Episode 45
V1: As we grow richer, there is rising concern about pollution, our ability to feed a growing population, and fears that we may run out of fuel and metals.
V2:The most important lesson is that we're near the end of development of society, which we've been going on for about 2,000 years and we’ve reach levels of prosperity which carry the seeds of disruption and necessitate a complete relook at the whole world's social, political and other situations.
V3:The world is in a completely unstable situation when it is likely to fall to pieces if it doesn't stop growing.
V4: Let's put it bluntly. Our option is not between this kind of society, present society and the stable state society. It is between a stable state society and chaos.
PJ: Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now! episode 45. The opening audio was a montage of various systems thinkers including cybernetician Stafford Beer addressing what is arguably the most fundamental flaw of the global economy today, it's endogenous basis in perpetual consumption and growth. This is an issue I have returned to quite a few times in this podcast and in other media, since it can't be emphasized enough, given viable public discourse on the issue is virtually non-existent.
I say viable public discourse, because while the subject of economic growth is loosely perceived to be a problem by some in modern sustainability movements, it's out there. True understanding of causality, and hence problem resolution is almost entirely missing, as I will talk about more so in a moment. But I want to point out that this growth attribute, or more accurately this growth function, in fact - function meaning a defining part of the very purpose of a total system - isn't a side effect. And in the big picture, it's really all you need to fully debunk the integrity of market capitalism.
Our race against time to replace the growth economy with a steady state economy basically makes moot all other system flaws we could mention such as Marxist theory, class debate, poverty, immorality, slavery, and the entire overall sociological nightmare of toxic human relations we endure, along with any other argument critics have used past and present to object to capitalism. All of that can be ignored when it comes to the priority of stopping the growth machine.
Without the ability to maintain homeostasis in civilization - without a steady state economy that balances regenerative resource use dynamically, diligently negating any negative economic externalities, the path is simply human demise in the end. Then yes, we can get all cute, stoic and philosophical about it all and say, "Well, to hell with it nothing lasts forever, right? We're all gonna die anyway, so maybe we should just reconcile the death of the entire civilization in the same way and just have fun in our ongoing train wreck.” And believe me, I can certainly identify with that kind of nihilism. There is nothing more frustrating than watching what we're doing." However, as much as I've tried all these years to convince myself that I'm just not gonna care anymore.
I always get pulled back out of sheer insult. The sheer disgrace of it all. As George Carlin would say, I feel betrayed by my species or more accurately my culture. It's an issue of principle, self-respect, basic personal integrity, to do something about this. What we're seeing on the system level here isn't just humanity going about its business a little sloppy, and then succumbing to some kind of late-stage cancer passing as an active old age or expected disease. No, this is a suicide mission. Civilization today is like a 400 pound dude already diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease, sitting at McDonald's and shoveling one cheeseburger after another into his bloated, drooling pie holes, lashing it all down with viscous cola corn syrup with the addictive and disordered compulsion of a meth addict.
There's no integrity to this, and it's a disgrace. insulting, offensive that this is the way we are behaving under the guise of cultural normality to effectively appease the market God, the system of consumption and expansion that we have created and are perpetuating into our own demise. And hence, I want no part of it nor should you, and yet there's no escape. So change becomes the focus and issue of principle, and our conceptions of success can only be tied to the total pattern of affairs. It doesn't matter how much money one has or how professionally successful they are or how great their family is or how many toys they have. Those notions of success happening within a completely unsustainable toxic ecosystem becomes nothing but vain and meaningless.
We are a failing species and I don't know about you, but I refuse to let that go out of sheer principle once again. I don't want to be associated with losers (laugh). Anyway, back on point, so what about solutions? How is the environmental crisis being approached out there? What do people that actually have the courage to even use the term "degrowth" have to offer? Like Kate Rayworth or Jason Hickle or George Monbiott and many other notable researchers, academics and even NGOs like Greenpeace? Well aside from many viable diagnostic analysis, the solution orientation is always the same, management; intervention through policy.
And of course, moral appeal. That one can be capable on average of more ethical behavior within a system that is universally unethical and rewards all of the worst behaviors. If we were all truly moral and ethical, no one would tolerate even existing in this type of economy for a second. But let's put the pointless moral appeals aside for now and focus on this proposed intervention. The only framework of solutions they offer. Let's take the famous work Donut Economics by Kate Rayworth of Oxford University and it's received great acclaim, many awards and lectures done in various sustainability organizations, and I've read her book and I've communicated with her. I even sent her my book in the hope that a deeper systems awareness could arise in her perspective.
Long story short, her work does a great job thinking about humanity's relationship to the ecosystem, but entirely falls back on policy suggestions ignoring the actual system once again because policy suggestions do not alter a system. Quite simply, you can try to regulate markets, or you can abolish markets. Only abolishing markets will fundamentally change capitalism quite simply, or at least removing markets from as many areas of society as possible, using it only as a last resort, the fundamental foundation. If regulation is seen as the only solution, it means the system isn't deemed the problem in other words. It means parts of the system are seen as the problem in a reductionist conception. When a mechanic looks at a problem in your car engine, noticing, say, the carburetor is bad, they don't turn around to you and say, "Well, it looks like the system is the problem."
No, they say this part is the problem, which is not the system. And that's another thing that the use of this term "system" is so overdone now, pop culture activism has basically commodified the idea of "system change", in fact polluting the very definition of the idea. And so we have our environmental activist and "intelligentsia" along with those that profess to be interested in sustainable economics. And all they do is make policy proposals. They are list creators. That's a new term to introduce into this lexicon. The List Creators. As commented on in the last podcast, this appeal to power ignoring the system dynamics. This is what has defined traditional activism once again, and honestly it's really pathetic at this point. Given people should have intuitively figured out by now that policy suggestions that move against the nature of a system by and large don't work, at least not in the long run.
