Technocracy -- A new social/economic system

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Thanks for derailing the thread, there was some relatively interesting debate on before you come in. Incidentally, Awesomelyglorious wasn't really promoting any of his own ideas as much as acting as an apologetic for mainstream Neoclassical theory, which is accepted by most modern economists.

no problem dude, i aim to please almost anytime i post in this forum

apparently you cant disconnect yourself from the board or know how to ignore my futile purposfully intentfull thread derailings

but hey i slept at a holiday in last nite so what do i know?

I always believe in the golden rule as in: "do unto others as you would have others do unto you"

But, for narcissistic shysters, I believe in a more antagonistic version of the golden rule as in: "Give unto others a taste of their own medicine for others who give unto you theirs"

CHECKMATE IN 3:

Who said anything about egalitarianism? The monetary system that is now in effect is not even correlational. That is it doesn't even correlate well with labour that is either performed by machines or manually by people.

Let's say I'm the holder of the meal tickets which is really what money is nothing more than.

Depending on who I am, how generous I am and where I set up shop, I can give you a certain amount of blue meal tickets than somebody else working the same type of job that is given more or less in terms of quantity of those blue meal tickets. Same job different amount of meal tickets. Labour and money is not correlated.

Or suppose I give you red meal tickets that is "worth" a lot less than the blue meal tickets even if you do the same type of job. Depending on how "poor" you are, I can even make you work more intensely and for a longer time at the same type of job than a blue meal ticket earner, but I'll just give you red meal tickets because I want to have more ownership over the things you work for to produce than the guy actually doing the producing which is you. Same job different meal tickets. Labour and money is not correlated.

Or suppose I own a power plant that generates the "labour" of manufacturing machines. Even though there's nobody actually performing the labour and it makes no sense to pay a machines meal tickets, anybody using the electricity derived from "my" fuel that generates the power that the machines consume will have to pay me their meal tickets which presumably is the result of paid personal labour. No job, no need to pay a machine, but you pay meal tickets derived from your labour to owners of power generation infrastructure. Nonlabour, labour and money is not correlated.

In the monetary game, workers are the game pieces and not the players. So how do we go about this to produce real civilization and not players and pieces in a game? Take over the game like in Cuba or the U.S.S.R.? No, because you'll simply have one player in the game with everybody else being game pieces. Well, not exactly one player because the politicians and money holders will be playing the game globally with others for the goal of global domination. Money = control. The game pieces are not empowered and are as expendable as toy soldiers and toy workers.

CHECKMATE IN 2:


I see. That sort of make sense. There's no joint winners in a marathon race.

But, I thought we're talking about productivity and making a productive and comfortable life for everybody who's willing to work. I never occurred to me that making a living and being productive was a game.

Further, in the competitive testing game that we're all suppose to play, what's the distance between 1, 50 and 100? Quite a bit isn't it? What's the distance between 90, 95 and 100 or for that matter 98, 99 and 100? Is there any meaningful distance or any difference between competitors that more experience wouldn't remedy. Or could it be that there are no "superior" candidates at all if the aptitudes were about the same because even for slightly lower scores some people with lower scores may have scored better in other areas than people that scored higher than them? But, who are the employers going to pick? Are those explanations of marginal relations of talent even relevant to them? No because they are the owners of the contest. They are the owners of the game which in no way correlates to them being "superior" and qualify them to judge who's the best worker to work for them, otherwise they would have no need to hire you to do a job they can't do themselves because of an inferiority of talent.

But, let's reverse things shall we? Suppose I'm the owner of the game and my arbitrary criteria for hiring is height because I like tall people. Maybe I own a basketball team and society is runned as a giant never ending basketball game rather than on intelligence and labour resulting in material wealth. I know it's a contrived example, but where do you think you're living now? You're living in a contrived society based on monetary "value". So, now suppose that Awesomelyglorious family and friends are entirely dependent on height to make a living. Within any social groupings of human beings even amongst identical twins I'm sure I can find "marginal" differences in height from a few centimeters to a few millimeters. Based on my arbitrary criteria meal ticket holders like me and others like me who are out to compete for the tallest players will inevitably filter out people who are only a few millimeters in height difference because of the pressure for monetary efficiency. The ones that are left out can be considered "useless bums" not because they actually are in reality, but it serves as good propaganda for anybody buying into the monetary game.

