The Democractic Manifesto

[Akhlut]

Who's going to define what constitutes "useful work", and why would a truly socialist economy need to keep track of such a thing? (Unless the original document, now deleted, advocated some sort of money-less capitalism, but that would of course be silly, as any other way of keeping track of expended labour time, would just be money in a clown suit.) If "useful work" can mean "anything, whatever, write a treatise of Star Wars vs. Star Trek, just don't sit on your ass all day", well people are going to do that anyway. If it means "produce necessities", there's simply not going to be enough of such jobs to make coercive measures necessary or probably even practical. Keep in mind that even in our current hilariously wasteful system, the majority do not have such jobs, and are driven further away from anything that would be useful in a socialist society as increases in productivity make them obsolete. As unemployment and purchasing power would be meaningless terms, there would be no horrible side effects to large increases in efficiency, so the amount of actually needed work to sustain society would be expected to decrease even faster.

As for those concerns: I don't know. I think the idea is intriguing, and perhaps even a good goal for the future, but I was essentially playing devil's advocate here to try and build something of an argument of how a moneyless society could work vis a vis trying to weed out cheaters/slackers.

It would also be useful, I think, to keep in mind our hunter-gatherer past: estimates put the work load of hunter-gatherers at around 15-20 hours a week, with the the other ~90% of the week being devoted to leisure and sleep. So, if one really could get such efficiency boosts that we only needed to work 15-20 hours a week, I'm sure most of humanity would be a lot more well-adjusted in relative terms, and possibly better at a lot more tasks because they could spend time on pursuits other than work.

[Akhlut]

So after all these paragraphs, in the end, you do acknowledge that in this system, people can have easy jobs, and presumably since you didn't answer the question, take the same benefits as another person. Whether it gets saturated or not is irrelevant.

What's easy, what's hard? A person with Asperger's and a knack for math would find doing statistical work trivially easy, while a social butterfly without a head for numbers would find it difficult, while the social butterfly would find a customer service job relatively easy, while the person with Asperger's would potentially find it to be horrifically stressful and difficult. Which one of those jobs is easy, which one is hard? And so on with every other job.

What if a person's lot in life is to be a janitor (and they are needed so someone has to do it). Then what self-satisfaction or prestige can the person ever hope to receive?

There are people who enjoy doing that sort of work, and there's still the matter that they are not finding life wanting, as they can acquire the goods and services they want and need. Prestige is also a very nebulous concept that isn't a hard and fast definition, as everyone has their own sort of personal definition of what fits in as prestigious. How many people think that movie stars have very prestigious careers? Yet, there are not a small number of people who think that they aren't really glamorous or prestigious. It's a subjective thing. So, even if few people think janitorial work is prestigious, there are many people who still enjoy the work (if not the work itself, their coworkers and the general workplace environment).

Here I also ask again, is this person's benefits equal to another or not? If it's the former, then is it enough to justify this person's 'misery' of working 8 hours that he'd rather do somewhere else but can't?

How is that person being forced into their job, though? Education would be totally free, and all one would need to be an entrepreneur would be a convincing idea to help secure workers for one's incipient business.

Now, I'm not sure of the exact nature of every single detail on how this moneyless economy would work, however, if capital were much more easily available to everyone and education were free, then people who don't want to be janitors aren't going to be constrained to working as janitors, as they could get an education and/or start up a new business, or whatever solution that is feasible for that person.

[Soontir C'boath]

So after all these paragraphs, in the end, you do acknowledge that in this system, people can have easy jobs, and presumably since you didn't answer the question, take the same benefits as another person. Whether it gets saturated or not is irrelevant.

What's easy, what's hard? A person with Asperger's and a knack for math would find doing statistical work trivially easy, while a social butterfly without a head for numbers would find it difficult, while the social butterfly would find a customer service job relatively easy, while the person with Asperger's would potentially find it to be horrifically stressful and difficult. Which one of those jobs is easy, which one is hard? And so on with every other job; as your aforementioned job

A job which does not take much effort or intelligence to accomplish.