They might work for a little while, but they will be eroded, and the river will burst through the dam and continue in its most natural state over time. Now why does regulation fail in this context? Because you can't override structural functions of a given system when those very functions are required to maintain the fundamental identity and stability of that system. And by stability, I mean internal. I mean the system itself. This isn't about stability related to human affairs. It's about what the system does. market capitalism in its system function is absolutely nothing to do with seeing humanity prosper and to be in good health.
Now since this is a complex issue that comes up a lot and it seems to be the fundamental clash when you talk to people that want to assume policy can work, let's jump into this a bit more deeply through the lens of system science and see if we can distill some more clarity here when trying to speak to others about this problem. In fact, I really want to emphasize this point because it's at the heart of the dilemma in regard to which direction, so to speak, people will go in their honest interest to resolve social problems. If you can get people to understand that the general traditional political policy-oriented route will constantly fail, overall, at least in the highest probability when moving against the economic system's fundamental nature, trying to bend that system, we will get more people on our side, at least we hope.
So let's introduce two basic terms here, both common to cybernetics, structural determinism and structural constraint. Structural determinism or consequential structural constraint, because these words should be relatively self-evident in their meaning, are two sides of the same coin, noting that the behavior of any system is primarily determined by its internal structure, which by nature of being a structure is inherently resistant to external influences or interventions hence the factor of constraint. In other words, the structure and internal system dynamics dictate the behavior and the higher degree of intervention against the natural flow of the system against the structure, the higher degree of resistance or reactionary constraint. Simply put, structural determinism means a system's behavior is relatively fixed and not easily altered if it's possible to alter it at all. And while many that are familiar with this podcast know this is at the core of what I've tried to get across over these years, this concept is literally non-existent in the public sphere, in conversation regarding social or political change. It is simply universally assumed that some kind of traditional, collective, democratic process that feeds back against the levers of power and the institutions that run our world will eventually break through and some kind of fluidity will be ever apparent adjusting to infinity our institutions and beyond as if there are no constraints.
And that is not the reality that is the mythology. And most intuitively feel that, but they don't really understand it. They think it's a thing called corruption, as we've talked about before. But anyway, more specifically, the problem is that there are internal system mechanisms, hence feedback loops that we've mentioned many times in this podcast, that are so tightly coupled that attempts to modify or influence a system's behavior, moving it against the structural determinism, inevitably has minimal impact because the structure fights back. It fights back, most particularly in this context of economics, through human agents and human institutions.
These human agents and institutions embody the reaction of the structural constraints. And not to be corny or invoke a overused pop culture cliché, but some may remember that short speech by Morpheus in the original Matrix where the writers unwittingly reveal their true social commentary, which as an aside makes no sense to the film's formal narrative, where Morpheus says, open quote, "The system is our enemy, but when you're inside, you look around what do you see, businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them so enured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
And as an aside, sorry to be an annoying script conceptual continuity critic here, but again this makes no sense to the dramatic narrative because the people in the matrix have no idea they're even in the matrix, therefore they can't fight back against something they're not conscious of. But the real concept behind it, the social commentary once again, is that the system has reactionary forces that push back to protect it, and that is absolutely sociologically true. And you could divide it into basically two categories. ‘Obedience to cultural values and belief’, kind of like a religion, where people are consciously objecting to ideas that go against how they think the world should be run, right- and hence the impression of living generation after generation with the kind of propertied, selfish, and competitive values of market economics -- along with the second and more specific counter-reaction, those that simply ‘don't want to lose money or power,’ the specific financial vested self-interest, which again relates to power interests, hence the scoundrel billionaire class and beyond.
And on that note, as an aside, One reinforcing feedback loop to be aware of is the cultural influence of the highly wealthy and usually famous people. The rich not only routinely push back against, say, higher taxation or other business regulation in favor of the free market myth through lobbying and manipulation, serving as agents of structural constraint once again, the very social presence of these famous influential figures really mold the values and practices of the general public, on average. Just look at the painful nonsense we hear from Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Bill Gates, or Richard Branson, or Warren Buffett, who routinely condemn any notion of system change truly believing in the market structure, which has so deeply rewarded them.
And needless to say, the effect of such rich elitist figures is massive when it comes to culture and the values and assumptions of legions and legions of people. It is simply natural for people to acclimate to the values and practices of other people that are successful in a given environment - mental adaptation for survival. People absorb the properties of these characters, and they think if they act like these people, they too will be rich, famous, and so on. And of course, that happens to be true. Granted, it's a zero-sum game, and not everyone can achieve those ends, obviously. But the most ruthless and immoral will ultimately rise to the top and stay there.
And so the general public fawns over these people, which reinforces the values of the rich and famous, and makes them feel even more like they're doing the right thing in the loop. The public wants to be rich, the rich feel good and rewarded and respected, so they continue their values; the public continues to absorb their values, and it cycles over and over and over again in one sick system preserving mechanism. That noted, you then add once again, as I've noted before, the simple fact that most people are deeply constrained in what they're able to do, living paycheck to paycheck, locked into debt servitude and their nine to five job, fully reliant on the system to meet their basic needs, hence without the convenience to even challenge or consider rocking the boat.