Well, Awesomelyglorious. Who's the shortest in your family?

CHECKMATE!


That's funny. I never thought that a participatory economy where everybody is empowered to be active players in the economy has anything to do with totalitarianism. But, let's take a look at totalitarianism and how it works in reality by turning the planet into a prison and determining what is the best means of control for the warden(s) of this system.

Suppose I'm a "nice" warden and decide that I would run an "egalitarian" prison of harmonious prisoners all equally subservient to me. How would I do it? Propaganda of the socialist paradise that awaits for anybody not clever enough to see that exchangeable money horded into my hands would actually mean you are all equally poor in relation to the hand that feeds you would definitely help. Would anybody buy into my lie? Why not? They're trapped within the monetary prison which is also a mental prison and cannot see past the prison walls so there would be thousands who grew up in an "unfair" Capitalist prison and would like to switch to a Socialist prison. I wouldn't even need to be the leader because the leader can be self-deluded into thinking he's "liberating" the prisoners from Capitalism and if he dies the real monetary elite can put the pickled body of the dead "liberator" into a glass coffin to be worshipped by the deluded sheep.

Suppose I'm not a "nice" warden, but a nasty one. I demand that my prisoners produce more than they receive back in food and shelter. This is clearly an impossible scheme without giving the illusion of freedom by allowing the prisoners the "freedom" to work for different equally nasty wardens. So now, meet warden mary, warden jane, warden tom, warden dick and warden harry as well as me. Within this system various numbers of games can be played to make the prisoners think they're actually important active players.

GAME 1: The competitive game
Everybody's free to compete for 400 meal tickets out of a prison population of 300, but wardens like myself get to pick the winners. If you win, I'll shower you with flattery like crazy, so you'll believe that you're actually believe that you're "better" than the unluckly fellow that missed out on the limited number of meal tickets. If you believe me and treat the poor like garbage then I'll keep you around.

GAME 2: The resume game
I need confirmation from other wardens that you're an obedient, hard-working prisoner. You'll need to write down what you did for these other wardens, but if you can get away with pulling enough s**t out of your ass and wiping it down on that piece of paper, I might give you a chance too. But, usually I just hire friends and family to work in those comfortable positions. I don't need to look at all this s**t!

GAME 3: The cannibal game
Well, this is a game that I made up. But, why not? Food is in limited supply given the limited number of meal tickets. Every increasing day the number of meal tickets get decreased by one regardless of the number of prisoners the prison holds. All the wardens including myself needs profit in that we want a surplus of something that is impossible to acquire unless some prisoners stop eating. But, since this can't be done without starting a fight amongst prisoners the alternative would be to chop someone up to serve as food for someone else that needs food. But, because non-initiation of force is important, somebody would need to volunteer to be cannibalized. If I catch you killing somebody for food, I just might kill you also. No, no. No fair forcing somebody to serve as food because the decreasing number of meal tickets given to you isn't sufficient for food. I need my profit. The other wardens need their profit. Somebody here needs to volunteer to be chopped up as food and it's certainly not me or any of my other wardens who are players in the money game. We got plenty of meal tickets. Some of you prisoners need to decide who will sacrifice themselves for the good of the prison.

I wonder if we should play these games on the former monetary elites in a prison setting once a participatory economy is established.

No, I'm just joking... but that's really up to the people who overthrow a monetary system to decide whether or they take inspiration from my joke.

CHECKMATE!

Again, anybody interested more in participatory economies and Technocracy in particular can visit:

N.E.T.

or google parecon and technocracy and emergy for more information

Also visit: DIE OFF

Why does it have to correlate well with an objective measure? I argued that money is a result of subjective evaluations based upon individual preferences and thus does not have to correlate with anything other than choices by individuals and firms.


Ok? Yes, you absolutely can. I think that is known as pricing in an oligopsonistic market, and basically there is some freedom for price variation, however, given that we are dealing with firms and people here, we are either doing this to maximize profit or to deal with an individual preference, or we have one of those Principle-Agent problems that arise from time to time.


Once again, I never stated that money and labor were correlated. In fact, there are easy examples of this not being so, such as lazy geniuses, janitors vs rockstars and etc, that does not attack the system.


