Here we have a more or less standard explanation of the fact that sometimes employers run credit checks on prospective employees. I second what Chicagosmith said in the second comment; that the practice amounts to social exclusion, no more, no less. And commenter John Laster, apparently in the “no credit” category, is probably at a disadvantage. Since “no credit” includes the debt-shy as well as the young, I’ve always assumed that the real motive for discrimination against unindebted people is based not on the idea that they are irresponsible, but that they are relatively less indenturable. After all, the more debt you have to service, the more married you are to your income. In the movie On the Waterfront it’s stated explicitly. “No loan, no job.” The same principle may apply to nations as well as individuals. Consider the following:

As with the United States and indeed nearly all countries, EU “aid” is largely self-serving – a combination of export promotion and bailouts for debtor economies to pay banks in Europe’s main creditor nations: Germany, France and the Netherlands.

More export markets=more income opportunities, and these opportunities are being opened precisely because the nations in question are debtor nations. Basically nations are being “hired” precisely because they’re not “free and clear.” It seems plausible that no-credit individuals might be discriminated against based on similar motives. But how would one go about testing this hypothesis? I’ve been giving that one some thought. The methodology might start with that of studies on race discrimination (e. g. this) that feature paired applicants (one black, one white, for example) with basically matched resumes. Here we field applicants paired by credit characteristics; perhaps testing good credit against bad credit, good credit vs. no credit and bad credit vs. no credit. I suspect that “no credit” would turn out to be the most disadvantaged category. Conventional wisdom would expect “good credit” applicants to fare better in the employment game than “bad credit” applicants, but I suspect there may be exceptions to the rule. If the alleged business model of Eurozone bailouts is accurate, perhaps there is a sort of “sweet spot” in which the wages on offer are barely (or even intermittently) sufficient for solvency, given the worker’s particular debt load. This would be plausible as a weapon against turnover—well, employee-initiated turnover.

A market basket is a bundle of economic goods. Since our aim here is to escape from market phenomena if possible, in this essay we’ll call it an inventory. Let’s use the term survivable inventory to refer to an inventory which is sufficient to the survival of a person. Ideally, we can individualize this, not assuming some standardized person as with hedonic indexing along the line of “poverty line” calculations. But our motivations in identifying survivable inventories are very much similar to those behind the “poverty line” concept. Basically the idea is to classify economic goods as luxuries or necessities, but with certain subtleties accounted for. We can speak of an inventory as survivable for a given person. The same inventory may not be survivable for another, due to medical or other special needs. We would expect all survivable inventories to include food, and almost all to include housing, clothing, and some medical products and services. The food portion should supply all essential nutrients in sufficient amounts. This raises the question of inventories that are technically survivable, but not without consequences that affect long term survivability (life expectancy). The choice of a standard of survivability should allow some flexibility. Given a true post-scarcity state of affairs, it would literally be a non-issue, while a condition of extreme hardship such as a famine might justify settling for a compromised understanding of survivability, at least for adults. This is of course not an exact science, but there may be reason to invest some effort in surveying the boundary between viable and non-viable provisions.

Now let’s extend the idea that an inventory is survivable for one person, to asking whether it is survivable for two persons. It is a question of whether it can be partitioned in a way in which each partition is survivable for one of the persons. Likewise for three or more persons. Now let’s take a big leap and assume that information about all assets in existence is public knowledge. We will refer to this condition as extreme transparency, and refer to the combined inventory as the common wealth. By the way, it is not intended necessarily to imply common ownership of this common wealth; only public knowledge of its contents. While enforced disclosure of asset holdings is abhorrent to anarchists, it is encouraging to see that unauthorized actions have probably advanced the cause of transparency more than have those of the authorities. More importantly, we can perhaps establish a community of persons as (perhaps among other things) an informational cooperative.