So you put such dynamics together, and there are many others, and you generate an extremely complex array of human action and reaction. That moves in the end like a kind of swarm, like this stochastic level swarm that comes from directions you can't even see at a certain point because of the complexity, endlessly trying to shut down anything that moves against the structural determinism of the system. Which in the specific context of market economics is the perpetual gravitation towards laissez faire, the invisible hand of the market. That is the natural state of market economics, one without interference or intervention.
The self-regulating invisible hand religion is the natural state of capitalism, and everything kind of oscillates around there. If you pull it to one side and say, "Oh, we're going to do something kind of socialist and give people this and that.” It's like a rubber band and it's going to snap right back and somebody's going to come into power or a constituency and they're going to override that idea because it goes against the religion. So to be clear here, regulation in this scenario is just improbable to have a serious effect because the system isn't designed to support such ends and the stochastic social feedback resulting from the inconveniences or the cultural clash will eventually stifle regulation itself returning the system to its more natural state through usually socio-political mechanisms like lobbying, lawsuits, political objection, and of course the supporting mythology such as associating business to freedom, and all of that noise.
I won't go into the biological and psychological issues we talked about in the last podcast such as we have natural wiring as human beings for group inclusion in our evolutionary fitness and we tend to conform beyond the scope of the market system. That's more of a human condition phenomenon but when you put it in the context of the pressures of the market environment it's it's that much more reinforced.
And since this is an episode about running things into the ground, let me take one more stab at this with a crude analogy in the context of simply design, feedback loops aside. We all know what a car is and what it's designed to do. We all know what a boat is and what it's designed to do. The characteristic functional properties, each operating towards a given end, one moves on land and one moves on water, obviously.
So what if you took a car and decided you want it to be a boat? Sure, a complex and painstaking engineering task of modifying the car to float, have some kind of motor and all of that could be undertaken. However, odds are the integrity of your new boat car would probably be weak if not dangerous. Well, that's precisely what we're trying to do today with the market economy and traditional activism. It is a car that we are desperately trying to turn into a boat, as it slowly sinks in the process.
There is a threshold when it comes to design, where at some point you really can't alter it anymore, unless you want to change the whole thing, right? Yeah, you can modify lots of things through intervention, but at some point it's going to be completely counterproductive and ultimately inefficient if not dangerous or pointless. Given this, what we see today is that our market economy is actually not designed to sustain human life and all the things that are assumed. It is not the function of the machine. It has a completely different purpose. Regardless of, say, medical breakthroughs or the alleviation of poverty, all those fleeting side effects that pro-capitalists people hold up actually have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism in its structure.
And mark my words, most of these supposed social gains are fleeting and they will reverse in time because of the fact they are not indicative of the structure. And we're seeing this already with life spans starting to decrease, poverty rising and so on. The grace period is over. You cannot turn a car into a boat. We are trying to take one system and turn it into another one, not understanding that the system we are building on doesn't even remotely represent the system we want to achieve.
And returning to the core focus at the beginning of this podcast regarding the inherent lack of sustainability of the system because it's built on constant expansion and growth like a cancer, in no area is it more self-evident that the car is not a boat. You can't have of this type of economy and expect any semblance of sustainability and the preservation or security of future generations. Now, I'm going to conclude the podcast by appending the lecture I did not that long ago called a viable society. And if you've already heard it, I'm sorry, but I want to add these things into the podcast and network because not everybody watches things on YouTube, which is where the original lecture is posted and many people listen to this podcast on say iTunes and whatnot. So just an effort to get that information into as many ears as possible.
But I will conclude here by saying I'm seeing decent progress, even though always slower than I expect, on the various media things I'm doing, such as the new film. And I'm going to be starting to Substack soon transferring things from my Medium account in an attempt to do shorter articles as well that are more prolific. I'm probably going to preserve the Medium account for transcripts of all 45 of thus far revolution now podcasts - while the substack will take on more custom articles which again I hope to be more prolific with.
I start writing these things man and I can't reduce them because of the inherent complexity. I wish I could write simple 2000 word articles which I'm going to attempt to do to get to the point and just leave it at that and if people can't understand it, then that's their own problem because there's only so much you can do over and over again. You can't restate the definition of things all the time as you go along.
And beyond that, Culture and decline, you know, the wind sub-series continues. I've been delayed on that one because of film-related complexities for the feature film. And I also want to try and get some animators together to do little one and a half minute animated segments, kind of like a whiteboard, taking very specific concepts and trying to get them out there in a more simple way. But that one's been on the horizon for a while. If I could just find a decent animator or maybe some kind of AI method, I don't know yet, but I think it's a good idea given our meme-based short attention span culture.
And finally, the big headache I'm facing, which I've talked about before, is the building of the infrastructure of a parallel economy, at least in the mock-up of it, because that is the peak of complexity. and I'm gonna try and get those websites and the mock cell phone app up moderately soon, probably timed with the film release. But if I can get it out earlier, I will. And that will be the core of whatever I do in the future. I'm over the social movement thing; for those that are aware in the Zeitgeist movement. I haven't really been a part of it for many years.
That was a great phase. And kudos to those that are still participating in that kind of social movement vocabulary because we do need community, we do need general education, but it's time to build. If we're not building, it's just completely goddamn pointless as I think I've expressed throughout this podcast. It may be cynical, I may be wrong, but I really just don't believe anymore in political or social activism, at least in terms of higher level efficacy when faced against the resistance, the structural constraints and the structural nature of what we are actually up against, it's going to take far more initiative to build and replace this system in some fashion.
That noted, here is the lecture A Viable Society, and I hope everyone's hanging in there. Take care out there. Talk to you soon.
