Any local worker/consumer cooperative that doesnt allow other workers/consumers to join have no real need to be efficient when society is at a disarray.
]]>Doug, part of the problem is that the corporate economy is designed to make strategic decisions involving technology and product design so complex that only the most educated quartile can deal with them. A little over a century ago, most factory work was still directly organized by self-managed work gangs on the shop floor, under the direction of master craftsmen (the Coventry System was a sort of throwback to this). The central goal of Taylorism was to deskill the people on the shop floor, so that most of the workforce was easily replaceable unskilled labor with no ability to extract rents from their skills, and control of production was shifted upward into the white collar hierarchies.
What Ivan Illich called the “radical monopolies” of professionals and the skilled trades are reinforced by (for example) local “safety” codes that criminalize unconventional self-built housing, which has led in turn to the skewing of research and development into building technologies most conducive to the needs of professional building contractors, and away from alternative modular DIY technologies.
On the other hand, as Vinay has suggested in several places, the diffusion of small-scale production in the general population depends on anti-Taylorism: making technology sufficiently simple and user-friendly to be within the competence of the average person. It also depends on the radical lowering of the transaction costs of diffusing the knowledge itself, as user-friendly open-source technology libraries are compiled, as cell phone connections become cheap and ubiquitous even in much of the Fourth World, and Net connectivity is a standard part of cell phone connections.
]]>a corporation is a very special environment (I spent a two dozens years in them myself), not necessarily showing how real people behave in real environements that support their potential, because the corporation is structurally feudal, based on alienated labour and expropriates the result of the collective work … it’s like school, really, teachers will complain about the passivity of the students yet it is the essential thing that they learn as soon as they enter it.
This of course does not mean that people have differential potential, as adult developmentalist would argue (see http://www.slideshare.net/evansridge/integral-institute-community-presentation, slide 17 for a population breakdown of such levels), but the best method I think is to develop equipotential systems like we have learn to do in free software and other open innovation communities, where ‘motivation’ and the ability for autonomous work is simply not a problem.
One may argue that these self-selected populations are not representative, but everybody has a passion and the key is to design social systems where people can self-select their passionate contribution to a whole.
]]>To raise their standard of living to a level where they have good health – a simple measure – may seem impossible, but look at Kerala in India. $300 a year avg. income, 76 year life expectancy, > 99% literacy.
Kerala is a model for the world.
Unplugging while maintaining a western standard of living is a different ballgame entirely – the ability to generate enough wealth from a primarily agricultural lifestyle to maintain the ability to, say, buy a new car for $20,000 every 5 to 10 years is extremely non-trivial, as those who try it rapidly discover. It seems that, for now, you can be rich, or you can be stable, but nobody knows how to get us to rich-and-stable.
Working on it, of course. Try http://openfarmtech.org for some ideas, and see the rest of http://theunplugged.org for the bigger picture of how this might all work.
]]>There must be a correlation, unmentioned in your thoughts, between education levels and the percentage of the population able to “unplug”.
My professional experience in large organizations, which I am retrofitting with “boy I wish i had now that before” theories from cultural anthropology, tells me that a hypothetical 75% of workers don’t have the ability for productive labor outside of large organizational support.
To combat this, in our firm we spent a very high percentage of our total labor cost on training for skills that really should have been learned in high school or college.
I’d further hypothesis that the percentage would increase from 75% if you looked a the population as a whole and not our self selected group.
A tangential question would be the kind of education possessed and its correlation to the needs of an un-plugged population.
Another interesting question then would be: if the educational elites do unplug, because they posses whatever skill is valued in the unplugged economy, what happens to the masses left behind who need them to create the structures for their productivity?
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