Freer Economy
If the problem with Managerial Capitalism is its ineffectiveness, then how
ineffective is it? And how do we measure ineffectiveness anyway? Well, they
pay economists way too much to worry about this stuff, but they're usually
wrong anyway, so why not have a go at it?
Flemming Funch, as usual, has wisdom to offer
on this point, and calls it Free
Economy. What else would you expect from a site declaring,
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up. He suggests that more abundance would
be developed if people and companies concentrated
on making
their
stuff
free.
It's a
fair point. Even though companies don't have a stated goal to make things
more free, that's the obvious effect of managerial capitalism. Perhaps
if freer stuff were their conscious intent, companies would do even better
with their stated goals of market share, profitability and stock price.
If I look at the resources available to me, and I identify what I can
freely share with others, and I work on increasing the number and variety
of resources I can freely share, and others do the same, then we'd gradually
be getting somewhere. Somewhere where a lot of what we need is freely and
easily available for everybody. I'm not talking about whether I might take
time out of my schedule to work hard for some charity once per week. I'm
not talking about sacrifice. I'm talking about arranging things so that
it is perfectly feasible and comfortable to give something away, without
particularly being worse off myself.
The production of goods and capital is so efficient in
the so-called first world that we've already achieved a lot of this,
compared to the so-called third world. Take salt for example. Salt was so precious
in the ancient world that Roman Centurions were paid in little bags of salt,
not coins. It was their salary. They were said to be worth their
salt. We're already well down the road to free stuff and constantly prove
that what is dear under one system is abundant in another.
Perhaps the core problem is philosophical or spiritual: we tend not to
value what isn't dear, so we don't celebrate the abundance we already have.
Or, paraphrasing Einstein, We pay attention to the things we can count
but which don't matter, and we ignore what matters but cannot be counted.
Digression...
So on Monday I was in the middle of riffing the above from Flemming
Funch, the Masterful Ming, and I go to his site to check a detail, and there's
this embarrassing
(but oh so welcome, give me more) admiration of
my last post in his Inspiration category.
I'm honored that he finds these rants reminiscent of the writing of John
Perry Barlow, whom I quote
repeatedly, and so should you. Barlow and I are both alumni of Wesleyan
University in Connecticut,
so maybe
there was something in the water (I'm embarrassed to admit that I
discovered Barlow only when I saw him on the cover of the alumni magazine.)
He arrived
the
fall after I graduated, about the time I was swearing in at Dubya's
and
my
favorite
USAF
recruiting
station
in New Haven.
Here's a sense of Wesleyan. A few years ago, I was visiting
my favorite professor, George
Creeger. I had been one of George's series of student "slaves" who
helped him restore 19th century houses and do odd jobs. More than most, I
hung out at his home with George and Elva and
Katie,
Karl and Kit on summer evenings after my construction job. During this last
visit,
he pulled
a book
off his shelf and handed
it to me. The book had been given to him by its author, another of his former
students, and George thought perhaps I'd enjoy it. Which I did. The book
was The
Perfect Storm.
In the halcyon early 60's, anything was possible, and Wesleyan was the
epitome of that open potential. We were at a social turning point
but didn't realize it. Still an all-male college of about 1100 students,
Wesleyan had the highest endowment per capita of any college on earth,
a liberal arts curriculum that may not be reproducible today for any amount
of money and a student body simultaneously adventurous, well informed but
intellectually curious and willing to party on any occasion. My freshman
dorm counselor
was Bruce
Corwin, my teachers, in addition to George Creeger, included Richard
Wilbur and Norman
O. Brown. I sat with Vance
Packard at a fraternity dinner, because
his son Randy was one of our pledges. I'll spare you the prank played
on them that day by Jim McInteer, who later took tea in Taos with Lady
Brett just for
the hell of it, pretending to be writing a thesis on D. H. Lawrence.
While there, an authentic scholar called from town requesting an audience,
but Lady Brett demurred, since she was having such an important talk
with McInteer, the merry prankster of scholars. But at least Jim knew
why Lady Brett was significant.
Just Give Us the Goods
OK. Back to our knitting. How do things improve, economically? I suggest that
a key attribute of a successful economy is the Delight factor. That's not
just a New Age neologism, but an attempt to name the difference between what
you
pay
for
something and what you would have paid if you'd had to. In a freer economy,
we'd expect the delight factor to be higher than in Roman times.
The secret of productivity is that experts can produce something for less
than someone else will pay for it. But there's always some other additional
value. Economists talk about friction-free markets, where every seller and
buyer is
perfectly informed and everything is sold for exactly its fair market price.
But the dismal scientists ignore the Delight Factor, where the buyer so relishes
the transaction that the price is still not equal to its worth.
There's not a lot of delight in commodities, but service-based products have
the potential to delight and amaze the buyer (Midwest
Express Airlines' wide leather
seats and free champagne) or not (Sprint PCS'
nonexistent customer service and, often, signal). What agency will help us grow
the Delight Factor and, perhaps, our economy?
From The
Peer Economy:
Corporations' inability to keep people profitably on task is the key
to the demise of the Corporate Age. If you want to see people on task,
stop by your local cleaners or bbakery. That's where you find people who
are close to their customers, sticking to their core competencies. They
are blissfully unmanaged by overly creative managers dreaming up new line
extensions to fritter away shareholder equity and their customers' time.
The
question is, how could the marvelous productivity of localized business
become the engine of the next wave of democratic wealth? It happens when
the global communications links forged by corporations serve the sole proprietor
as well as the multinational corporations and interactive TV spuds they
were designed for.
A ubiquitous Internet, unmediated peer-to-peer payments
and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are the building blocks of the Peer
Economy, where
you transact
directly with another and not their company, although you've never met
nor will, each with absolute confidence in your security and total satisfaction.
The Peer Economy provides mechanisms for wealth creation which cut across
corporate borders and are aggregated in the very fabric of the Internet,
not locked inside the balance sheets of contending companies and mutual
funds.
So, if great granddad toiled in the old country for half an hour
for the loaf of bread you earn in one minute, when will your child work
10
seconds
for her bread? It happens as soon as the means of production are on
task six times as much (usefully tasked, as defined by consumers, not managements).
This includes people in addition to the robots and computers staffing
the impending golden age of automated slavery.
The point is not how
many slaves we have, it's how much they and we are deployed on tasks
which are truly useful to each other, unmediated
by
clueless managers.
Do we really ask anything more of each other than that, for the moment we
serve, we be truly on task? Delight is the result of being paid attention
to, not commoditized into consumerism.
12:34:53 PM 
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