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I once saw a bumper sticker that read: “I don’t have anything against God—it’s His fan club I can’t stand.” Substitute The Invisible Hand for God, and you have the way I’ve been feeling lately, to a point. To be glaringly honest, I must say I have never really been intellectually capable of not believing in the inevitability of the market mechanism. On the other hand, I have never been emotionally capable of being at peace with its implications. I want to believe that the market is a human invention rather than a force of nature, but I can’t summon up enough suspension of disbelief to maintain that belief.

For the sake of argument, let’s tentatively classify me as someone who accepts the market as a reality that isn’t going away any time soon. As the gnostics have their “Hypostasis (i.e., reality) of the Archons,” I’m burdened with the realization (gnosis) of the Hypostasis of the Agora.

In this blog post I would like to outline my current thinking on how best to pursue radical change with both freedom and equality in mind.

While I’m prepared at this point to give up on giving the Invisible Hand a bone-crushing ‘bionic handshake,’ I’m still determined at least to arm wrestle it to a draw. Human outcomes should be a negotiated compromise between the reality of the market and the hopes and dreams of humanity (or at least the present specimen thereof); prominent among those being freedom from precarity and the supplanting of competition by cooperation.

While solving the Calculation Problem may be theoretically impossible, I believe we may have sufficient information technology to uncloak the Invisible Hand; making it a visible hand. Even under main$tream economic theory, transparency is a prerequisite for a fully competitive market. I’m trying to build a collection of ideas on how to impose transparency on the world and to monkeywrench business models based on asymmetric information. Readers (if any) are encouraged to participate in this effort at the pubwan wiki. Even if the market ultimately turns out to be something we can’t control, I’m nowhere near ready to accept is as something we can’t understand, and I intend to understand it at a microscopic level of detail.

I reject as false the dichotomy between ‘market economy’ and ‘centrally planned economy’ (or more pejoratively, ‘command economy’). I see no reason decentralization should be incompatible with economic planning. Wild Pegasus once ridiculed Participatory Economics as ‘making Pol Pot look like a piker.’ I see this as a gross overstatement. Although I’m not a peace with economic consumption requiring permission (apparently the case under Parecon), I’m equally not at peace with participation in production being a privilege. As far as I know, all pro-market views equate the ‘a job is a right’ thinking to what they call ‘forced sales.’

So, while I can’t with any intellectual honesty fully identify with the NMNS or non-market-non-state tendencies, neither can I have solidarity without reservations with the market socialist and related tendencies. I also refuse to jump on the ‘post-left’ bandwagon as I find rightist ideas such as the free market to be as inimical to social solidarity as statist institutions are to freedom.

Not so much as a middle ground, but as a reversal of stated priories, I will tenatively start labeling myself as MNNS (market-negative-non-statist). Basically I’m addressing the market mechanism as something inimical to my hopes and dreams, but that is theoretically impossible to dispense with. It occupies a position of contempt similar to that of entropy in my estimation. Maybe instead of ‘anagorist,’ you should call me ‘agoraphobic.’

Came across Maxwell Despard’s blog Protean Post-Left Nonsense while browsing profiles on Google. Attention zeroed in on the phrase ‘altruistic individualism;’ listed first among Despard’s interests. Further search linked this term to Gandhi. This comes as a refreshing alternative to rugged individualism, regarded as synonymous with capitalism.

I’ve generally privately thought of myself as an individualist, but with some caveats, and a generally distancing of myself from self-identified individualism. Unlike the people usually associated with individualism, for whom every aspect of the human condition seems to revolve around a grand dichotomy between the private and public sectors (good and evil, respectively), I’ve recognized the relevant dichotomy as being between individuals (who I understand to be human beings) and institutions, by which I mean government, business, religion, family, culture, etc. Needless to say, I’ve run into some quandaries fine-tuning this formulation. Do institutions include organizations in general? My general inclination is to grant a sort of exception for organizations dedicated to both the individualist and anticapitalist causes, but is such an organization an example of a non-oppressive institution, or a non-institutional organization?