There are people who enjoy doing that sort of work, and there's still the matter that they are not finding life wanting, as they can acquire the goods and services they want and need. Prestige is also a very nebulous concept that isn't a hard and fast definition, as everyone has their own sort of personal definition of what fits in as prestigious. How many people think that movie stars have very prestigious careers? Yet, there are not a small number of people who think that they aren't really glamorous or prestigious. It's a subjective thing. So, even if few people think janitorial work is prestigious, there are many people who still enjoy the work (if not the work itself, their coworkers and the general workplace environment).

So in a society where prestige and the sense of accomplishments are much more prevalent than in our society, the goods and services that he and everyone else receive should be good enough to allay the new meaning of one's own worth? Doesn't seem like it.

How is that person being forced into their job, though? Education would be totally free, and all one would need to be an entrepreneur would be a convincing idea to help secure workers for one's capital.

Not everyone likes to go to school or are as capable as you. School is free now already but that doesn't change the intelligence or abilities the person is capable of ie. there is only so much a person can do. School can maximize his abilities, but that upper limit varies.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not sure if I was clear enough; all I was trying to say was that the system shows that you did work, not that you were given a certain number of tokens that can be used to purchase things. Simply a sort of labor record that isn't diminished by "purchasing" goods and services.

Ah.

That runs into problems on the distribution end (who takes how many of what?). It also runs into problems because of simple envy and frustration- I cannot get 'more' in any tangible sense by working harder at essentially the same job than my neighbor does; in short there is no overtime pay.

[scratches head]

[K. A. Pital]

Overtime is formally forbidden to exceed a certain number of hours legally in most First World nations. In Germany you can't work more than 10 hours no matter what you do or how much you so desire. Banning overtime actually makes worker's lives have more free time.

[Simon_Jester]

Possibly, but if you ban it outright there's no flexibility. What if someone wants to expend an unusual amount of resources on a one-time thing (say, a wedding) and desires to justify it with extra effort?

The reason this system bothers me is that it's so... low-resolution, there is only the binary "works/doesn't work." I perceive many gradations within the definition of "work," depending on the relevance and prestige of the work, on what proportion of their time the worker is willing to dedicate to the task, and so on.

If we are to abolish money, I would think we'd need to preserve some of that subtlety and complexity, because it seems to me that the complexity has important functions. Without it, we get perverse incentive structures and bottlenecks in the entire system ranging from labor to supply and demand for goods.

[K. A. Pital]

I do not perceive a great difference between limiting overtime to just 2 hours (re: Germany) and banning it outright.

[Dooey Jo]

As for those concerns: I don't know. I think the idea is intriguing, and perhaps even a good goal for the future, but I was essentially playing devil's advocate here to try and build something of an argument of how a moneyless society could work vis a vis trying to weed out cheaters/slackers.

I'd say keep up the devil's advocacy then, because it's not a "concern" so much as it is a reason why weeding out "cheaters" would be unnecessary. Productivity today is so high that a single farmer can supply more than a hundred people with food. So, simplified, a hundred people could share a 40 hour work week of farming (so they'd work half-an-hour each per week, but coercing people to do so, and especially keeping track of their efforts, would be impractical and voluntary labour would probably be a lot more efficient). A slacker that sits around doing nothing all day will frankly not even need that much effort to keep alive. Even less if we assume he dies from boredom in short order.

Maybe it should be clarified that the "moneylessness" of a socialist society does not mean to get rid of a thing called "money" for the sake of it, but rather that common ownership and abolishing wage labour would lead to money or other means of exchange being superfluous.

What if a person's lot in life is to be a janitor (and they are needed so someone has to do it). Then what self-satisfaction or prestige can the person ever hope to receive?

Without writing fanfiction about what a hippotestical future society would look like, that is not a very difficult issue to solve. If it is decided that horrible work is indeed necessary and can't be automated, the workload could instead be rotated to decrease the burden of any one person. Certainly there are very, very few jobs that truly require the same person to do it for 8 hours per day their whole life. For janitors specifically, who's to say it would be difficult to find someone who wants to be one. I know tons of weirdoes that actually enjoy cleaning and gardening and whatever.

