[extropy-chat] Re: EDU: Public Schools

[Samantha Atkins]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:55:03 -0500
"Technotranscendence" <neptune at superlink.net> wrote:
> I won't dispute that volunteer work -- charitable work -- has value or
> can create value, but there are two caveats here.  (Heck, for that
> matter, in some sense, even a command economy can create some wealth.)
> One is that in order to volunteer, one must already have some other
> source of wealth.  Someone without at least the basic necessities will
> die, so she or he won't be of much use as a volunteer.  Even on this
> minimal level, you need something before you can give -- you need at
> least to have basic necessities before you can help others.
>

In short, you need some surplus time and energy from "earning a living".
   
> The other is that the money economy is much more efficient than
> volunteering.  

I disagree.  The money economy is good at performing tasks that generate more money overall than they consume.  This is not necessarily the same as generating more actual value in all areas.   Some things that are quite valuable to people do not lend themselves to a good business model - one that both is profitable and does not lower the value too much. 

> Yes, the two are not mutually exclusive -- as can be seen
> from the fact that people in advanced money economies not only do
> volunteer work but fund charities and the like -- but my original
> statement above was, "Nothing wrong with charity, but if most people
> didn't do productive things and interact through trade, most of humanity
> would have to die out."

There are all kinds of production, not all of which are funded or generally counted by the market.  There are also more kinds of trade than those on a ticker tape.


>  The incentives and information problem are
> resolved much better in a market.  

Pure assertion.

> Yes, charity meshes nicely with
> market interactions, but absent market interactions, all else being
> equal, overall efficiency would be so low that most of humanity would
> have to die out just to sustain that rest who interact in non-market
> but, hopefully, still voluntary ways.  (Non-market _involuntary_ ways --
> i.e., the command economy also known as socialism -- have an
> indisputably low efficiency.)
> 

Would you say overall efficiency in Open Source was so low?   On the contrary it has taken many market based software companies and segments by storm.  

> Both must coexist, but the big engine of wealth creation is the market
> system.  This is why market interactions took off once they were
> established.  E.g., we can see in very primitive peoples today
> gift-giving cultures -- ones where people freely give gifts usually with
> some expectation of a return.  These most likely preceded actually trade
> of the non-gift sort in early societies -- or between them where such
> exchanges were infrequent.  (See Elman R. Service's _The Hunters_, and
> many other anthropology books cover the same phenomenon.)  While such
> things still go on in modern, advanced economies, the bulk of
> interactions resulting in wealth creation are market ones.
>

Open Source is largely a gift giving culture.  When we get full MNT and most information and computation is too plentiful to meaningfully meter, I would expect that gift giving and creative acts would still be pretty big although not "primitive" at all.  The concepts of the market and its importance are true within a context that I do not believe is immutable forever.  
 
> Now, value is subjective -- in the Austrian economics sense -- so you
> could say you experience more value from your volunteer work -- and
> hopefully you do get what is called "psychic profit" (no reference to
> the paranormal, but just meaning the benefit is emotional or, forgive
> the term, "spiritual" as opposed to for monetary gain) -- but, again,
> most people do not, since they don't all spend their time doing
> volunteer work.  Also, again, the market economy creates more material
> wealth upon which to rest the charitable efforts.
>

Often the benefit is simply a sharing of the best one has with others who share the best they have without having to go through all the business world paperwork to do so.  For goods/services that work best in a commons imposing a normal market approach devalues the commons and lowers rather than increasing the value of the goods and services.  Your thinking seems to oriented to a few modes of market and "volunteer work".
 
> The libertarian social ideal as I understand it is just to allow people
> to interact voluntarily.  I believe -- and you seem to agree from your
> other posts -- that under such conditions, people will still do
> charitable work, though I think the bulk of social interaction will
> still be via some form of market economy.
> 

As the world becomes more abundant I expect market economy to lose some of its apparent value as the best way to do things.  Heck, I expect the economics itself to get turned a bit on its head when scarcity itself becomes relatively scarce.  In a world where most of the material needs and more of all humans can easily be met exactly where is the big incentive to economic competition?  

- samantha