Of course you do! The plant is the result of past labor. Capital does not arrive from the void to be planted for no reason, but rather it is the result of productive labor allocated for potential future benefit, if you weren't paid then you would not have provided the necessary capital for this plant. The real issue here is just private development and benefit from capital.


You have not made your case that workers have no freedom, therefore they are still players. Frankly, you have assumed they were not players and then stated it as true despite my explicit lack of acceptance.

We are talking about productivity first. Through productivity we have a comfortable living for everybody who is willing to work. Wealth did not drop from the sky, but rather is the result of productive processes across multiple firms in creating wealth.

Read Bob Frank's book called The Winner-Take-All system(if I remember the title correctly). He makes the argument that marginal differences can be immensely important in certain frameworks such as law, upper level management and others and that this can lead to inefficient distributions of wealth. He does not reject the capitalist system though, but rather is one of the better left-wing economists. Yes, explanations of relations between talent are relevant to them. Once again, you make the assumption that employers are a homogeneous and unified group, which I have already argued against. Employers aren't the owners of the system because of this, but rather competitors in their own subsystem and thus they seek superior candidates. Also, your point completely misses the idea of the division of labor and on some level interpersonal comparative advantage. Just because one person CAN do everything, doesn't mean that one person SHOULD do everything, and in fact, it is impossible for many of our structures if one person does everything simply due to human time limitations.


Ok, society is a neverending basketball game. My first question: how does this really address my subjective preferences? No, I am not in a contrived system, as I stated, money is not based upon objective material facts but rather subjective preferences which are at the center of human experience. To call this contrived is to call the human experience contrived. Well, my first question about this is how does a basketball based system provide utility? I mean, technically a capitalist system could be completely based upon basketball, but honestly, basketball neither relates to utilitarian ethics, or libertarian ethics and I can't see a society that really loves basketball that much or how basketball benefits people much so it really makes no sense. Well, technically Prot, the term "useless bum" is not one used by economists but rather one that people give to other people, some ethical systems deny the existence of "useless bums", however, what capitalism states is that it does not find a place where these people can contribute in a manner usable to other people. Really though, once again, I would regard your entire example as sophistry as you completely ignore the issues of subjective preferences and money. Instead of making money a vehicle as it is understood by participants in a capitalist system and by economists, you make it into an independent entity.

I tend to consider most left-wing economic ideas to be varying forms of totalitarianism.

Actually, I would argue that you would fail at successfully creating a socialist system. I also tend to think that your entire example is just the use of an assumption that I am brainwashed to prove that I am brainwashed. Sort of like saying I assume X, the world as I see it is not much different from it is if X is assumed, therefore X is true. Using that logic, we can "prove" many things from teapots in space to Bill Gates being from the future.


Well, sir, your entire thought experiment demands the idea of an entire class of people with a unified front, an assumption I have challenged you on repeatedly. If there is not an entire class of people with a unified front, your entire conceptualization of the economy fails. In fact, I would consider this entire line of reasoning to be a claim that capitalism is NOT capitalism, as you must assert that capitalism is not a system marked by competing forces and thus subject to supply and demand and entrepreneurial efforts.

And this is of course the reason why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are donating much of their fortunes to Africa, why Carnegie and John Rockefeller gave much of their fortunes to education, and why capitalism is occasionally attacked by Bill Gates and George Soros and then has to be defended by free-market economists who denounce their ideas as theoretically and empirically invalid?? You are assuming a master in order to prove it, and thus your logic is flawed.


Of course, and the founders of large companies such as Nike, Microsoft, Walmart, and IBM have lots and lots of friends and family members all across the world. And as well all know H. Lee Scott, Jr. is secretly Sam Walton's bastard son. How is giving a resume even that much of a game? It is a necessity of changing positions, heck, I imagine that if you changed positions within a company there would be a reviewing process on your qualifications.


Yes, of course.... because these are all games and not actual processes for managing an economic system which sustains millions of lives and experiences continual improvements in the growth of capital, technology and efficiency.


*sigh* Oh yes, your logic was oh so flawless. Woe is me, for I am defeated! Have you ever studied neoclassical economics or Austrian economics or any othert economic idea that examines market behavior? I don't even regard your criticisms as those of an intelligent opposition but rather an onslaught of bad assumptions and misunderstanding of economic ideas.