Using the survivability criteria established above, we consider the question of what is the largest fraction of the population for whom survivable inventories can be partitioned out of the common wealth. Negative utilitarianism (basically the least bad for the least number) suggests we adopt maximization of the survivability percentage as a shared goal. A second goal might be minimization of nonrenewable inputs in the creation of common wealth. Additional goals can of course be piled on, but these two seem to make sense for early stages in the project. Anagorist ideals suggest calculating the coordination by playing a unicoalitional cooperative population game of perfect information. Under agorism it would be multicoalitional, under anarcho-capitalism most likely with imperfect information (with the shared goal of survivability maximization not shared universally, perhaps?), and maybe the “tragedy of the commons” people would make it a noncooperative game. The question of whether a whole population (even a small population) can agree on a shared goal stated in terms of negative utilitarianism is one question. The question of whether the solution can be effectively pursued noncompetitively is closely related to the question of whether anagorism is workable.

Agorist Wally Conger informs us that to “make it” in internet marketing (spam?), or marketing in general requires big brass balls.

What are the defining characteristics of a market? The pro-market left libertarians stress the difference between actually existing economics (and the accompanying establishment understanding of what “free market” means) and what they term “freed markets.” I’d like to put some attention on the boundaries between market and non-market, to get an understanding of what the full implications are of being under a market economy, and which of those implications will still apply after the market has been freed. To that end, I seek to find answers to certain questions.

Does an actually free market imply non-entitlement?

And whether it does or not, what are the implications of this? The benefit to workers of freed markets tend to be touted in quantitative terms—getting to keep more of one’s labor product—but doesn’t this assume that one has a labor product to begin with? I can be at peace with the idea that economic niches have to be earned, but I’m not entirely at peace with the idea that they have to be competed over. An economy that doesn’t require labor may be ideal, but for now, labor is needed, but not everyone’s labor is needed. For me, failure of inclusivity is a deal breaker. If that makes me an archist, so be it. There are “normative criteria” that I happen to believe in.

Traditionally, the entitled classes have been understood to be the nobility or landed aristocracy, but of course the right wing messaging machine has re-framed “entitlement” as the new term for safety net programs. Now it seems the entitled classes are those at the very bottom of the food chain; those so marginalized as to be rejected more often than not from even the most menial of employment.

Does successful participation in the freed market imply competition?

If not, how is market equilibrium discovered? If so, how can the losers consider themselves free? Freedom to fail I can get with right libertarianism. Again, is the difference offered by left libertarianism qualitative or quantitative? Does left libertarianism mean the lowest hanging fruit is a little lower, that the cost of living is a lot lower, or some other comparative virtue? Or is the difference between the freed market and the “free market” one of kind rather than degree?

What role does strategy play under the freed market?

What, if anything, is at the intersection of prices, information and strategy? Is there any reason, under the freed market, to play one’s cards close to the vest, so to speak? As the ad copy says, “Expedia can offer prices that airlines and hotels won’t reveal separately.” Left libertarianism, like right libertarianism, is quite adept at explaining why all the complaints people have with market transactions are actually attributable to government policy. Perhaps this includes informational shell games, package dealing and other strategies against real transparency.

I’m assuming that where markets are in play, market share is an issue. Does a worker co-op seek to expand market share? If not, why not? Zero market share implies failure. How big a niche is necessary to achieve solvency? Is solvency even a freed market issue, or just a “free market” issue? It would be helpful if someone would make a list of things truly free markets have in common with “free market” principles as advertised by the big money think tanks, and another list of putative market phenomena that are categorically not features of the truly free market, and perhaps a third list of social ills we should reliably be able to expect to be shrunken to manageable levels by the actual freeing of the markets.

Perhaps the main project of this blog is to put non-market anarchism on a solid theoretical footing. While I’m excited to find that many people envision the supplanting of the exchange paradigm by the gift paradigm, there seems to be no underlying theory that hopelessly left-brained me can latch onto. Also, the implementation doesn’t seem to have gone far beyond the Free Store stage. Oh, and of course software. But you can’t eat software. Three identifiable clusters of interest in the gift paradigm are in feminist anarchism (this link being to what is probably the closest thing to a theoritical understanding of gift economy that I have found), Christian anarchism (where gift economy might be attributed to “agape”) and Venus Project types.

