This thread addresses a new post-industrial economic paradigm, so forgive me if I challenge what I consider tenents on industrial thinking.
Let me suggest that abundance exists when people enjoy producing more goods and services than their communities want to consume. Let me also suggest that once basic needs (which are determined by culture as well as physiology) people begin to demand experiences and demand for experience drives demand for additional material resources. As we spend more and more time seeking virtual experiences such as this conversation, the demand for experience drives less demand for material goods.
If you agree it’s possible that an individual can stop demanding economic goods than the quesiton becomes whether or not it creates more utility for a people to do so.
Is there a physical limit to time? Is time material, experiential or both? I consider that a tough question…
There are more songs in the world than there is time to listen to them all. Is that a material constraint or an experiential one? Is there a scarcity of songs?
Air is scarce. Where there is oxygen, there cannot be argon. Where there is argon, there cannot be xenon. Physical reality occupies space, and space is finite.
You don’t know what people demand, because every individual is unique.
Your reasons for doing something, are not the same as the results of your actions. We can’t judge motivations, we can only judge results. Production over consumption is still savings, regardless of whether you enjoy producing or hate producing.
We can’t escape material scarcity as long as the universe is finite, and as Jonathan indicated, time is also a part of this finite universe.
I can agree with that. Savings leads to capital accumulation, which leads to more technological advances, which leads to more savings which can be invested again as capital or consumed as leisure. Generally. life is getting better for the human race as long as we are able to save.
Between your birth and your death, there is a finite amount of time with which you can interact with physical reality.
You think a utopian fantasy is possible?
I think our definitions of scarcity are different and at this point unreconcilable.
I agree.
I agree.
I think our definitions of scarcity are different and at this point unreconcilable.
I agree we agree.
I think this is a matter of perspective.
Just because something sounds like a utopian fantasy doesn’t mean it is. 
Stranger - I’ll read through your post and respond soon but I don’t like the term intellectual communist as it implies the use of coercion which I do not advocate.
So you don’t believe in material scarcity or time?
This thread addresses a new post-industrial economic paradigm, so forgive me if I challenge what I consider tenents on industrial thinking.
First, you have to show how this “post-industrial economic paradigm” comes about, and as of yet you have not provided a convincing case. You just can’t assume a world of post-scarcity; you have to prove that such a world is even possible.
Let me suggest that abundance exists when people enjoy producing more goods and services than their communities want to consume.
Okay, that’s a given. The question is if there can be a general overabundance of goods, and given that the demand for wealth is essentially limitless then there can never be a limitless demand for wealth. Otherwise, you have to answer the question: how much stuff do people want? What is the limit to people’s demand for wealth? How can you decide that for others, knowing that we live in a world were preference is subjective.
Let me also suggest that once basic needs (which are determined by culture as well as physiology) people begin to demand experiences and demand for experience drives demand for additional material resources.
So, even conceding that whatever you mean by “experiences” exists and is true, the fact is that people will always want to add to their wealth. You concede this in the part of your post that I quote above (italitcs mine).
As we spend more and more time seeking virtual experiences such as this conversation, the demand for experience drives less demand for material goods.
How so? I’m pretty sure that apart from chatting on here, I also look to add to my wealth elsewhere, along lines of production almost completely irrelevant to this one. For example, I recently bought a cell phone. On Friday, I will probably buy a bycicle. I continue to buy economics books. If I made enough money (which I don’t), I’d also love to buy my own house, a new car, a new television. After I attained these things and I could accumulate enough money, or even get a higher paying job, I’d love to buy another house, another or an even better car, maybe even a boat. All in all, aggregate demand today is multiple magnitudes greater than aggregate demand one thousand years ago, even one hundred years ago (and this is precisely because aggregate supply has grown by many magnitudes).
If you agree it’s possible that an individual can stop demanding economic goods…
Show me how it’s possible.
Is there a physical limit to time? Is time material, experiential or both? I consider that a tough question…
It’s not. Is your life finite? Yes. Time is relevant as it applies to man. That time may be infinite in the absolute sense has no bearing on whether it is infinite for an individual. Time, as it applies to the individual, is for all intents and purposes finite.
There are more songs in the world than there is time to listen to them all. Is that a material constraint or an experiential one? Is there a scarcity of songs?
There can be an overabundance of a certain song, but that doesn’t mean we live in a world of post-scarcity. That means we have overproduced in one good, and underproduced in another. What we’re discussing is absolute overproduction, not overproduction among certain economic goods.
I think one major source of confusion about open source development is, that it is a form of a gift economy. Its actors already have a secured livelihood and do not rely on it (at least directly) as their source of income. While one can surely imagine groups living in this way and organizing their existence around these principles, it is a far cry from saying that that is the future of all humanity.
