[FRIAM] means of production take 3
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Nov 25 13:54:23 EST 2019
Dave -
I really appreciate this offering. Your simplified model of exchange
here fits my own anecdotal experience well enough and might provide a
good armature for a expanded notional model of
exchange:commons:symbiosis that I've been thinking/working around.
Please do send your full paper.
Until I can read/assimilate the larger work, I'd like to offer to this
audience another layer. Adding the spectrum of mutualistic to
parasitic symbiosis in exchanges, and a measure of the *health* of a
culture/community and its commons.
I believe that mutualistic symbiosis is key to all 3 of your types of
exchange. What you call general is more than altruism or deferred
repayment in-kind. It involves a positive sum exchange both ways, where
what is taken by each side has more value to the receiver than to the
giver, and vice-versa. What you call balanced may well include an
uncanny ability for each member of a group to keep the same ledger (e.g.
who is always "light" when it comes time to pay) but I believe works
best when the exchange includes asymmetric value received.
I have friendship relations with people whose ability to pay is
unbalanced, in some of those I carry the heavy end, in others I take the
light end. This is usually done in qualitative ways... when we
eat/drink at an expensive restaurant, my well-heeled friends (who might
choose that class of place) offer to pay and when I make the overture,
we go to a place that more evenly matches my means. Some of my friends
truly can't afford to eat/drink out, so they reciprocate by providing a
more humble or homemade meal at home and I might contribute an expensive
(to them) libation. If we were keeping track of $$ in either case,
there would be a lopsided asymmetry, but that is not the medium of
exchange that is important. This is how idealized communism works
"from each/to each".
The flywheel effect of the commons has two main effects, one is that it
allows excess resources to be "stored" somehow... whether literally as a
communal granary or by enhancing the quality of a pasture, woodlot, or
water source, to be retrieved later. This also allows for smoothing
over time and circumstance. In a drought year, the community may draw
more water from a reservoir than the runoff replaces, and one individual
or family may not be able to do their full share of Acequia maintenance
one year, but still take their full share of water. In both cases, the
implicit ledger is there, maintaining a balance, but not the exchange is
not directly between individuals but between an individual and the
collective *through* a commons.
To the extent that the "commons" in question is a healthy ecosystem,
then it is incumbent on the group to seek a general or balanced exchange
with the ecosystem in many ways as if IT were another member of the
community, to maintain it's health. In fact, more to the point, to join
that ecosystem taking a mutually symbiotic role.
You speak of asymmetries in power and information. These are both
culturally derived/relevant ideas. With enough abstraction, one might
caste the exchanges in an ecosystem into those terms, but I think it is
generally the wrong way to measure those relationships. Predator/prey
models ala Lotka-Volterra may fit this well (the information and
physical prowess/power asymmetries allowing the predators to effectively
hunt/kill/digest the prey ant the prey being able to
evade/defend/be-unsavory enough to survive. But amidst this simplified
free market economy "red of tooth and claw" there is something yet more
constructive afoot.
I wonder, using your terms of power and information, if the key to this
symbiosis and the apparent creative emergence of an ecosystem, isn't the
tension between these two abstractions (power and information)? To the
extent that information can be copied with no degradation to the
original and power is generally a conserved quantity, there would be an
interesting interplay. The oxbird on the Rhino's back exchanges
nourishment (eating parasites like ticks, but also sucking blood from
the wounds) for freedom from those parasites (and possibly some healing
through removing contaminated blood?) but also provides an early warning
system through it's keener hearing and sound, alerting at early signs of
danger.
I think I owe Glen a response on the #2 branch of this thread, but
perhaps this branch provides more background to thread #2 which is less
about exchange than about control of exchange (ownership).
- Steve
On 11/25/19 7:48 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Gary,
>
> I sent it to your email. If anyone else wants it,I can do the same.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2019, at 1:53 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
>> Is your paper available?
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 7:11 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm
>> <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
>>
>> Some comments that might be intrusive (in which case, I apologize
>> and please ignore) or contributory as context to the "ownership"
>> discussion.
>>
>> Two-years ago I presented a paper, "Patterns of Humanity," at a
>> social change conference. Part of the paper dealt with
>> "economics," — in. quotation marks because not all of economics,
>> but practical efforts to set up alternative mechanisms for
>> economic exchange.
>>
>> All systems of exchange can be derived from three human/cultural
>> patterns of reciprocity: general, balanced, and negative.
>> Simplified: General is akin to parent-child, value is given with
>> little regard for "repayment" except in very general and delayed
>> terms (kids take care of their parents in old age); Balanced is
>> implied by the name, exchange occurs but is balanced among all
>> members of the group - with remarkably precise awareness of any
>> imbalances, (we all know which of us missed their turn to buy a
>> round of drinks when we are out partying); Negative is both sides
>> trying to maximize benefit at the expense of the other party.
>>
>> The key factor in viability of each type is social distance;
>> general within family, balanced among small groups, and negative
>> the only one that scales and includes strangers.
>>
>> Markets can be based on balanced reciprocity, but only at
>> relative small scale, e.g. the village or a community like the Amish.
>>
>> Almost all markets with which we are familiar and within which we
>> participate are grounded in negative reciprocity. Because these
>> are focused on asymmetric outcomes; they are enhanced by
>> asymmetry with regard the factors of the mechanism of exchange.
>> Two of the most common are asymmetry with regards information and
>> asymmetry with regards power.
>>
>> A concept of "ownership" is but a tool for establishing or
>> enhancing an asymmetry of power.
>>
>> Like Markets, a "Commons" can be grounded in balanced or negative
>> reciprocity. The possibility of a "balanced" Commons is
>> constrained, by social distance. The only way to ensure the
>> minimal social distance necessary for a balanced Commons is some
>> kind of overriding Culture. So it works just fine in groups with
>> a strong defining culture like the Amish, Mennonites, and
>> pre-statehood Mormon communities.
>>
>> Commons derived from negative reciprocity are doomed to "failure."
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019, at 8:36 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> > Nick writes:
>> >
>> > < Dogs seem to have (or enact) a concept of ownership. >
>> >
>> > Just have to bite on this one: My cattle dog seems to think
>> of her
>> > collar as jewelry. If I take it off she chases after me and
>> tries to
>> > get it back.
>> >
>> > < This scheme is known as altruistic enforcement because from a
>> > Darwinian modeling point of view, it's hard to see why the
>> dominant
>> > individuals -- the soldiers, if you will -- don't pool their
>> resources
>> > and take down the Don. >
>> >
>> > Each would have to believe the new boss would be better than
>> the old
>> > boss, that it wouldn't be them, and that someone will be the
>> boss.
>> > They've invested in an organization that has a pecking order,
>> and so it
>> > would be dangerous to suddenly abandon it in favor of a looser
>> cabal:
>> > Everyone beneath each of them might do the same.
>> >
>> > Marcus
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>
>
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