[PRESENTATION]
The following presentation is in two parts, first and overview as to why today’s market-based economic system is inherently unstable and must be changed if we have any expectation of a sustainable future. Second, a general assessment of what a sustainable economic system would be, inferred from what modern understandings in public health and basic sustainability science has taught us, along with an exploration of how transition can be made from where we are today into this more viable and workable economy.
It is the opinion of this author that today’s economic system has adapted over a very long period of time since the core inflection point of the Neolithic revolution, and while the system has accomplished a degree of wealth creation and societal advancement, it has done so in a manner that cannot be sustained as the negative consequences now arising are outpacing the positive consequences.
Even more, as will be touched upon, the traditional political route to influence societal change has now become marginally effective. While education is critical, along with shifting of social values, traditional democracy and the public lobbying of governmental representatives to initiate relevant institutional or economic change appears to be hindered to such a degree that such a process can no longer be trusted or relied upon, at least not exclusively.
It’s going to take the building, from the grassroots up, of an internal parallel system of economy, which can be strategically expanded, effectively deflating the system we have now, pulling people from the old into the new, through new incentives that are actively rewarded. However, before we begin, please note that the following is a crude summation. Certain propositions offered will not be with much expansion due to time restraints both in development and the fact that a full treatment would be many, many hours long.
As a follow up to prior works, a book will be created along with a white paper, and I’m also in the process of film development to explore similar ideas. I would like to offer anyone watching this presentation a free copy of my 2017 book, The New Human Rights Movement, if you would like to understand some more about the subject matter. Simply email me through my website PeterJoseph.info and I will email you a PDF copy.
So let’s begin. Part 1, The Anti-Economy.
In Greek, the root of the word economy means “management of a household.” Most of us experience this basic strategic thinking as we bring goods back from a store, working to preserve and efficiently use those goods so nothing goes to waste. The very concept of “economizing” means to optimize the utility of what we have purchased to obviously reduce the need for future purchases as that requires human labor to gain purchasing power through money.
Therefore, we are incentivized to be conservative, efficient, and as sustainable as we can be. In stark contrast, state or macroeconomies work the opposite way with the exact opposite incentives. As John Maynard Keynes emphasized in his theory of effective demand, the system of market economics is consumption-based. The basic starting point is demand. It is through consumption and hence the ability to act on demand through purchasing that the system is kept alive.
While there is no shortage of complex classical and neoclassical models that seek to explain the market system’s internal dynamics, at the most basic level, the economy simply doesn’t work right without the perpetual movement of money and the more the movement slows, the more problems arise and hence economic contraction and all the features we come to understand with business failure, unemployment and so forth.
In other words, in direct contrast, once again, to our typical household economy, the foundation of the system moves against the most basic economic principles of conservation, sustainability and efficiency as endogenous features of the system. The cycle, of course, is simple: if people do not purchase, then jobs cannot be created to make those required goods. If jobs cannot be created, income cannot be earned, and hence there is no purchasing power to continue the cycle and hence the economy contracts causing problems.
As an analogy, the systems foundation works like a car’s gas pedal. Gas must perpetually enter the engine at a consistent rate to maintain momentum or stability, hence when the pedal is evenly pressed, while increasing pressure on the pedal accelerates the car with the introduction of more fuel. The market system requires this perpetual gas to sustain agents, but prefers constant acceleration — in other words economic growth.
Put another way, market economics is a scarcity-based system that gravitates toward infinite economic growth in a total contradiction of intent. And I can assure you that if you attempted to run your household economy with, say, a family in the same way, you would cease to prosper and rapidly move into poverty. The very structure and system dynamics that define the endogenous nature of market economics is antithetical to all basic principles to sustain and expanding species on a finite planet, because conservation, efficiency, and sustainability is not incentivized, while constant use, waste, throw away, turnover, and consumption is.
The very basis of economics and the most powerful trajectory of our scientific advancement is doing “more with less.” Stunningly, the more we advance efficiency, technologically, doing more with less or what Buckminster Fuller called “Ephemeralization,” the more we actually inhibit the internal success of the market economy.
Now, due to time, I’m not going to walk through all of the feedback loops that keep reinforcing a gravitation toward infinite growth. But let me quickly say that there are roughly four with the first and most foundational issue being what is just talked about, which I call the need for “cyclical consumption.” Hence, constant turnover to create jobs, to create purchasing power, as if one person is digging a ditch throwing the dirt out while another person is taking the dirt and throwing it back in, so the other person has incentive or motivation to come back and do it again, in a cycle of perpetually digging and filling ditches, which is not an absurd analogy to what this economy actually is.
However, very quickly, the second thing to look at is the debt-based monetary system, where money is created out of debt. Interest is charged on that debt, and that interest does not exist in the principal money supply, constantly creating deficit that must be compensated for, either pushing the need for more employment and consumption and growth so people can try and get out of debt, which of course just displaces the debt, or the fact that debt, being the foundation of money, always means that debt has to be carried by somebody in parallel to the existing money supply.
In other words, for there to be a trillion dollars in an economy, there must also be a trillion dollars worth of debt, and while some people may have that money as wealth or income, others are going to be carrying it as debt or liability. This pressure from the financial system creates a perpetual incentive to submit to the system to keep economic turnover going in an endless pursuit to relieve one’s personal debt stress, which at the end of the day, on the macro level, is actually impossible to relieve, functioning like a game of musical chairs.
Now, the third issue to quickly touch upon has to do with the very nature of competitive self-regulation, in the sense of how inter-business dynamics force each company to push harder and harder seeking capital accumulation in order to maintain market share. Much more could be detailed on this point, but let it be said that this very basic competitive arrangement forces unnecessary economic expansion because of the need for economies of scale within a company in order for it to remain competitive through market efficiency.