I hope this does not become a techical debate, but generally most open source projects are driven by a small core team, and the most successful ones are normally paid by a company like Red Hat or IBM. As it is those companies interest that more companies use that software, to fit with their “software as service model”
The problem is that software is not in the same class as industries that work in the “material”. There is actually such a thing as “open cola” which provides its recipe for free, that does not however translate to it being able to beat coca cola, to achieve the production scale of coca cola one needs serious capital. The only way a participatory “open cola” project would work would require a capitalist model.
The problem is that software is not in the same class as industries that work in the “material”. There is actually such a thing as “open cola” which provides its recipe for free, that does not however translate to it being able to beat coca cola, to achieve the production scale of coca cola one needs serious capital. The only way a participatory “open cola” project would work would require a capitalist model.
Actually, I would somewhat disagree here. With software, there is still investment necessary (even if it’s only time), advertisement (even if it’s ‘word of mouth’ donated by others) and so on - even if the costs can be much smaller or almost nonexistent, making successful open source software is at least as ‘capitalist’ as building a successful soft drink company.
About ‘open cola’ - how good is it really? (Comparing it to a giant like Coca Cola is a bit unfair, as it took them many years to get where they are.)
The manual I’ve found on open cola says the mass production of soft drinks is very expensive, so that is also an unfortunate example (there’s also “free beer”, that might be cheaper to produce) - although it presents an interesting opportunity for an enterpreneur willing to invest the requisite money. One doesn’t need to take over the entire industry to make a successful business. But ultimately it’s a question of how good the stuff really is, and what are the customers willing to pay for it, including the feel-good open-sourceness.
I don’t really understand open source.
I’m paid a decent salary as a software developer. Usually, I don’t feel like donating extra time to create more source code.
Are there guys living in their mom’s basement donating 100% of their time to open source? I guess this is fine if it’s what you enjoy, but it’s harmful and wasteful in the sense that there is a lack of any price system to direct effort into the most urgently needed kinds of code.
I don’t really understand open source.
I’m paid a decent salary as a software developer. Usually, I don’t feel like donating extra time to create more source code.
Are there guys living in their mom’s basement donating 100% of their time to open source? I guess this is fine if it’s what you enjoy, but it’s harmful and wasteful in the sense that there is a lack of any price system to direct effort into the most urgently needed kinds of code.
Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a good introduction to the topic. For starters, consider rule 1 - “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” Creators of open source can be much more motivated than regular software developers, since they often have a personal stake in the result. The successful prjects also tend to have much larger teams of developers and testers to fall back on, than purely ‘commercial’ projects.
Consider also the number of companies that are making good money out of open source - surely, there must be some value to it?
If you have trouble putting it into the Austrian perspective of things, note Mises’ distinction between work and play and Rothbard on play as a consumers’ good - I would classify the ‘noncommercial’ open source projects as play - but nobody ever said playing can’t create useful products. Some of the OSS products are serious competitors for the best software of the closed-source world. These folks enjoy their leisure, have fun, and create something many consumers obviously enjoy. I don’t see anything bad about that.
As for the lack of a price system, there is a natural selection between various open source projects, striving for attention of users and developers alike. There are still costs to those projects (time, labor and a computer, if nothing else) and there are definite benefits - besides personal satisfaction from creating something useful and elegant, there is also the reputation and heartfelt thanks from the users.
Let’s not forget that not all can be - or has to be - immediately measured in money. (Even though success in the open source world tends to attract it as well.)
Watch all the videos that can be found on TED that have to do with open source. Very incredible stuff.
I think open source has already had large impacts on society. We already take it for granted, without really understanding it fully. My question is how institutions (the nation state, the corporation, the university, etc) that developed in the centuries after printing press are going to adjust and respond to open-source. Each of those social institutions, love em’ or hate em’, are societal answers to various questions about how to accomplish certain goals. I think their development is very much a story of how society shifted to the information revolution of the printing press. We find ourselves in another information revolution, one that incorporates every single information medium thus far and also allows for contact between both the producers and the consumers of that material. For instance, ‘journalism’ as a profession was an answer to ‘how are we going to inform society about current events’. The answer was to have a professional class of experts with an institutional structure, paid by consumers. Today, that institutional structure is being upset. Now, anybody can go online and produce information in an open source way. They are doing it because they feel like it and because they can. Some good bloggers are found credible while others are not. The same question “how will we get information to the public?” is being answered. But, it is in very different manners because open source is causing individuals in general society to use the tools in ways we can’t exactly predict. Spontaneously.
