unemployment rises, hope fades, the chance of war increases. This sad historical correlation lies behind President Obama’s recent characterisation of economic growth as an “imperative”. But even though it is a systemic requirement, perpetual economic growth is impossible. If we want to survive as a species, our relationships with GDP growth and orthodox economics must change, not to usher in Utopia, but to adjust intelligently to new knowledge and circumstances.

Why is the impossible an imperative?

For two main reasons. Firstly, the way money is designed requires growth; money is created as interest-bearing debt, and compound interest is exponential growth. Our system is wired to grow exponentially. Secondly, redirecting the economy from the growth track requires radical change, change that vested interests do not want. Nevertheless, either we push on with the impossible, or we do something different.

Something different would be an economy as happy with growth as with de-growth (steady-state). This only sounds crazy because de-growth currently causes social distress. Space does not allow an exploration of the many proposals for alternative money systems currently being discussed, but this is a technical challenge humanity can solve.

A steady-state economy powered by an appropriate money system would not cause social distress, it would free us to enjoy a healthy work-life balance. Think about it: what is economic growth? Ever more economic activity. What is economic activity? Production, buying and selling. Are these the source of all human happiness? We do more of them today than ever before. Are we happier than ever before? Most of us realise rampant consumerism is bad for environment and community alike, so not only is perpetual economic growth unsustainable, we don’t actually want it. It's a cultural addiction, not a genetic requirement.

How does this relate to technological unemployment? Well, we don’t need ourselves economically as we once did. When we contemplate economic de-growth exacerbated by technological unemployment, we see an ever-diminishing role for humanity, we fear “robot overlords”. But a dystopian future only awaits us if we refuse to accept that unpaid work can be more valuable to society than paid work. What does society value more: good parenting or investment banking? If money is our guide, the latter. Otherwise, the former (and similar social contributions). We need new money and money-distribution mechanisms that honour the former. With such systems in place, we would welcome technological developments that free us from boring jobs.

Looked at coldly, wages are a mechanism for distributing money to people. Wages imply that the work they reward is good for society, but this may only sometimes be true and then only partly. We also value contributions to society that cannot be remunerated by the market. In light of technological advances and the need to de-grow our economy, we should implement a Basic Income Guarantee (“BIG”), a new mechanism for getting money to people. To want to do this, we must first re-envision money as a public utility that both frees us to contribute meaningfully to society and rewards us for work the market deems valuable.

If you believe we cannot afford a BIG, you probably think it is money that affords. Resources and know-how afford (what is money without natural resources?). Let’s say we need 30% of the adult population to produce enough to keep everyone housed, warmed, fed and clothed. I.e., there’s enough of the basics, but not enough jobs. In this narrow example, market mechanisms must fail to provide everyone with purchasing power. Abundant supply meets impotent demand. Here the market is the problem, not ‘lazy’ people.

Just because we no longer need people economically does not mean we cannot learn to value what they might contribute when freed to do so by a BIG. Nor does it mean that giving money away must lead to inflation; the need for a BIG arises from the fact of what I’ve termed “impotent demand”.

Technological unemployment is real because production can exceed consumption. The “lump of labour fallacy” rightly argues there is no fixed amount of economic work for humans to do. Correct. It can shrink. Or it can be forced to grow against our better judgement; we neither want nor can the environment afford perpetual economic growth. The lump of labour ‘fallacy’ is thus a red herring. Far more important is redefining our cultural definitions of work, value and reward, and how we design and distribute money.

The cultural habits ingrained in us over recent centuries have dangerously narrowed our thinking. There are good alternatives to ever more jobs. BIG is perhaps the best of them, though just a first step. We have come to mistake money for wealth, and are having a hard time accepting that we can indeed afford to de-grow, that consumerism does not create health and happiness, that economic activity is not a panacea. If we automate more, consume less, move to renewable energies, set up a more appropriate money system, our work-life balance will improve. Indeed, work would become more and more pleasant, until our work becomes our passion, our life.

This is the potential of technological unemployment. From employment in meaningless, environmentally-damaging jobs, to meaningful work for society. To seize this opportunity, we must heed Einstein and transcend the thinking that got us into this mess.


Addendum, 25.02.2013:

Anyone seeking an insight into this would do well to consult a terrific report by Sarah O'Connor, the Financial Times's economics correspondent. She visited Amazon's vast distribution centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire and her account of what she found there makes sobering reading.

She saw hundreds of people in orange vests pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle because "the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time". They walk between seven and 15 miles a day and everything they do is determined by Amazon's software. "You're sort of like a robot, but in human form," one manager told Ms O'Connor. "It's human automation, if you like."