This is a fatal flaw of having a system foundationally based on competition amongst many other flaws. And finally, the fourth issue to talk about is the sociological consequence of a culture that has been saturated with the consumption ethic. As per World War II, some may remember that consumption in the West was considered a civic duty in order to help people get jobs to support the war effort or the post-war effort, and so on. It is not an exaggeration to say that there has been a sociological transference of what this system requires to keep stability, hence constant consumption and growth, where people’s very values and ethics have become part of that pursuit.
Materialism, vanity, social status are now all intertwined with so-called personal success. It is a very nasty sociological feedback loop creating an unsustainable value system, which will likely only be overcome once the system’s foundation is changed and the culture can reacclimate. No one needs a PhD in philosophy to understand the moral problem with people obsessed with infinite wants, materialism and consumerism, with no sense of limit, striving to be billionaires with 50 room mansions and private jets, and how utterly neurotic and wrong that is from the standpoint of any species inhabiting a finite planet.
Excess has no place in a sustainable model. Minimalism is the important value along with strategic efficiency. So that is loop one to be aware of, the system’s perpetual drive for consumption, growth, and ultimately the manifestation of perpetual waste, which is undeniably un-economical.
The second loop to discuss in regard to the endogenous flaws of the market economy has to do with economic inequality. From an epidemiological perspective, economic inequality, with its many downstream effects, is a violent affront to the lower class or the poor, in both absolute and relative terms. For those unfamiliar with the public health outcomes of an unequal society, I do recommend, as a preliminary study, “the spirit level” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
What is found is that the more unequal a society is, the more sick, the more aggressive, and the more neurotic and unsustainable that society is. It’s also worth pointing out that low socio-economic status, poverty, and the unfolding that has linked certain demographics to poverty has fostered bigotry, racism, xenophobia, and other qualities that are nothing but negative. In fact, if you look carefully at the civil and human rights movements of the world, they have almost exclusively revolved around people trying to get out of the oppressive state of poverty dealing with effectively a class war between the haves and the have-nots; the owners and the workers; the colonialists and the vassals and so forth.
This gravitation toward socio-economic hierarchy is not a positive feature of society and is ultimately a highly destabilizing one, one that will get far worse in the conflict generating tensions as the environmental crises that we are seeing starts to get worse. Wars, mass migration, gang behavior, terrorism, general crime, all of these features are linked to socioeconomic inequality. In fact, in the words of Harvard researcher James Gilligan, a foremost expert on the causes of violence, he explicitly states that the best thing you can do to relieve violence on the planet — is to reduce economic inequality.
All of that said, the question now is what is causing the inequality? If you look at neoclassical theory, they tend to say that technological change and the skills required is the cause. Pop psychology and pop culture also have perspectives that somehow social stratification is built into us as a kind of human nature. This faulty intuition carried over from analysis of, say, chimpanzees and other primate brethren is actually untenable. And the anthropological history of humankind is that of great flexibility, not fixed responses.
What I’m getting at is that the socioeconomic inequality, the economic inequality that we see in the world today with vast differentials, the Gini coefficients, the two or three people that own more money than billions and billions is not a consequence of anything, but the actual mathematical mechanics of the market economy. As modern mathematicians are coming to realize, even if you gave everyone an equal playing field and had them begin competitively trading with everyone having the same amount of money, the process inherent to the competitive aspect will inevitably gravitate money from the majority to the minority.
In models put forward by mathematician Bruce Boghoseon, who was also the author of an excellent scientific American article called “Is Inequality inevitable?” without any intervention, the system’s dynamics always move toward oligarchy, or a very small number of people owning the vast majority of wealth. This type of work is corroborated from different angles as well, such as Thomas Piketty’s capital in the 21st century, where he comes to the conclusion from a different angle that the system moves toward inequality by nature.
So what we have here is an economy that forces vast differences in the wealth and income of people, irrespective of their fortitude, talent, and skills. Meaning, in the broadest sense that the system is going to do what it does anyway, regardless of the nuances of differences between people, competitive behaviors, innovation, dedication, and so on.
Now, that is the second loop to recognize when considering the endogenously destructive nature of markets. And just as with the first loop regarding a lack of environmental sustainability, our tradition says that, “Well, we just have to engage politics, vote in better people, lobby government, develop NGOs, and other legislations, institutions, and protocols that want to set the trajectory a little bit more straight by manual force.”
Some may remember a staffer at Beers’ famous quote that a viable system needs no controls, and we can qualify the integrity or viability of a system by just how balanced and self-regulating it is, without the need for external intervention. I point this out to preface the following section because if you look at what the system does endogenously, it moves against almost everything that the system needs to do to maintain viability in the environment it exists. In my personal opinion, I don’t think you could create an even less viable system than what this system does inherently.
And this brings me to the third or final destructive loop of this section I will simply call “intervention sabotage.” As an analogy, imagine a classic steam engine and its Watts governor. The governor is designed to feedback with the engine in order to maintain speed stability. But what if the engine somehow was conscious and had agents that, for whatever reason, had no interest in such stability. So what they do is they reach over and they interfere with the process, removing the capacity for corrective controls. Now that may seem like a silly analogy, but that is effectively what we’re seeing in society today. Vested interests that have been rewarded by the market system, hence the upper percentages holding income and wealth, also happen to be those that hold the most influence and power when it comes to social operation.
And the notion of changing fundamentally the system that has rewarded them so thoroughly poses a deep protectionist reaction for self-preservation. We see this in the general political loyalties and constant push and pull in the political sphere. The transition from Keynesianism to Reaganomics or Supply side Economics brought producers, business owners, and effectively the ownership or upper class into priority with the average consuming public and workers as secondary.