Representative democracies and the nation state were once answers to certain ‘problems’. How might open source arrangement undermine and compete with those old answers to create new arrangements? One thing I think I’m observing is that economies are not as based in physical ‘space’. When you are on ebay, you are at a market. But you are not in a physical market located in Derpburg, Derpistan. Where is the excuse to tax? There’s no need to ‘protect’ that market from physical raiders. Also, more economic arrangements that are across artificial political boundaries will muddy up the idea of representation. Your specific location won’t necessarily be where your economic ties are. The world economy is already greatly globalized. Open source will only add and accelerate that. Govt through representation will no longer have much meaning because your neighbors are no longer necessarily your business associates and economic ties. Think about how much a person today really feels connected to their neighbors. The information connections they have with people continents away might be stronger than those who are across the fence.
Okay, I’ve rambled. Any thoughts
I’ll add one other trend, linked with my journalism example: the turn away from an expert driven society. Pretty much the whole of academia and top-down hierarchical society is an obsession with applying the scientific method to social issues. We can solve a problem by sending some PHDs do figure it out. In some sectors this is good. In others, it’s wrongheaded. Open source, as I illustrated in the journalism example above, is a new answer for certain societal questions. We don’t need and ‘expert’ class of journalists to tell us the news. The open source information superhighway now can do that. Sure, old journalism institutions may participate in it, but now they are competing with Joe-Shmo Blogger.
Another example of this applies to even a scientific example. NASA a few years ago had a project mapping the surface of Mars. The old model was to give the project to a few PhDs and pay them a salary to complete the project. So they did this. They also put the project online so that people could use a pre-arranged program to look at pictures of Mars and map it. The results after months of observing was that the 80,000 or so online participants gave a result that was ‘virtually indistinguishable’ from the work of the experts. There are people just ‘donating’ a few hours of their time just because it was entertaining to look at photos of Mars. They did what it would cost NASA hundreds of thousands and years of training to usually do. Similar experiments have been done with translating old texts with similar results.
The point isn’t that there is less scarcity. We are still restricted by resources. It’s just now that time and effort can be arranged differently to achieve the same goals.
Can someone please explain how the abolition of monopoly rights on things that aren’t scarce (i.e. ideas and patterns) will end scarcity of things that are scarce (i.e. physical goods)?
Stallman’s GNU and the Open Source movement in general is digital communism. While patent laws, copyright laws and the whole concept of intellectual property is bogus and represent aggression against property rights, the idea of “Free Software” is more than just saying people should be free to copy anything which is made publicly available or reverse-engineer any product which is sold in the open market. Rather, “copyleft” - as it is termed - rides on top of the existing patent/copyright system and its existence is dependent upon the authority of that system. Its purpose is to force people to release their “source code” in exchange for use of any existing “open source” source code.
If the code were truly released to the public domain, then I should be free to incorporate it into my own system as part of a trade secret by which I earn a living. Instead, the communistic Open Source movement says “oh no, if you used one line of Open Source code anywhere in your code, then you must release the entirety of your code to become the property of the Open Source movement.”
Now, it appears to me that Stalman’s motivation in creating the free software movement was that he saw the corruption of researchers coming in to university, using public computing equipment, public research, etc. and then going off into the private sector with all this code and technology developed at the public’s expense and becoming wealthy on it. But his cure is worse than the disease.
The right solution is to acknowledge that “intellectual property” is not property at all, it’s a fiction created by the government’s patent and copyright system, and to acknowledge that “trade secrets” are a crucial component of a profitable business model - just like free and unhampered copying of public information (any information which is not concealed on someone’s private property) is a crucial component of progress. We need both. We need people to be able to copy anything in the public domain… the coming shift to this paradigm will engender progress like we cannot imagine. But at the same time, no one is to be coerced into revealing their trade secrets because they “copied from Open Source.”
The GNU project claims that it’s OK for you to sell your GNU-licensed software but it really isn’t OK because a really complex and useful software package - say, commercial aerodynamics modelling software or large-scale finite-element analysis software, is so expensive to develop that the price tag per copy of software would be more than enough incentive for people to pay someone to demand the original source code and then independently compile it … at a fraction of the cost.
Clayton -
Clayton, did you just make a pro-IP argument?
If someone (violated physical property rights/contracts and) posted the original source code online for everyone to copy & compile, would the software package producer be left with absolutely no recourse in a private court against anyone compiling it “at a fraction of the cost” without their permission – given how useful it is and how expensive it was to develop? Perhaps, there may be a judge or two who’d be open to hearing their case?
Perhaps, precedent and common law in flourishing free market societies would allow for IP to emerge as a valid property concept, especially if it would promote the design of more “useful software packages that are expensive to develop”?