I’m not sure how important gift theory is or should be to anagorist theory. I’ve been thinking mainly in terms of dreaming up alternatives the market as a method of allocation. It seems that in gift-giving, the giver (or in economese, the supplier?) does all the thinking…what to give, when, how much, to whom. Perhaps this authority is some kind of compensation for a “negative” “profit” on the “transaction?” But this “analysis” doesn’t escape conventional economics, does it? Oh well, I continue to brainstorm, as hopefully do others. It’s encouraging that no less than two commenters here have expressed at least some frustration with the agorism expressed by certain left libertarian tendencies.

I find it hard to imagine a situation in which all real needs can be satisfied without any work being performed by people. I find it equally hard to believe that we will ever see full employment; understood to mean enough jobs to go around. Automation is real, and it’s inconceivable to me that the future needs all of us. Thus, as long as we are living under a market economy, some of us will be expendable.

Kurt Vonnegut envisioned this scenario in Player Piano, in which people not in-demand enough to merit a paying gig were relagated to the humiliation and indignity of the “Reeks and Wrecks,” a make-work program created to provide the illusion of being a contributing member of society, but the illusion wore thin rather quickly. In Player Piano, the “engineers and managers” are the last dominos left standing. As the nightmare is materializing right now, it looks more like nursing is the hardest occupation to automate.

It seems apparent that somewhere between the staffed economy and the unstaffed economy is the partially staffed economy. With substantiated complaints of “jobless recovery” for at least three economic cycles, I’d say we’re definitely in that middle zone right now. I think we are managing this transition in the least humane way imaginable. Instead of dividing the reduced workload, some can’t get out of mandatory overtime while others can’t get out of part time employment, and the market denies still others any employment at all.

Spreading out among the working-age population all the work that can’t yet be automated or otherwise obviated may mean training a sizeable fraction of the population in those health care fields that somehow manage to be still in demand. There is an obvious inefficiency involved in investing in the training of millions of people, most of whom will subsequently be working part time, but I never accepted efficiency as the yardstick by which all practices should be measured. We have to evolve from a culture in which unemployment is unacceptable to one in which it is unavoidable, without destroying the self esteem of millions. As Marshall Brain tells us, “‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat’ is a core philosophy of today’s economy, and this rule could make a rapid robotic takeover extremely uncomfortable for our society.”

One benefit of widespread automation and resulting decrease in work requirements/opportunities might be what they call a “universal basic income” or “basic income guarantee.” The downside is that most proposals for such a thing posit the government as the agency which disburses these benefits. For the non-market, non-state sector the trick is to create a non-state method for accomplishing this or the equivalent. It probably falls under the general heading of mutual aid. Click here for a review of some of the literature of mutual aid by one Eric Laursen. It’s mostly about secret societies, which is a little troublesome for someone like me who hungers for inclusivity, but there’s a lot there on the treadmill of economic growth, the isolation of suburban sprawl, and so many other social ills. The concluding remarks (emphasis mine):

But the labor movement never succeeded in creating a health and old-age benefit system that provided for all workers, either. Today, mutual aid still appears to be the only way to create a humane, caring, and fully participatory society. But anarchists have not begun to consider their biggest challenge yet: how to make mutual aid universal. This doesn’t mean the movement needs to renounce the autonomist principle—only that it needs to take confederalism just as seriously.

John J. Alquist informs us that “the Industrial Revolution is dead and the 20th Century is ancient history. These changes spawn a whole new world of nearly universal self-employment, serving global markets.” Alquist is a public speaker who seeks a variety of audiences, including network marketing/MLM groups, among others. Perhaps universal self employment is, among other things, a pyramid scheme.

Bonnie Erbe equates the freelance economy, freewheeling as it is along the highway to universal self employment, to basic economic insecurity, as do I.