While we like to believe that people can think intelligently and objectively, more often than not, people go towards what rewards them operantly. The overwhelming influence of vested interests in this society that have been rewarded by our endogenously corrupt economy pose an immense ongoing barrier as they have for literally thousands of years, in an interest to change the system to be sustainable, because in order to do so, you have to alleviate the mechanisms that reinforce their wealth and power.
At the same time, assumptions about the moral nature of markets have been absorbed into culture to a degree where great fear exists with anything contrary to free market dynamics. The rise of communism, for example, has served as a notable boogie man, where even modest attempts to regulate the society to redistribute wealth, are met with accusations that somehow we’re just going to move into a totalitarian nightmare, and the only safe haven is loyalty to free market principles.
So there’s that. And the third issue to consider on this subject is simply the daily routine the average person is forced into in the scarcity-based society, living paycheck to paycheck as most do. Hence, the stress of survival forces a lack of initiative, while people are told they have to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” to “get what they work for,” and other meaningless phrases that still capture the zeitgeist.
The very daily pressure of short-term existence for most people reduces the probability of rocking the boat even if it means foreseeable long-term destruction. So, when you combine the cultural conditioning and the tendency to preserve power, the probability of the kind of system change required to alleviate the vast array of negative trajectories we are currently on, appears increasingly slim.
In fact, there is good sociological and psychological evidence to reason that the more tense things become in the future, the more selfish, the more tribalistic, the more bigoted people will become, as opposed to any kind of awakening about the true failures of the system. Therefore, a different process must be considered at least in tandem to common political action.
Which brings us to part two of this presentation, “Designing System Change.”
So in the interest of public health and sustainability, what are the common sense requirements for a workable economy? First, physically we must have dynamic equilibrium with the environment, not using more resources in a time frame they can be equally regenerated, nor suffer biodiversity loss, pollution crises, and other obvious issues.
This means scientific resource management must be explicit, not merely sidelined as market economics does. Sustainable resource management technically must be built into the model itself, in the pursuit of maximizing strategic design and efficiency — hence true economizing. Second, the system should be structurally non-competitive and hierarchy attenuating. Collaborative economic processes have proven to be far more stable and efficient, and any defense saying competition drives innovation, which is a classic response, omits that it does so for all the wrong reasons, also driving extreme waste, human conflict, and social oppression through socio-economic stratification.
And number three, similarly, the system must be abundance-focused, not based on the exploitation of scarcity, which is what market economics does today, disallowing the rise of stress-easing, public health improving abundance. It is a sobering realization to understand that the abundance of anything, such as water, is actually a negative feature when it comes to the internal success of markets.
Abundance has no value. In fact, the more problems there are in the world, including the scarcity, the more economic action is generated in response. The market economy, in fact, thrives not on solving problems, but preferring to continue them so they can be exploited for jobs and income. There’s no easier way to collapse a market economy than the introduction of abundance.
Now those basic points made and there are others. Let’s just say for now that in short, we seek a hierarchy attenuating abundance-focused non-competitive economy, with strategic resource management and design organized around dynamic equilibrium. The goal is to maximize public health while being sustainable over generational time. Very simple and evidence-based. Now, with those goals in mind, how do we move from the existing, system building out the future system?
As stated before, we are assuming that traditional political activism, with 99.9% of people are doing today, is not going to work. Appeals to corporations and legislators may have an effect and should be pursued along with public education, but the following is about persuasion by doing, not demanding, others take action in power. So, let’s consider a crude model of transition. First, we can’t move from point A to point B without shared attributes that can be leveraged. Something must connect the two systems as mechanisms of transition.
As will be touched upon in a moment within our market-based evolution, certain elements have emerged that are actually in contradiction to that system’s internal integrity and yet have still gained popularity. And those contradictions are actually in support of the new system and hence can be exploited as leverage. Second, such transitional mechanisms must be integral to the new system as just alluded to allowing for scalability.
In other words, the shared aspect must be defining in regard to the operation of the new system, not secondary, ideally serving as a foundation by which other related economic characteristics can be built over time. And third, as the new system builds along such leveraged transition points, the process should be fundamentally antagonistic to the old system, in an effort to deflate the system’s relevance and functionality.
It doesn’t serve much purpose if there is a parallel system of economy that poses no true threat to the existing system’s survival. There must be a fundamental coercion and pressure built into the mechanisms and developing structure, incentivizing people to join the new system as the old system continues to falter.
Now, in the next and final subsection, we’re going to talk about two levels of this. First, economic attributes currently in existence, though structurally limited by the existing system, can lead to be integral in the organization of the new economy. And second, when it comes to transition in the most preliminary stage, grassroots engagements that overlap with these economic attributes, also already existing in the systems such as tool libraries or time banks, even though very structurally limited and restrained, can serve as the initial stages of public engagement.
On the first point, this is a figure from the fifth chapter of my book, The New Human Rights movement presenting five integral system level economic transitions as just described. Automation, access, open source, localization, and networked digital feedback. Each of these not only contradict current market structure incentives, they are also more effective economic mechanisms to achieve higher efficiency and productivity while fostering increased egalitarianism and equality.
So first we have automation. Automation is a substantial challenge to the labor for income model at the foundation of markets. There is little reason not to expect human labor to be continually replaced by machine, not only because it’s more productive, but through the market lens increasingly cheaper than human labor as it advances.
Human employment will continually become inverse to productivity as it already has in many sectors. Furthermore, automation is not only in contradiction of the labor for income model, it also challenges assumed scarcity. While resource management must always be strict, automation’s capacity to meet human needs and hence the generation of a relative abundance, beyond current methods, should not be restrained.