Source

Anyone seeking to understand what technological unemployment (and underemployment) is about, ought to think deeply about what these two quoted paragraphs are telling us. In short: money is more important than both humanity and environment in this system. Until we address this, this tightly controlled, robotic insanity is going to get worse and worse, simply to sustain consumerism and perpetual economic growth, both of which are unsustainable.

Dependence + Independence = Interdependence. But How?

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Douglas Adams

Totally depending on others for your survival, but not being able to give anything back is not a pleasant state of affairs. Even people we might call scroungers, who appear to contribute nothing, are likely to be of the opinion that their personality, or friendship, or some other quality of theirs is a ‘sufficient’ contribution (which it may well be), i.e., even scroungers need to be needed. But the infirm, the handicapped, the seriously injured, etc., totally dependent on others for their survival, are most often frustrated by their inability to give back, to return the favour. This may result in a curious form of denial, where the dependent person is angry at the world, and especially at his/her caregivers. Of course, there are many shades of nuance involved with total dependency, not least of which is the frustration of being imprisoned by one’s inability, and there are people who love being taken care of when ill, but I strongly suspect total dependency is unpleasant, at the level of contribution, for most who experience it, and that the dynamic just sketched is no idle fantasy.

In contradistinction to this, being independent, or, expressed differently, being able to contribute meaningfully to society, large or small, is a far happier state of affairs, generally speaking. Why? My answer is that humans are social animals and thus need to belong (as I’ve argued before). This answer suggests that the ‘independence’ I just described is a form of dependence. To be independent, to be an able contributor whose contributions are valued/rewarded by society, is to rely on a society which values and rewards your contributions. Nothing makes sense in isolation.

(Note: I am not talking about the lone woodsman surviving in the wild apart from all human society. Such independence can be seen as a skill set that depends on the rest of nature operating within certain parameters. Independence and dependence are slippery concepts, interdependence is perhaps the more helpful term.)

Let’s visit Charles Eisenstein’s observations on community. Charles once made attempts to establish community in his local neighbourhood by inviting neighbours over to cook together, to watch the Super Bowl together, to try and gel with each other. The attempt failed. His initiating analysis, that people complain about community breakdown and subsequent crime rates, insecurity and isolation etc., and thus want community’s return, is sound enough. His attempt to learn how to rebuild community by trying to do so both logical and noble. So why did something fail that everyone wanted to be a success?

The failure to build a little community, in his eyes, rested on the cold fact that the people involved didn’t actually need each other. There was no interdependency of a sufficiently unifying intensity. All they could do as a group was consume together. Not one member of the group depended on any other member for their survival. Modern society provides us with what we need via money and wages, not favours and return favours among friends and neighbours in a tight-knit community. Apart from artistic ventures (like being in a rock band) or raising children, there’s not much left to do together but consume the glittering produce of an anonymous society. This does not give rise to community in the sense people seem to long for. We can manufacture desire, but can we manufacture the type of need that creates and binds communities? Should we strive to recreate binding interdependencies?

If it is true that humans are social animals, that they thus have a basic need to contribute to and be needed by the social group, should we then dismantle all technology that comes between us and ‘genuine’ community? For me, this question is highly relevant to the RBE idea, as a global RBE utterly destroys existential angst and thus the intense need for each other Charles asserts strong community requires. Can humans be ‘happy’ if the lack of need for each other keeps them apart from each other in some significant way? Would an RBE be counter to human biology?

I repeat, independence and dependence are slippery concepts. The first two paragraphs of this post set them out in a somewhat binary presentation that I have then tried to blur. This may have been a little confusing, so I’m now going to state this post’s purpose as two questions:

1 Are our social interdependencies static in their nature?

2 Is there a basic, natural state of affairs for humans we ignore at our peril?

As something of a relativist, I don’t like seeking clear answers to such questions, but do see the value of openly exploring and pondering them. Here goes.

There have been many types of human society, beginning with the hunter gatherers; through to horticultural societies; tribal, pre- and early states; city states; nation states and also, I’d argue, the corporation (which has very close ties to the state form I believe). The ways in which humans express and live out their need for each other within these societal forms changes with each societal form. This is not to say that our biology changes (though it does), rather that the social structures in which it finds expression give rise to different external manifestations of biological drives, including our understandings of and relationships with those drives. That is, human behaviour is a consequence of multiple factors, not just of biology.

There never has been nor will there ever be a utopia. So while it strongly appears that one relatively stable constant of human nature is that we are social animals, while it may indeed remain true that we need to be needed, like to be liked and love to be loved, what seems to me to be a hiding to nothing is an attempt to recreate (from the idealised past) or create (for the idealised future) the conditions we consider somehow perfectly suited to our biology. There are too many variables, too much variety for this to result in anything other than an oppressive attempt to control people, to force as many of us as possible to become ‘good citizens’ of whatever ideology.