A few years ago, the trend in television advertising seemed to be montage designed to turn my television into a strobe light. I imagine you could kill someone with epilepsy that way. Later the strategy shifted to the audio spectrum, with commercials anywhere from 10-30 dB louder than the content shoehorned into the airtime between them. The decibel blast is still part of the strategy, but more and more, the ‘voice roll’ is becoming an almost universal feature of television and radio advertising. Salient features include wildly exaggerated inflection, exaggerated difference between loud and less-loud syllables, sustained vowels on ‘key’ words, the sustained tempo of the hypnotist or preacher. The keyest of the key words are of course the phrase ‘Call now!’ There also seems to be a tendency to a mid-south accent; along the lines of the ‘Tennessee trader’ stereotype.

This style of vocal delivery has always of course been characteristic of a certain ghetto of the advertising world; the infomercials, and the types of products that associate with that crowd— the too-good-to-be-true propositions, and the sales pitches built around pressing people’s inadequacy buttons. Then of course it spread to the characteristically salesy industries which until recently were doing the strobe light thing—replacement windows and furniture. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but the practice seems to be spreading to a larger and larger portion of all TV and radio advertising. Almost all radio advertising, in fact. Perhaps these things go in cycles, and once again the emphasis will be on flashing lights and whooshing noises. There is of course a sort of arms race between advertisers and we the people with our time-shifters, popup-blockers, and recently my rapid-fire trigger finger on the mute button. STFU, folkx!

A rough outline of this schema was offered as a comment on Non-Monetary Coordination at the Angel Economics blog. That blog suggested use of an input-output matrix to model the processes of production and trace supply chains. My comment related some modeling ideas I’ve been tossing around over the years using graphs, Pareto optimality and a preference description language I call ‘maxhi schema.’ I call this bundle of concepts pubwan. Pubwan was initially intended as a set of tools for studying and mapping the actually-existing economy by reverse engineering the mechanisms of market intransparency and asymmetry. Angel Economics, as proposed, has inspired me to envision applying these and other ideas to the much more difficult problem of modeling economic calculation itself.

My first suggestion was to start with a simple production process; organized around one person or some other small number. Identify the inputs and outputs of that process. This activity should be simple, step-by-step and replicable. A large number of people modeling a large number of processes in this way should start a discovery process that identifies, among other things:

• opportunities to link processes within the community of participants
• as a consequence, transparent, openly documented supply chains
• which processes can be implemented (i.e., which products can be produced) most cheaply in the economy under construction, relative to their prices in the actually-existing economy.

Note that prices from the actually-existing economy are used to initialize the model. It is hoped that prices in general can be phased out, but even if not, the creation of extreme transparency and a cooperative model of production would seem a worthy goal, even if liberation from the the price mechanism itself turns out not to be feasible.

A logical step to take after describing and modeling production processes is to actually implement them. This entails obtaining equipment and supplies, and documenting in detail where, when and at what cost these are obtained. Thus far, except for treating vendor transactions as nonproprietary data, we are describing the setting up of a place of business. The practice of ‘business,’ like the price mechanism, is something we would like to phase out, assuming we are good little anticapitalists. I should point out, of course, that my interest is experimentation. I would not be inclined to bar people from participation in the project based on their opinions. Here are some important differences between the quasi-business (QB) proposed here, and business-as-usual:

• We are starting with the assumption that all accounting information is nonproprietary, down to the resolution of individual journal entries.
• We are starting with the assumption that the relationship between such ‘business’ units is entirely cooperative, and not competitive.
• We are not trying to maximize profit, at least as a singular objective.

To some extent, these ideas have been adopted by actually-existing-capitalism, as ‘B corporations,’ ‘open-book policies,’ and ‘multiple bottom line accounting.’ One thing that is different about the QB is that the primary objective here is one of experimentation and data collecting, to see what happens. In particular, the third difference above, about goals other than profit, needs to be fleshed out. Here are some objectives to optimize early on:

• informational closure. By this I mean a preference for pursuing projects that have the potential to fill in informational gaps in the shared database.
• ‘autarkic’ closure, or the pursuit of relative self-sufficiency by the QB economy. This means seeking to minimize inputs from outside the community, or ‘imports,’ and a preference for pursuing projects to produce products identified as inputs (especially expensive inputs) of already implemented or modeled processes.

Once a number of closed loops are established within the QB economy, perhaps there will be opportunities to explore decentralized and democratic approaches to allocation of resources.

I couldn’t help noticing that the ad copy at one point in Neighbor Works’ “Questions Protect” radio PSA’s changed from “predatory lenders” to “predatory mortgage lenders.” I can only wonder whether this has something to do with the proposed car dealer loophole in the proposed legislation for a new consumer watchdog agency.