[K. A. Pital]

Robotization of cleaning is already underway, so I'm not sure there's much work left for a janitor in advanced industrial economies. Even industrial workers themselves are now a smaller percentage of population than they used to be.

[Lord Zentei]

No, I just said it sounds interesting. I am (sort of) working on non-monetary systems with a degree goal in mind, but I don't know if I would ever have the opportunity to dedicate more time to it.

Yeah, good luck with that. It's not as if it hasn't been tried countless times.

Robotization of cleaning is already underway, so I'm not sure there's much work left for a janitor in advanced industrial economies. Even industrial workers themselves are now a smaller percentage of population than they used to be.

That's part and parcel of the increased productivity per worker that arises due to technology, which in turn increases the capacity of the economy to supply higher wages. You still need someone to press the buttons. And vis-a-vis point #1, you need the incentive for the technologist to provide said technology to achieve that.

As an aside, I'm not at all in favour of banning overtime - some people use that to make ends meet, or at least to help increase their savings during a difficult time. There was a time when I worked in "mind-crushing" jobs in order to save money for college, and I would have wasted more years on that shit if I couldn't have worked overtime. So, fuck bans.

[Dooey Jo]

Robotization of cleaning is already underway, so I'm not sure there's much work left for a janitor in advanced industrial economies. Even industrial workers themselves are now a smaller percentage of population than they used to be.

Yeah, exactly. It was apparently estimated that in 20 years time, the current demand for commodities could be met by some 2% of the population. You'd think that would bring the possibility of huge amounts of free time, but of course that's not how capitalism can work. It'll bring huge amounts of unemployment, over-production and invention of pointless minimum-wage jobs to keep the system running. As usual.

[Teebs]

I'd say keep up the devil's advocacy then, because it's not a "concern" so much as it is a reason why weeding out "cheaters" would be unnecessary. Productivity today is so high that a single farmer can supply more than a hundred people with food. So, simplified, a hundred people could share a 40 hour work week of farming (so they'd work half-an-hour each per week, but coercing people to do so, and especially keeping track of their efforts, would be impractical and voluntary labour would probably be a lot more efficient). A slacker that sits around doing nothing all day will frankly not even need that much effort to keep alive. Even less if we assume he dies from boredom in short order.

Specialisation is produced massive efficiency gains. Everyone doing half an hour of lots of jobs would destroy that.

[Dooey Jo]

Indeed, forcing everyone to have an equal share in all parts of the production of everything would be impractical for many reasons, including some jobs needing specialisation. But probably we shouldn't focus too much on the specifics of an explicitly simplified example meant to illustrate the point; that the amount of needed labour power wouldn't be enough to provide meaningful work for everyone all the time, and thus deciding how to punish people who don't do such work would be pointless as they would not be a systemic problem. If everyone chooses not to do such work, that's another question, but presumably this hippotestical future society wouldn't be made of idiots.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, good luck with that. It's not as if it hasn't been tried countless times.

Like in economies where peasants were 80% of the population and industry was pathetically primitive? Actually, no sensible theory of an advanced economy without money was ever properly developed and tested. Perhaps Beer and Glushkov had a shot at getting a try, but their experiments did not progress far enough at all for reasons completely outside their scientific work.

That's part and parcel of the increased productivity per worker that arises due to technology, which in turn increases the capacity of the economy to supply higher wages. You still need someone to press the buttons. And vis-a-vis point #1, you need the incentive for the technologist to provide said technology to achieve that.

I work, shall we say, in an organization which does not look kindly on overtime. I am not asking for it since the base income is more than enough for survival. Base reward is enough of an incentive for mental labour.

As an aside, I'm not at all in favour of banning overtime - some people use that to make ends meet, or at least to help increase their savings during a difficult time. There was a time when I worked in "mind-crushing" jobs in order to save money for college, and I would have wasted more years on that shit if I couldn't have worked overtime. So, fuck bans.

There was a time when I worked in mind-crushing jobs too, though thanks to the aforementioned ill-botched attempts at building a money-free system I didn't have to pay for college or whatever medical issues occured; I just passed the exams and got the education. As far as I know, college isn't expensive in Europe either, though I might be extrapolating Germany's system to other places.