On the other hand, inevitable change demands wise and intelligent adaptation. So it is equally true, utopia or not, that the way things are now, the way we have become used to, cannot be sustained indefinitely. I don’t know if a ‘return’ to a low-tech, horticultural society is upon us for reasons of entropy, peak oil, planetary carrying capacity, etc., or if what awaits us is more akin to a techno-utopia (or dystopia); I am not sufficiently qualified to judge. But I strongly believe that humans will muddle through whatever new forms emerge, and that their behaviours will adjust accordingly. Should The Venus Project’s basic analysis be sound, should a non-monetary system be the most intelligent arrangement in light of current technological developments, ‘community’ and interdependencies generally will emerge in accordance with the conditions of an RBE. Our needs for social interaction and interdependency will take on new forms, find new expressions that will give rise to slightly different social challenges, slightly different social pleasures and conventions, all rooted in our biology of course, but blooming and finding expression in new-ish circumstances.

In short, human nature is something of a red herring. There is no perfect social construction for our biology (social engineering), any more than there is a perfect human biology (eugenics). Should an RBE future indeed unfold, humans will adapt to it, change as a consequence of it, and enjoy and be irritated by it just as in all other social arrangements. Independence and dependence are not absolutes, nor is a particular type of community, nor is a particular set of human social expressions. Leaving self-destruction aside for a moment, my sense is that the trajectory of our progress is towards an RBE, simply because the market system that relies on wages and perpetual economic growth has been rendered redundant by automation and cybernetics, as well as natural limits to economic growth. Consumerism is as ‘true’ to human nature as is communism or fascism, and will go the way of the dodo in due course. This is not to say that the RBE is better or worse than anything else, but that circumstances tend humanity in its direction. It may be that our lock-step addiction to entrenched cultural norms means the dissonance between the pressure of history and our inability to adapt intelligently to that pressure results in our self-destruction, but that would be a failure of adaptation, not (necessarily) a misreading of the pressure of history.

Nostalgia is always with us, it seems. We are imaginative creatures and can idealise anything we want to, including past and possible future communities. Interdependence is a fact of nature, of Universe, but we cannot extrapolate from it some correct and eternal social form that’s ‘just so’ for all human beings.

[C]onservative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished age, which ‘knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the child the father’.

R. H. Tawney (1922: 68)

Money Talks, Bullshit Walks (or, Scarcity: a New Look at an Old Devil)

In Aztec, the notion of deference is regarded as crucial. Consequently, according to Nida, ‘it is impossible to say anything to anyone without indicating the relative degree of respect to which the hearer and speaker are entitled in the community’ (1964:95).
Mona Baker, In Other Words (2011:95)

A friend of mine used the expression that is this post’s title a little while ago, and it struck me as a true statement. As someone concerned with the resource-based economy direction (demoting money and promoting wealth), I recognise that this simple truism deserves my attention, which it has had these last few months. In what follows, I’m going to try and associate the validity of this truism with both capitalism (which is in a state of advanced breakdown in my opinion), and the change of direction humanity is stumblingly bringing about.

When we commit to something, we invest in it. If that investment is to mean something, both to ourselves and those around us, losing what we’ve invested must be painful. Because of money’s importance, when we risk our money investing in something, people recognise that we believe in that something (unless we are compulsive gamblers or otherwise of unsound mind). Thus the risk of losing something valuable causes us to carefully appraise what of our scarce resources we invest in which projects and endeavours. For believers in a resource-based economy, this begs the question: does abundance mean we won’t take anything seriously? Put another way, must things be scarce to be valued?

The most obvious example to help us look at this is air. It is abundantly available and has a price of zero. Accordingly, we might argue, we have treated it rather cavalierly. Only as we have started to notice that its delicate ability to sustain life on earth is threatened by our reckless treatment of it have we begun to try and figure out how to look after it. In other words, as the abundance we earlier perceived doesn’t seem to be the whole truth about air, as scarcity enters the picture, so we treat the item with increasing respect and wisdom. The same, it could be argued, goes for planet earth.

The economy

There is a curious paradox here. Economics presents nature as a subset of the economy (concealed in "other inputs"), as an inexhaustible supply of idle resources to be converted, via labour and machines, into goods and services, then sold as scarce commodities via supply and demand (price discovery) processes. (If this assumption were dropped, perpetual economic growth could not be held to be both desirable and possible.) We might express this as follows: abundance + labour & capital = scarcity. For this to hold, labour and machines must be limiting in some way, a sort of conduit through which idle resources must pass to become goods and services. We might look at this conduit as partly consisting of time; even if we could work 24/7, we have to go to market and have time to consume what we buy there. That is, we can’t only earn and produce, we have to spend and consume too. Society needs time to demand/consume what it supplies/produces, as it were.