This was intented as a comment to Non-monetary coordination at Angel Economics, but it got too long to fit the 4KB size limit for comments.

I would like to add some modeling ideas for incorporation into the economic modeling paradigm offered as ‘angel economics.’ Basically, I am applying the ideas I have set forth as pubwan to the ideas described there.

First to address your information agencies. I see no need for institutional control of information. Your information storage and distribution can be the existing Internet, which hopefully can be made more resilient and independent of commercial activity. It would be good for the community of angels to hedge its bet by developing a parallel or alternative internet from the ground up, perhaps akin to Fidonet back during the era of bulletin boards. Given an internet, the information agency is essentially an open content database in which to store your input-output matrices.

The use of matrices to model production processes is reminiscent of Leontief’s input-output model of the economy. You also seem to be advocating using matrices to model the information in a process sheet, focusing on one stage of production and cataloging inputs, outputs, equipment, perishable supplies. The method I propose also uses graphs to model processes. Consider each process as a graph node. Let’s also consider people and things as graph nodes. Now draw a line from the process to each of the people and things involved in the process. The people involved can be marked as being members of a particular occupation or profession—more on this later. The things involved in a process include inputs, outputs, machines and fixtures, perishable tooling, etc. Each item should be cataloged using ‘is a’ and ‘has parts’ relations to help identify equivalent pieces as equivalent in spite of variations in nomenclature, spelling, etc. As the master graph gets filled in by more people marking up more processes, situations will self-identify where a particular type of object that is one process’ output is another’s input.

One way to start this project would be to spread the word about your idea of angel economics. Attract as many people (or angels) as you can. The first thing to ask of your participants can be to use matrices and graph nodes to model their own jobs. Hopefully their jobs aren’t so monotonous that the whole workday isn’t built around a single process operation. In any case any person’s current actual job in meatspace should be able to be modeled by listing materials used in each on-the-job activity, as well as internal and external ‘customers’ dealt with, etc. Additional information to obtain from each participant would include jobs or trades they would be interested in learning, as well as any for which they are expert enough to teach. This lends itself to creating a many-to-many relation mapping participants with occupations, in which each instance of person-in-an-occupation can be preliminarily tagged as ‘apperntice,’, ‘journeycritter,’ or ‘master.’ Sure this brings rank, and potentially rankism, into the equation. Consider it the kind of ‘authority’ that implies expertise and nothing else. In the angelic social structure we are modeling of course, apprenticeship is more purely for the purpose of instruction, and undertaken without the usual emphasis on bondage, servitude, entry barriers and trade secrets. On-the-job training, of course can be seen as another process to be modeled.

The addition of nodes representing production processes will continually enlarge the database. It is expected that linkages between processes will be discovered in the process. Hopefully this will present a serious challenge to the idea of supply chain as proprietary information.

The next thing to ask of the participant-angels is to similarly model their leisure activities, or their consumption of goods and services. In terms of market-based theory of economics, this entails mapping out one’s own ‘utility function.’

Getting back to the idea of an information agency: The agency is the database. One activity in the maintenance of the database is closure-seeking. By this I mean the use of systematic methods to identify holes in the information. An obvious place to start is with objects identified as outputs but not as inputs, and vice versa. Wikipedia’s most wanted articles feature is an example of a closure-seeking mechanism. Another closure-seeking mechanism for angel economics might consist of identifying products, processes and product destinations that are outside the system, so to speak. These could be thought of as imports and exports from the perspective of the angel economy. While I don’t think autarky of production is a sane objective for any economy, I think autarky of knowledge would serve the cause of resilience.

Does all this mathematical modeling effectively replace price signaling? I’m guessing not; at least not in the early stages. Instead of redesigning economics on a blank slate, I would propose taking existing price signals as givens, for example for the purpose of deciding which market baskets are feasible for the purpose of utility mapping. Perhaps this scaffolding can be removed at some point; perhaps not.

This is only a text. It is being posted to see whether the recent Blogger outage is really over. If you are reading this text, then it is possible to post text to Blogger from this place at this time.

The Center for a Stateless Society, like many marketist groups, hosts a web-based Find Your Philosophy Quiz. As is par for the course with these quizzes, I can’t find my philosophy in the quiz, precisely because the questions are worded in a way that excludes my philosophy.

I would think at best they are missing an opportunity by not asking the respondents which (business or government) partner they perceive as more powerful.