P.S. Anybody has a copy of the "document" in the OP? It was deleted, duh.

[Lord Zentei]

Yeah, good luck with that. It's not as if it hasn't been tried countless times.

Like in economies where peasants were 80% of the population and industry was pathetically primitive? Actually, no sensible theory of an advanced economy without money was ever properly developed and tested. Perhaps Beer and Glushkov had a shot at getting a try, but their experiments did not progress far enough at all for reasons completely outside their scientific work.

No, I didn't have medievalism in mind: I meant apart from the usual shitty suspects. It's making advanced economies work without a medium of exchange that's tough. Haven't heard of Beer and Glushkov before now, though.

That's part and parcel of the increased productivity per worker that arises due to technology, which in turn increases the capacity of the economy to supply higher wages. You still need someone to press the buttons. And vis-a-vis point #1, you need the incentive for the technologist to provide said technology to achieve that.

I work, shall we say, in an organization which does not look kindly on overtime. I am not asking for it since the base income is more than enough for survival. Base reward is enough of an incentive for mental labour.

For idealists, perhaps. Not for most people.

As an aside, I'm not at all in favour of banning overtime - some people use that to make ends meet, or at least to help increase their savings during a difficult time. There was a time when I worked in "mind-crushing" jobs in order to save money for college, and I would have wasted more years on that shit if I couldn't have worked overtime. So, fuck bans.

There was a time when I worked in mind-crushing jobs too, though thanks to the aforementioned ill-botched attempts at building a money-free system I didn't have to pay for college or whatever medical issues occured; I just passed the exams and got the education. As far as I know, college isn't expensive in Europe either, though I might be extrapolating Germany's system to other places.

It is expensive. Just not for the students - someone still has to pay for that.

P.S. Anybody has a copy of the "document" in the OP? It was deleted, duh.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to see it before it got deleted. But based on the reactions, I doubt we missed much.

[K. A. Pital]

It's making advanced economies work without a medium of exchange that's tough. Haven't heard of Beer and Glushkov before now, though.

Glushkov's OGAS project and Beer's Cybersyn were the only real attempts to introduce a computerized real-time controlled planned economy in reasonably advanced industrial nations (USSR of the late 50s and Chile in the 70s) that I know of. Good studies of non-monetary economies are few and far between, probably because of the fact that the political climate would not allow to conduct any practical experiments required to check the theory. What's the point of making such a study if it won't be implemented? Better make a study about, say, brandmanagement - more practical, corporations may even pay you for it. As for whackoes like myself, we usually don't have a lot of time on hands for a proper study.

For idealists, perhaps. Not for most people.

Actually, most workers are not idealists. They just want to get a living wage since they're risk-averse people. A tiny minority would risk a guaranteed income for a possibly higher, but non-guaranteed income, if we're talking about your ordinary worker type. I'm certainly not typical.

It is expensive. Just not for the students - someone still has to pay for that.

Oh. I thought (what was it?) 2000 euros per year is more or less tolerable with a wage upwards of 12000 per year.

[Simon_Jester]

I do not perceive a great difference between limiting overtime to just 2 hours (re: Germany) and banning it outright.

It's the difference between allowing "I can quickly increase my income by 10% to balance out extra expenditures" and "I honestly prefer to work at a harder pace in exchange for 'greater' rewards," and not allowing those things.

I really worry about the feasibility of a system which suppresses information about who works hard and cares about their job versus who's just going through the motions. And it's not like we can reasonably expect everyone to reach that level of passion just to get the "I work" credit either. Realistically, most people don't know what they'd be truly passionate about until they've done it, and in order to contribute to society at all must be able to find a role where they can work at a job that they do purely because it is a job, knowing that they do not love it.

So the system, to accommodate the aspirations of the people working in it, has to enable two things. It has to enable people who care about their work and consider it a major part of who they are to work hard at it, and be rewarded for working hard- otherwise they will become burned out and a valuable thing will be lost. And it has to enable people who, while largely indifferent to the specific thing they are working at, nonetheless want to contribute to society in a meaningful way, in exchange for society's consideration in letting them have food and shelter (and luxuries to some extent as well).