The abundance capacity of industry since the Industrial Revolution was driven almost entirely by automation. In contrast to current restraints, abundance producing and labor-saving automation is something to be accelerated. Strategic automation is not only more efficient, it is more productive and more humane, and future economic aspects logically should fully embrace it, not fight it, moving away from the labor for income system.
The second attribute is access, access over property, by which I mean moving away from universal ownership in favor of shared methods, as is the case with the universal assumption of labor for income in the structure of markets, Property and ownership are equally as defining and rooted. While we can all relate to the use of certain items, such as a laptop being very personal, the general tradition of ownership is increasingly wasteful and impractical in many areas.
From the standpoint of efficiency, the general idea of everyone owning one of everything is irrational in terms of sustainability and just practicality. Very few goods are consistently utilized over time, with some goods such as cars dormant the majority of the time. While certain sharing traditions exist, such as a library, these are the exceptions. What’s often referred to as a “sharing” economy today, in fact, is really just a rental economy, but it is an improvement. Just as society idealizes today, automated cars, serving as taxis or ubers in the future, where people do not need to own their own car, gaining access as they need it.
It’s important to remember that it’s also about saving industrial resources, reducing land pressure, and other economic factors, by which this gravitation towards access should be extended to everything whenever possible. It’s also worth noting that the social benefit would extend to increasing egalitarianism with more having access to things they once could not own. A goal of a future more sustainable system would be to create access abundance for as many goods and services as possible, working to generate dynamic networks.
Once again, you see the kernel seeds of this, with ride sharing, Airbnb, and so on, and what has been crudely termed collaborative consumption. Again, this interest needs to be magnified, challenging the strict property system we see today, which is inherently wasteful and elitist. The third attribute is the incorporation of open source contribution, making all industrial and scientific information freely available.
Some have referred to this as the cultivation of a collaborative commons, and as will be touched upon more so in a moment, serves as the framework by which future product development and economic designs can flourish, ideally eventually replacing corporations and business itself. While there is a kind of common sense that ideas should be shared because more minds are better than one if strategically organized, the market economy does not like this and moves against this explicitly under the umbrella of preserving private intellectual property for the sake of future income and profits by the owners.
This deeply inhibits intellectual development. While currently there is indeed a community of open source pioneers out there, such as those that developed Linux long ago, there is also this fundamental restraint holding it back which needs to be overcome in transition, where open source becomes the norm, not the exception.
The fourth attribute is localization, which is very straightforward. In contrast to globalization, localization is about regaining efficiency, hence reducing waste by locally producing as much as technically possible, streamlining the supply chain. Extraction, production, distribution, and recycling should be subject to design itself, organized in closest proximity to a given grouped population.
Seems like common sense, but today due to cost efficiency and resource and labor exploitation, commodities and goods are moved all around the world, unnecessarily. The average American food plate moves about 2,000 miles before it lands on somebody’s table. It is nothing but absurd to be importing strawberries from Brazil when you have the means to produce them locally through advanced agricultural methods.
Hence macroeconomic organization needs to be strategic linked to the needs of particular regions localized in an effort to reduce waste. And the fifth and final attribute in this context to address, in terms of transitional characteristics, to be amplified as integral to the structure of the new economy, networked digital feedback. The best example of this is popularized today as the internet of things. It’s about networking technology to optimize information flows.
It goes without saying that active feedback is integral to proper economic understanding and unfolding. Knowing what’s going on in near real time will allow for rapid awareness of economic problems. It also compensates for a long-standing debate post-popularized by Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises in his work Economic Calculation and the Socialist Commonwealth, which is held up today to argue that the dynamics of price, through trade, creates information that simply cannot be obtained in any other way, about public preferences, supply and demand, value, and so forth.
This is a very old and arcane assumption. Modern technology will allow society to move away from price reliance, and in many cases, as abundance is generated, away, in fact, from trade itself. There is no reason to trade in a condition of general abundance. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about utopian abundance. We’re talking about overshooting in production, strategically, existing demands of a given regional population and by extension the global population due to feedback. Through real-time networked strategic economic management through feedback, we can easily figure out what’s going on and what’s needed, what needs to be corrected, and so on.
In the exact same way, in fact, modern production inventory systems of companies do every day, even though it’s only internal and more myopic. Now, with those five attributes introduced, it should be increasingly clear that what we’re going for here is a system mostly without a market, needless to say, as emphasized earlier, given the flaws of the system fundamentally. Does it mean markets do not exist at all? Not necessarily. would simply be used in the most extreme circumstances of scarcity.
Moving on, and before we conclude this presentation with one of the more subjective and difficult areas of focus, as we try to think about a scalable system that could be built from scratch to replace the current economy, I would like to comment on the research and development side of this pursuit.
As touched upon a moment ago, collaborative, open-source design, if properly organized, provides a method to replace business institutions as we know them. Just as collaborators came together to design Linux, a very popular and stable operating system that is open source, so can collaborators come together to design anything, particularly now with advancements in computer-aided engineering.
CAD systems, computer-aided design, as they’re called, have been advancing to a point where artificial intelligence, physics, properties, and other elements are incorporated assist product design. It’s not difficult to imagine an online system of engagement that allows parties to organize tour with the design of a given good, such as a car or a laptop, or a cell phone or anything.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, as we see rapidly moving today, what we can expect is that good design will begin to emerge as a semi-automated process. Humans will no longer sit around trying to put together, say, an automobile part by part. Rather, artificial intelligence will digest the engineering information and will be able to output preliminary models based on the goals of the programmers as input. From there, perfections can be made in a collaborative open-source environment.