Here, David Friedman has an online price theory book. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/ ... y_ToC.html

and the Austrians have good books in explaining some of economic thought (although they are not neoclassicals by any stretch and have epistemological views you would probably disagree with)
http://www.mises.org/ Menger's principles and any writings by Bastiat might be helpful.

and yes, I did give you the most radical sources, but here is a list of more conventional explanatory books. http://www.oswego.edu/~economic/newbooks.htm

As well, if you check out a website such as Amazon or something of that nature you can probably find a good textbook cheaply if you look at the used ones that are no longer used by universities. Also, this is not to say that you cannot recommend books to me, however, I have read part of Robin Hahnel's book Parecon before I got sickened by his assumptions and lack of meaningful depth, I think he has another, better book, but I haven't bothered to read it. I have also read some of John Kenneth Galbraith's work, and J K Galbraith who was a follower of some of Thorstein Veblen's ideas, and if you know the history of technocracy then you know that Veblen was one of the economists who had some amount of approval for technocracy. I haven't bothered reading the book I downloaded from technocracy's website though, it dips too deeply into physics for a social science and was written during the depression so it does not really seem to address modern economic theory that well.

The Technocracy is just another variety of a planned economy run by paternalistic "experts." I fancy myself a market socialist, and thus agree to a point with the libertarian/neo-liberal criticisms of economic planning.

p. 165, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, by Michael P. Ghiglieri; Perseus, 1999; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... rainfood.a

Here's more: "Chimp social structure would be unique were it not for humans acting similarly. This is no coincidence. By most taxonomic criteria, chimps and humans are sibling species. Overall, chimp society is not only extremely sexist -- with all adult males dominant over females -- but also xenophobic to the extent of killing all alien males, many infants, and some old females who enter their territory. To some readers, my use of the word war may seem too strong to describe what male kin groups do. But systematic, protracted, deliberate, and cooperative brutal killings of every male in a neighboring community, plus genocidal and frequent cannibalistic murder of many of their offspring, followed by usurpation of the males' mates and annexation of part or all of the losers' territory, matches or exceeds the worst that humans do when they wage war.

"Wild chimps reveal the natural contexts of territoriality, war, male cooperation, solidarity and sharing, nepotism, sexism, xenophobia, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, polygyny, and mating competition between kin groups of males -- behaviors that have evolved through sexual selection. Also significant is the fact that none of these apes learned these violent behaviors by watching TV or by being victims of socioeconomic handicaps -- poor schools, broken homes, bad fathers, illegal drugs, easy weapons, or any other sociological condition. Nor were these apes spurred to war by any political, religious, or economic ideology or by the rhetoric of an insane demagogue. They also were not seeking an 'identity' or buckling under peer pressure. Instead, they were obeying instincts, coded in the male psyche, dictating that they must win against other males." [p. 176]

"The central 'truth' of sociologists is that nature, especially that of humankind, is nice and that people are designed to do things that, all in all, favor the survival of their species. Hence people could never be equipped by nature with instincts to kill other people. This idea comes from the Bambi school of biology, a Disneyesque vision of nature as a collection of moralistic and altruistic creatures. It admires nature for its harmony and beauty of form and for its apparent 'balance' or even cooperativeness. It admires the deer for its beauty and fleetness, and it grudgingly admires the lion for its power and nobility of form. If anything is really wrong with us, it explains, it is a sociocultural problem that we can fix by resocializing people. It is not a biological problem.

"Nature, however, is actually a dynamic state of recurring strife of relentless competition, dedicated predators and parasites, and selfish defense. The deer owes its beauty and fleetness to predators such as mountain lions, which kill the clumsiest and slowest deer first; to competitors for food; and to competition between males to mate. Without predators, deer would not only lack fleetness; they would lack legs altogether. They would be slugs oozing from one plant to another. Yet even if these deer-slugs were the only animals out there, natural selection would favor the evolution of faster and more aggressive deer-slugs and would favor any other trait that made them superior competitors against each other. This would include the killing of one deer-slug by another in situations where it boiled down to kill or die.