[Akhlut]

A job which does not take much effort or intelligence to accomplish.

Which would be which jobs, precisely? Stuffing envelopes? I honestly can't think of a lot of jobs that actually pay money that only have the relatively effortless and mindless tasks assigned to them. Even jobs which have those tasks as components still have other tasks which do require effort and/or intelligence. At the very least, those tasks usually require diligence to continually do them over time.

So in a society where prestige and the sense of accomplishments are much more prevalent than in our society, the goods and services that he and everyone else receive should be good enough to allay the new meaning of one's own worth? Doesn't seem like it.

There's also the matter that they can find avenues outside of their work to find meaning and prestige. I know a lot of people (perhaps the majority of people) in the current economy who do work simply for the paychecks and do a lot outside of work that work more toward prestige and improving the valuation of their own life via hobbies, hanging out with friends, and similar pursuits.

Not everyone likes to go to school or are as capable as you. School is free now already but that doesn't change the intelligence or abilities the person is capable of ie. there is only so much a person can do. School can maximize his abilities, but that upper limit varies.

Then why not try to maximize his happiness through areas other than simply employment? Plenty of janitors and other people in low-prestige and low-paying jobs still live relatively fulfilling lives; the main problem they have these days isn't so much low prestige as finding it hard to live on the salaries they're earning. Remove the worry about living from day to day, and life satisfaction would improve dramatically.

[Lord Zentei]

It's making advanced economies work without a medium of exchange that's tough. Haven't heard of Beer and Glushkov before now, though.

Glushkov's OGAS project and Beer's Cybersyn were the only real attempts to introduce a computerized real-time controlled planned economy in reasonably advanced industrial nations (USSR of the late 50s and Chile in the 70s) that I know of. Good studies of non-monetary economies are few and far between, probably because of the fact that the political climate would not allow to conduct any practical experiments required to check the theory. What's the point of making such a study if it won't be implemented? Better make a study about, say, brandmanagement - more practical, corporations may even pay you for it. As for whackoes like myself, we usually don't have a lot of time on hands for a proper study.

I suspect that most who are in a position to go for such an experiment simply don't believe that such a model is feasible (I'm inclined to agree with them ). A smaller scale experiment would be needed to convince people to go for the larger scale stuff.

For idealists, perhaps. Not for most people.

Actually, most workers are not idealists. They just want to get a living wage since they're risk-averse people. A tiny minority would risk a guaranteed income for a possibly higher, but non-guaranteed income, if we're talking about your ordinary worker type. I'm certainly not typical.

And most workers want to be paid, and wouldn't mind at least having the option of getting more for extra work.

It is expensive. Just not for the students - someone still has to pay for that.

Oh. I thought (what was it?) 2000 euros per year is more or less tolerable with a wage upwards of 12000 per year.

That's just the public schools, since they're subsidized. The real costs can be seen in private institutions where the cost approaches ten times that.

[Teebs]

Private schools may not provide the best guide because they are likely to spend more than government funded schools since they have to be able to sell themselves by getting better results.

Some actual spending figures from the UK:
School education: in the region of £6000 per pupil.

University education is harder to find statistics for because all the costs of researchers, postgrads and undergrads are mixed up together. Also you're going to get a far greater degree of variance in costs between universities and between subjects. A quick google did find this which states that the cost of educating an Oxford undergrad (which is going to be one of the more expensive degrees to provide because of the way Oxford does things) is considerably more than the current £9000 fees cap. For reference, Oxford is a public university, so it's got no profit motive going there.

[Lord Zentei]

That may be, but even so £6000 per pupil is still €10000, and thus five times the €2000 price-tag mentioned above.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I suspect that most who are in a position to go for such an experiment simply don't believe that such a model is feasible (I'm inclined to agree with them ). A smaller scale experiment would be needed to convince people to go for the larger scale stuff.