So in tandem with what I will be describing next, online systems need to begin developing now that imitate or use this process in whatever minimal form. While we do have examples that are similar, such as GitHub, the notion of expanding collaborative design in advanced open source networks with artificial intelligence assistance is paramount.
While this development omits how access to resources will be gained in the current, private property world of today, the exercise itself would prove the potential. Anyway, much more could be said on this engagement and educational initiative, including what goes on under the hood of such a program to ensure sustainability protocols, maintaining dynamic equilibrium, and other filters, if you will, which I’m going to leave for another time to discuss.
Now, just as we have emerging economic characteristics that stand in contradiction to the fundamental logic and incentives of markets, which can be exploited and harnessed to empower a new system, so do we have grass roots processes and initiatives that exist today in micro form that ideally can be expanded and amplified toward the same end. It’s interesting to see how across the world, over time, pockets of people have moved against the foundation of markets in many ways but there’s no unifying link between them. It’s disparate.
Tool libraries or access libraries, mutual credit systems, time banks, package free shops, zero waste communities, production collectives, open source free distribution communities, design communities, peer-to-peer decentralization, and many other counter-market ideas persist in small detached pockets. And many of these practices contain one or more of the attributes we just spoke about in regard to automation, access, open source, localization, and digital network feedback to one degree or another.
Hence, it’s not impossible to consider how such practices can be strategically organized as one transitional system where people begin to engage in these non-market-based networks for economic needs as the system scales out into a larger parallel system eventually overriding the old, if done strategically well enough.
At this stage of my own work, along with time restraints for this presentation, I am not going to go through a full exploration of this, but suffice it to say that with the proper plan, I think this is the best route (at least that I can think of), to get people incrementally off the grid of the destabilizing market system, correcting course, emerging a new, more sustainable system.
For example, the establishment of a time bank could initially serve as a way to exchange labor and primitive form, creating, say, a blockchain-based credit system that has none of the attributes of the existing monetary system. We’re not talking about Bitcoin. Such a credit system would have non-transferable, non-value changing units. For those familiar with time banks as they have been practiced, it’s important to understand that they are very crude at this stage, but development could be pursued around average utility to create more divisibility between time units, so different forms of labor can find parallel labor without objection.
In other words, without the problem of value differentials, “Oh, is this person knowing the law and doing the same skill as someone programming a computer?” And so forth. Hence, time-bank systems can not only serve as a mechanism for direct time barter between parties, such credits can also be used to obtain access from other mediums such as access libraries, community food programs, production collectives, transport sharing systems, communication means, and so forth.
While I apologize for the vagueness of all of this, let’s take an example in regard to a production collective as I call it. And I’m going to be as realistic as I can in this description, assuming that we are still in a transitional model where private ownership of the world’s resources and the means of production, in general, is still the norm, requiring money to obtain land, capital machinery, and so forth.
As many are familiar with, business collectives sparsely exist across the world. The idea of employee-owned businesses, so to speak, have been around for a long time. However, these businesses still compete with the external non-communal businesses in the free market environment.
Therefore, while they may be egalitarian internally, they are exactly the same as an institution as other businesses externally. Hence, business collectives, as commonly practiced, are of little transitional use overall. It’s just old, socialistic ideas. But if we modify this in what we can call production collectives, non-competitive production collectives, since market business, as we know it isn’t relevant to the future economy, we can imagine that a kind of club is organized around the production collective outputs.
Hence, people do not buy with money what is output. Rather, they contribute to the production collective either directly or through credits obtained in the time-bank system, gaining the fruits of that production as a community that is subscribed to the system. How did the collective get the machinery and the land in the building? That would no doubt take a preliminary investment by like-minded people using actual customary fiat currency. But once that is taken care of, along with other administrative issues such as taxation, the organization of the production collective uses none of those tools, detached from the incentives and procedures of markets.
This pooling of traditional monetary resources serves as a transition affecting investment in community which no longer use that system once they are established. Some may argue that’s improbable, but people donate an enormous amount of money each year for various causes with no expectation of return, in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I personally believe that once the infrastructure of this kind of thing is set up and the options are there, many people seeing the caustic nature of the existing system will be willing to invest their financial capital into non-market return based production collectives, understanding that the fruits of what is being created is a community service. I know I certainly would.
That considered once we have this pocket of infrastructure, a person who has been active on the Time Bank network could actively participate in the production aspects of this collective, rewarded not by money, but by the collective, the club gaining access to the fruits. The goal is that over time, as efficiency increases, the necessity for credits becomes less and less. The functionality of the production collective begins to support itself by community engagement and increasingly advanced technologies, particularly automation and other efficiency parameters.
It’s not inconceivable, for example, that a vertical farm system producing produce could be funded and built in a local community, with just enough people administering the system for credits benefiting from those credits or the fruits of the system itself, while the community at large accesses those ultimately free resources in an increasingly zero marginal cost environment.
Now, I apologize when I’m going to stop there. I will conclude by saying that such a preliminary developmental community network would develop into a smartphone app with all of the parallel institutions accessible and networked together strategically toward the goals I have expressed. In terms of education at this primitive stage, such an app could also be simulated until those institutions are able to manifest giving people a sense of what it would feel like to engage in such a way. The ultimate goal, of course, being a transitional process through expanding community engagement through such parallel systems that eventually transcend the old destructive system over time. My name is Peter Joseph and I hope this thought exercise will inspire others to consider such a program as we all work together to figure out how we are going to get out of the mess we are currently in. Thank you for your time.