"Moreover, the power and noble visage of the lion (or of the family cat or dog, for that matter) rest entirely on natural selection having shaped not only a fleet predator and efficient killing machine but also a very violent competitor against its own kind in situations where the options were narrowed to exclude or kill, or else kill to survive or reproduce." [p. 179]



The classical economists Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Henry George were all operating with the eighteenth-century scientific worldview of the Physiocrats. In the 1870s, neoclassical economists such as William Stanley Jevons in Britain, Leon Walras in France, and Karl Menger i n Austria moved even further away from reality by shifting emphasis from limitations on supply to interpretations of consumer choice in psychological terms.

What? You're going to psycho-analyze consumers now?

FIVE FUNDAMENTAL ERRORS


Economics can never be a science because it's claims cannot be proven falsifiable.
This means it is not even wrong science. It does not deserve the title of science because it is a secular cult.

I never denied that people were evil, killers, territorial or anything of that nature, so it is hardly a counterproof.


Essentially, yes, because the economy is the result of subjective AKA psychological processes in human functioning. I would argue that the issue is not one of the LTV being more scientific, but rather of the LTV being less reflective of human processings. In fact, modern economics has even made greater progress towards psycho-analyzing consumers with ideas such as behavioral economics, experimental economics and expectations based models popping up with the focus on learning how economic actors tick. (note, before you think to attack expectations based models, I think legitimate economists have already pointed out issues in testing the theory and using it)

Your link really lacks a lot of meaning. I really find a lack of things that can actually be meaningfully criticized. I mean, I could argue that David Hume WAS an economist who argued against mercantilism along with the rest and who had an idea on inflation that was revived by John Maynard Keynes. I could also argue that the nature of energy really isn't that important and that energy is just another resource just as land or labor is, and even argue that our untapped energy flows are rather large. I could also even argue that economics still ends up being a science because of its positivistic doctrine and emphasis on statistical analysis of data to prove or disprove models and the existence of the distinction between positive and normative economics, showing that it avoids unscientific presuppositions about how things ought to be, which David Hume would likely love. I could even argue that the definitions and arguments are necessary for logical interpretation of the world, and that methodological individualism is a good idea for dealing with issues of preference. Honestly, I don't really agree with the argument that economics is not a science, as it is as much, if not more of a science than most social sciences in existence. Frankly, I would argue that most critics of economics do so more because they have an ideological itch and dislike the current economic acceptance of markets as reasonably efficient processes and its failure to generate policy ideas to their favor as honestly, as I stated earlier, economics has the same, or to be more fair, less scientific failure than any other social science.

Yeah, tell me about it. I mean you got economics with supply and demand curves that doesn't really measure anything more than the distribution of social power via money which may be affected by many things not even considered relevant to the economist like coercion, warfare, resources, education, energy efficiency, ecology or sustainability.

And you got science with no unprovable assumptions about the psychology of people or the "efficiency" markets, but have laboratory testable empirically derived formulas that are universally true regardless of culture or psychology like:

V = I R, voltage = current x resistance
F = M A, force = mass x acceleration
E = I V T, energy = current x voltage x time

Well, supply and demand curves are approximations for certain societal set-ups. They do not apply in areas where coercion or warfare matter, as those are governed by the subset of economics known as game theory. Not only that, but issues of resources, and energy efficiency are matters for industrial engineers, and issues of ecology or sustainability are issues for ecologists. Economists simply explain firm or individual behavior given a set of constraints or institutions.


Because statistical analysis is such a horrible way to do things? Like I said, economics often cannot use laboratories like many other social sciences, and thus it uses statistical analyses to make up for that. As well, economics uses formulas and frankly a lot of economics as your own author noted is math, based upon the set of assumptions used for the framework. Frankly, there cannot be a "true regardless of culture or psychology" because variances in culture and in psychology represent changes in the framework being used. It is useless to have a supply-demand model for predicting prices in a society that lacks market structures, and it is very difficult to accurately design a game theory model for a psychotic. This is not to say that economics cannot work towards analyzing tribal cultural set ups, as Gary Becker has done research on determining the set up of the family, nor is that to say that a game theory chart cannot be made up for a psychotic, we merely have to know what that individual's mind works like.

Also, btw, we do have equations that work regardless of anything else.

MV = PY for instance, or Y = C + I + G + NX, both equations are true by their definition just as V = IR, F = MA, and E = IVT are true by their definition(don't believe me, just look at the definitions of the units used for the physics equations and you'll see that your equations are definitionally true)