The problem is, you cant. Systems on different scales operate differently. For example, a small community like a medieval village can prevent free-riders because everyone knows each other. In such a system, people cannot get away with the bare minimum or less if they expect to be treated nicely. A city like new york cannot do this. Now, it might be possible to distribute the system so that a city block of a few thousand people all know eachother and keep track of all their little tit for tat exchanges.

Actually, that might not be a bad way of doing it. Individuals would just need to keep track of say, favors/goods given or produced vs favors/goods owed and paid back/paid forward. File the form at the end of the year (or month or whatever) to a database that cross-references them for accuracy. It then prints out a Tit For Tat scorecard you can use in negotiations for things. That way, you dont need to actually know the person to avoid free rider problems. You check the card and if they are a good productive citizen and generally good at re-paying obligations and contributing to society, you would be more inclined to help them out with their chicken breeding or whatever.

[Lord Zentei]

I'm well aware that you can't always scale economic models. But less-than stellar workability on the small scale and lack of workability on the medium scale doesn't bode well for these things, hence reluctance to undertake major experiments like this.

PS: Incidentally, we already have something like the tit-for-tat scorecard you describe: it's "money".

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect that most who are in a position to go for such an experiment simply don't believe that such a model is feasible (I'm inclined to agree with them ). A smaller scale experiment would be needed to convince people to go for the larger scale stuff.

The problem is, you cant. Systems on different scales operate differently. For example, a small community like a medieval village can prevent free-riders because everyone knows each other. In such a system, people cannot get away with the bare minimum or less if they expect to be treated nicely. A city like new york cannot do this. Now, it might be possible to distribute the system so that a city block of a few thousand people all know eachother and keep track of all their little tit for tat exchanges.

Stas's examples (OGAS and Cybersyn) were not, strictly, of 'moneyless economies.' They were of economies, or attempts to build economies, coordinated by some means other than just arbitrarily tracking units of currency and letting whoever happens to have the money in their pockets figure everything out. And to do this in a more modernized, efficient way than the relatively crude 1920s-vintage methods used by the USSR and other planned economies built on its model.

The USSR (and most other planned economies) of the 20th century simply had bureaucrats make all the decisions while shuffling paper files, but there have been serious attempts to update and expand on this process using networking. One of the things Stas mentioned was Project Cybersyn; I think Stas is presumably thinking in terms of refinement on this concept. Ultimately, with enough computing resources and the right setup you might engineer around the problems of centralized decision-making.

I'm well aware that you can't always scale economic models. But less-than stellar workability on the small scale and lack of workability on the medium scale doesn't bode well for these things, hence reluctance to undertake major experiments like this.

I think Stas's point is that trying to do all this informally, using Iron Age tools such as big piles of paper in filing cabinets and Steam Age tools such as telephones, may fail... but trying to do it using Information Age techniques might well succeed, or at least provide a more viable alternative to capitalism. One that could keep the economy from becoming a total basket case, while avoiding most of the major problems endemic to a capitalist economy, even if it doesn't provide all the creature comforts and other benefits of capitalism.

If you could get cybernetic control of the major economic sectors going (jury's very much out on that), you'd be in a better position to abolish money. Because you'd be better placed to command that things happen and have them carried out in the absence of piles of dollars to drive the actions that need doing.

[madd0ct0r]

Stone age (human memory) works for a few hundred people
Iron age (paper)works well up to about a thousand people (guessing, based of Alyrium's estimate above me)
Steam age (telephones) might take that to a few sets of thousand people, maybe a dozen?

Digital age? Not only is our data collection and sharing much more sophisticated, our ability to analyze said data has improved a bit too.

What about a semi monetized system? Everybody gets a basic income (or right to food, shelter ect) regardless of work, and then pocket money is issued for various things and used to buy luxuries produced outside of work hours.

Edit. There's also the point of what people are want to do, regardless of pay. Ie, I spent the week checking drawings for dimensional integrity, typos and designing an inspection regime for quality control for the construction phase.
I spent the weekend analysing different possible bamboo cross sections to otimize stiffness for a friend who's making a bow. I also checked several armylists for rules and cost integrity and for typos.