In my view, if I accept someone’s positional authority, it’s because I’ve run out of options that don’t involve authority. I refer to this process as resignation, not consent. This highlights profound and widespread controversy as to the definition of consent. If the C4SS were seriously interested in exploring the range of public opinion along several ‘axes,’ one of the more important and interesting ones would be the spectrum of understanding of what constitutes consent, or alternatively, views on what factors determine the scene of consent.

Here’s a news flash. Some of us see managerial and executive level decisions as a net-negative. I pride myself on my lack of managerial background, just as I and other pride themselves on lacking a ‘civil service’ background. You can see this attitude even in pop culture. Those old enough to remember the TV show ER perhaps recall the kinds of resistance nurse characters and even doctor characters made against ‘promotions’ to managerial roles. Whether or not the stories are realistic, the fact that they are part of our popular culture says something about our national psyche.

Throwing in ‘organizing their work lives’ with ‘mak[ing] managerial…decisions,’ is of course an example of package dealing.

If they deleted the if clause from the statement, I would have ‘strongly agreed,’ without reservations. As stated, I have to decide whether an ‘agree’ answer will be interpreted as support for the idea of worker takeovers or as support for the idea that all unfair advantage (or privilege) has its origin in the public sector. A rhetorical question.

More package dealing. Self-employment is seen as less preferable than employment-employment by many, for reasons I find perfectly understandable. Many are backed into self-employment by circumstance, and the self-employed on paper (1099 instead of W2) are de-facto temps, counted as business founders as yet another way of cooking the employment and business startup statistics. See for example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/fridays-job-numbers-and-w_b_598520.html.

Cooperative economics is something I value in its own right, not only because it is an alternative to working for a boss, but more centrally because it is an alternative to competitive economics.

Partnerships are something I understand to be (by definition) an ownership arrangement, and therefore not a departure in any sense from capitalism, even actually-existing capitalism. Anderson Consulting was an example of a partnership.

No consistent answer available to someone who believes in squatting but doesn’t believe in land titles.

They’re effectively asking whether I favor censorship, or favor freedom of the press being for those who own one. Another loaded question.

As a matter of principle, the word ‘and’ should be avoided in questionnaires of this type.

True. They also of course use the built-in advantages inherent in wealth itself.

Sweatshop labor is a by-product of economic desperation and little else. Yet I hesitated to answer ‘disagree’ as I feared I would be interpreted as viewing such work as ‘voluntary.’

Plain English Glossary

Often we generate more heat than light because we are reading from different dictionaries. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the so-called marketplace of political ideas. Take the word liberal. In terms of what Rush Limbaugh means by liberal, I’m a flaming liberal, while in the sense of what the Economist (magazine) means by liberal, I’m a flaming antiliberal. Then there is the related term ‘libertarian,’ which somehow during the 20^th century (in America, at least) morphed from being (among other things) an anticapitalist movement to being (among not many other things) a laissez-faire capitalist movement. Libertarians in the American sense (henceforth called litas in this blogentry) cherish markets and liberty, while they disparage egalitarianism and collectivism. My own attitudes are largely the opposite, in spite of very real common ground. My purpose here is to provide a small list of words that are especially prone to multiple connotations, and explain my understanding of what they mean, along with my understanding of the litas’ understanding of what they mean. I generally prefer to use words in whatever way is most consistent with what the words mean in everyday, non-jargony English.

market

The pencil-and-paper science called economics conceives of a ‘market’ as a category of product or service, and that portion of the population who either buy or sell that product or service. This ‘market’ can be described in terms of a supply curve and a demand curve. It’s really all quite abstract. To me, and to many if not most, ‘market’ is a verb, as in: “In the new economy, you have to market yourself.” Market is also, of course, a noun: “I have to go to the market and replenish my supply of cat food.” The verb usage of market has the most bearing on my social/political/economic worldview. In my experience, the more ‘market oriented’ the political climate gets, the harder I have to [expletive deleted] sell, sell, sell myself to get a job offer on the table. I definitely associate market-oriented policy with economic precarity, if not hardship. Maybe that just means I’m a loser, but that’s how I feel.

equality

The snarkiest voices among the litas and other rightists frame equality as something that comes in precisely two distinct forms, which they call equality of opportunity and equality or results. The former is possible, if not inherent, in the frictionless plane that is the unfettered market, while the latter is theoretically impossible, and as a stated goal is a symptom of the psychological disorder called sense of entitlement. They love to ridicule it with Diana Moon Glampers jokes or by implying that it implies people being identical. I recognize a third sense of the word equality, characterized by the very widely understood notion of an equal footing. I understand this type of equality to be somewhat broader than the narrow sense of equality of opportunity that seems to imply a society free of de jure privilege. It requires the (to me) more ambitious goal of a society free of de facto advantage. This is in no way equivalent to equality of results.