Demand is an area of economics which is also abundant, or insatiable. Indeed, economics is the study of how best to distribute scarce goods and services to an infinitely greedy humanity, goods and services which are scarce precisely because humans are insatiably greedy. To expand on the earlier equation then: abundance + labour & capital = scarcity (because of demand abundance). Scarcity is thus inescapable, if we accept this sort of thinking. Scarcity appears to emerge within the pincers of posited abundance. In other words, scarcity and abundance happily coexist in economic theory. They are not mutually exclusive.

Of course, the other reason for scarcity in the price system is that if supply exceeds demand (which might be a definition of economic abundance), price falls to zero (‘I couldn’t give it away!’). Suppliers must limit the amount of stuff they bring to market to keep price/profit as high as possible. In other words, for there to be prices above zero, demand must exceed supply, generally speaking. (Let’s not forget the advertising industry that manufactures artificial demand.) In short, the picture is somewhat clouded, although the simple mechanics sketched above make the necessity of scarcity to the market system very clear.

I have come to think of abundance and scarcity as matters of perception and organisation (again, we mustn’t forget advertising). For example, the question, ‘How much is enough?’ cannot reasonably be answered. There is no specific enough. Against what yardstick of what phenomenon? Happiness (immeasurable)? Health (immeasurable)? Security (immeasurable)? So when dealing with the problems of scarcity and abundance, we are not dealing with absolutes. To draw on the preceding paragraph, abundance need not be about infinite amounts, only amounts that consistently exceed demand. I don’t think economics has quite mastered scarcity and abundance, and by logical extension, value. There is much for us to learn and discover here.

And yet the truth of “money talks, bullshit walks” remains. Should we seek to initiate a resource-based economy at all? How would humans value things if there were more than enough of everything? Look how we’re treating the earth. The Perpetual Growth paradigm says nature can keep on providing idle resources to be turned into ever expanding amounts of goods and services forever, that planet earth can take everything we throw at it (or throw away on it). I’m with those who believe infinite growth (of the economic realm) in a finite system is impossible. Unless we treat the ecosystems which engender and support us with intelligence, wisdom and respect, we have it in our power to destroy ourselves. A better model for envisioning economic activity might look something like this:

  Source: Positive Money/David A Jones

Let’s recap the conundrum. On the one hand, we have the current economic paradigm which sees abundance on the input side and scarcity on the output side. On the other, we have a possible future system which sees scarcity on the input side and abundance on the output side. If the reason we are trashing earth’s ecosystems is because of the flawed assumption of input abundance, does it not follow that we will trash ‘goods and services’ if they are abundant? Not necessarily. It all depends on how we raise our kids, how we educate ourselves, and what we see as the function of ‘goods and services’ in a resource-based economy.

In a RBE, there are no goods and services. There is no market. Things like housing, clothing, computing, communication, energy, travel and education would be available with no price tag and are therefore not goods and services. There can be no consumerism, no ‘I want the latest iGadget’, no keeping up with the Joneses (as we experience them today; there will always be the pursuit of novelty and excitement). A full-on, global RBE is only possible if people really understand the benefit of treating, with wisdom and respect, the systems that make their prosperity possible. That’s the idea, at least. In the way we learned to perceive air as a scarce resource, that treating the air with respect is good for humanity generally, so too can people learn to treat housing, transportation, gadgets etc. with respect, even if there is no private property. As in the current paradigm, there would be no binary choice between absolute scarcity or abundance; humanity would deal with scarcity and abundance from a different mindset.

So what happens to money? I think something like it will still be around, albeit in a vastly different form and with a vastly different role, perhaps unrecognisable to our eyes, perhaps something equivalent to kudos or deference (as in the quote that opens this post). “Money (or some related equivalent) talks, bullshit walks” will still apply. There will be respect, accomplishment, social standing (though not as class-based as today’s), expertise, reputation, and other ‘rewards’ for social contribution. Only, the ‘price’ for losing one or all of them won’t be starvation on the streets.

We might argue that these immeasurable social phenomena will be the new money, the only remaining social currency. They are of course with us today, so are nothing new. They will be scarce and require hard work to build up and earn. People in an RBE will not lightly risk this new money, just as we don’t lightly risk contemporary money. Because we are social animals with strong preferences and dislikes as well as very varied ambitions, this aspect of value and scarcity will never leave us. But the abundance the RBE idea references is a more sensible abundance than that assumed of nature today, and is certainly not some absolute, infinite abundance.

As I have repeatedly stated, an RBE is a direction, not a destination. This article is thus somewhat out of keeping with recent posts. I wanted to return to RBE proper, as it were, because I still believe the direction, which is essentially the prioritizing of human concern and environment in the context of reasonable sustainability, is the only game in town that makes lasting sense. It deserves more attention from more people than it is getting, not because it is a finished idea we can implement tomorrow, but because it is an open idea that is both wise and intelligent, if still in its infancy.