David Ellerman defines capitalism as “production organized on the basis of the employer-employee relationship,” with the alternative to this system being “a private property market economy where everyone is self-employed (individually or jointly) in their workplace.” At first glance, it looks to me as though selling oneself to one or more employers as a prerequisite to solvency and independent survival is replaced by selling oneself to one or more customers. The necessity of selling remains a sort of sword of Damocles; the wolf is still at the door. One clear advantage of self employment over employment employment is that the full time employer employer is usually a sort of monopsony, or sole buyer of a person’s labor. With monopsony comes market power, which, like any kind of power, corrupts. One advantage of employment employment over self employment, to me, is that one act of selling oneself gets days, weeks, months, maybe years of employment, whereas self employment may require selling, schmoozing and networking as much as 24/7 for life. Self employment is also monopsony for the entrepreneur with only one customer. This is typically the case when one is “self employed on paper,” basically a de facto employee receiving a 1099 instead of a W-2. Replacing employment employment with self employment seems to me at best an even trade, and perhaps a baptism by fire or worse for shy folk such as myself. Ellerman explains that the type of universal self employment described here entails labor hiring capital. Hopefully this means that labor is less on the defensive; no longer having constantly to prove its worth, compete over every opportunity, no matter how small, and in general, be expendable.

Anagorism, of course, seeks an alternative to property and markets, not just to employers and employees. How to implement an alternative to market employment? One tool I envision is One Big Database for matching people to “jobs.” One science fiction implementation is “Divlab” in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed. The key element to such a scheme, as I see it, is transparency. The most odious burden the status quo labor market places on me is the necessity of networking, or maintaining the type of social contacts to know where at least some of the “unadvertised” openings are. The statist approach, of course, would be to require public posting of all vacancies. A dual power approach might start with the approach of acknowledging that for now, information about available jobs is insider information, but instead of seeking to become an insider through networking, seek to expose the information through crowdsourcing. If One Big Database can’t be created, at least a sort of distributed database should be possible; hopefully indexing a larger fraction of the labor market than proprietary engines such as monster.com, which makes people jump through countless hoops of saying “no, thank you” to for-profit “universities” in exchange for access to mostly low-value information.

I’m not sure what might be the ultimate goal of anagorism when it comes to matters of employment or alternatives to it. Sufficiently cheap technologies of automated manufacturing might mean total economic self-sufficiency for each individual, without the interdependence which necessitates push-and-shove venues such as trading in the market economy. High-tech modification of the humyn form might result in people getting by with physical inputs small enough to allow being self-supporting even on Mechanical Turk wages. Perhaps we will settle for a soft anagorism in which the market still operates, but more humanely, perhaps through extreme transparency, or better yet, partial satisfaction of needs through non-market activity.

The proprietor of the The Left Libertarian channel at YouTube tells us:

I should also say that I have nothing to do with The Alliance of the Libertarian Left, which is a centrist libertarian platform. My videos promote the 3 schools of Left-Libertarianism: Libcom, Collectivism, and Mutualism.

On the one hand, they distance themselves from left libertarianism on the grounds that it’s a centrist libertarian platform, as do I.  On the other hand, the channel promotes mutualism.  It’s not clear to me one way or the other whether I’ve found a fellow anagorist.  Claimed by the same YouTube user is The Left Libertarian Appendix channel.  Their video Consumer Democracy is a critique of the notion of dollar democracy, i.e. “one dollar one vote:”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK5dFtgvaWE&feature=channel_video_title]

Looks like someone invented picoeconomics. Based on the name alone, it sounds like a very nice idea, sort of like ramen profitability only better. At least one of the complaints I have with Economics As We Know It is lack of scalability. In Earth’s high rent district (a.k.a. the “first world”) there’s a level of income below which survival is not feasible. On a little further reading, it seems the idea behind picoeconomics is not scalability of economic activity, but of economic actors:

Where microeconomics is used to describe the negotiation for resources between individuals, picoeconomics (or micro-micro-economics) describes a similar process but within an individual himself, helping define different aspects of his [sic] behaviour.

This may have implications for thick individualism. According to Robert Vienneau:

If a community cannot have group rights and cannot have an unique ordering of choices², how can an individual have such rights when he may be just as divided in mind as a community?