What does it mean to be on an equal footing with another party? I think most people know intuitively what it means. It means nobody has your head over a barrel. It doesn’t mean getting everything on your terms, but it does mean you have enough clout, game, or whatever, to negotiate a compromise in which the other party doesn’t, either. Expressions like ‘market leverage,’ varying degrees of ‘duress,’ ‘boilerplate contracts,’ ‘getting taken advantage of,’ and ‘monopoly’ are very common figures of speech, even though the litas perform much derivation to demonstrate their theoretical impossibility. Everyone understands what they mean, and that understanding comes from very routine personal experience. Certainly it’s possible for the conventional wisdom to be wrong, but I find it to be a more ready guide than theoremsies derived from assumptions such as a universe in which the only economic goods that exist are eggs and root beer.

freedom

Litas love liberty (the ‘l’ in litas stands for libertarian, after all) and they love the word liberty. I love liberty. What self-respecting person doesn’t? It turns out that in recent years I have been more and more reluctant to self-identify with liberty. The liberty equals negative liberty meme has been pounded so relentlessly, at least on the Internet, that I’ve been conditioned to think of liberty as a basically right-of-center concept. People on my side can and should, of course, remind me not to let our adversaries steal our issues and hijack the language in other ways. I agree, but there is some practical value in ceding the field in spite of my better judgement. Navigate down any blogroll infused with blognames like liberty this, liberty that, CamelCaseLiberty, whatever, and you’ll find a rogues gallery of the usual suspects; Birchers and other conspiracists, litas, agoraphiles and other FMF’s, as well as a bumper crop of Republicans. Including the word ‘liberty’ in my blog name would simply create the wrong impression, and would put me in company I don’t want to be associated with. So, for better or for worse, the colloquial meaning of ‘liberty’ has successfully been massaged to rightist specifications. This sort of poisoning of a word is not uncommon. The 20^th century variety of communism fetishized the word people so much with their people’s republics and people’s liberation armies, that almost reflexively, seeing a sign that said something like ‘People’s Pharmacy,’ my first thought would be, ‘I wonder if it’s run by communists.’ Likewise with the word family and Bible-based Christians.

What about ‘freedom?’ To the litas, freedom means nobody is holding a gun to your head. It’s become quite a cliché. I think of freedom as ‘play,’ in the mechanical sense, that is, some part is free to move along more than one axis. Analogous is the mathematical idea of degrees of freedom. In this spirit, freedom of action is far more precious than freedom of expression. Freedom of conscience is more precious than freedom of belief. In Plain English, economic freedom is synonymous with the phrase ‘set for life.’ To the litas, of course, economic freedom means freedom to fail. At least that freedom is universal. I’ve been trying to popularize the idea that economic freedom means freedom from economics.

capitalist

In Plain English, capitalists are people who are in business for themselves. It’s a functional, not an ideological, term. Practicing capitalists, in general, don’t mind having the government as a customer.

collective

The ultimate dirty word among the litas, it’s not really part of everyday English. Perhaps its most widely recognized usage is collective bargaining. ‘Individual bargaining,’ or negotiating one’s own wages (and of course terms of employment) without representation, is asymmetric. The other side has legal representation, as the job application and other signable documents are professionally-drafted boilerplate. It is also important to note that the other side (the employer) is in almost all cases a collective entity.

Much is being made of the fact that Rand Paul’s position on civil rights laws prioritizes property rights over civil rights. This is a well-known feature of the Libertarian Party platform, and the American variant on libertarianism in general. That this was drawn out of Dr. Paul by a blogger rather than a journalist comes as no surprise. With the main$tream media, zero exposure for third party movements is obviously an editorial policy. More troubling is that even the progressive media are discussing the public accommodations aspects of Dr. Paul’s troubling priorities, rather than the much higher stakes issue of employment non-discrimination. The consumer marketplace is considerably easier to negotiate than the job market, the customer always being right, and all.