P2P Foundation

Because abundance is clearly present in many aspects of human life, it is obviously an interesting phenomenon and its study should logically be a major field of study. Yet, economics practically denies abundance, defining itself as the study of efficient options in the context of scarcity. Economists often say that when a good starts becoming abundant, it stops becoming interesting, because the economic problem has been solved. If indeed, abundance is recognized as the solution to the problem of scarcity, shouldn’t it be studied even more? Shouldn’t we learn the conditions that lead to abundance, and the conditions that keep it going? Shouldn’t we acquire the knowledge and skill to generate abundance at will? Shouldn’t we master the art and science of making one form of abundance create another, and another, leading to a cascade of abundance?

Abundance is simply one end of a continuum that has scarcity at its other end. Obviously, anything that is relatively scarce is, at the same time, relatively abundant. For completeness and by any form of logic, the entire continuum should deserve our attention and study. We need a new economic science that studies both scarcity and abundance.

In fact, many of the questions raised here go beyond the realm of economics. They need a multi-disciplinary approach that includes expertise from the social, natural and physical sciences.

Indeed, the questions raised by a study of abundance are worthy scientific challenges.

Let us apply our new-found awareness and curiosity about abundance and make the first step towards studying it.

Let us see how abundance may be classified..

2. Classifying abundance

Abundance may be classified in various ways, each way revealing additional facets about the phenomenon and giving us hints about tapping it for the human good. For instance, abundance may be classified according to:

* Space.

Is it, like a waterfall, available to a few communities only? Local sources need local management, where face-to-face interaction between acquaintances may ease the tension of resource conflicts. In fact, many resources are actually local, though nation-states have appropriated these for themselves and turned them into national patrimony. The Regalian doctrine that favor national over local control of resources is, in many countries, vestige of their colonial past. The continuing debates between local and national decision-making in the case of forests, dams and mine sites reflect this ongoing tension between local and national management of sources of abundance. This conflict becomes every more complicated with the entry of corporations, who range the globe for resources to tap until these are depleted and move on. Some sources of abundance, like seas and great rivers, bring benefits to more than one country, and therefore require even more delicate and sensitive negotiations. Resource conflicts may erupt into wars, especially with resources which are being gradually depleted. The truly global sources of abundance, like our atmosphere and the oceans, require complex international management, as can be seen today in the climate change negotiations. Each of these types need skill and knowledge not just in the scientific aspects of abundance but in a whole range of areas that include political, economic, social, cultural and historical perspectives.

Negotiations between potential beneficiaries and other stakeholders involving spatially-limited abundance can be highly unequal due to existing assymetric power relations. This is even truer in the case of abundance that is spread over the time dimension, as explained below.

* Time.

Is the abundance precarious? Precarious abundance is one whose collapse is imminent and might be gone soon, and we had better do something about it quickly if we want to continue enjoying its benefits. Is it temporary? This would refer to phenomena that last for less than a human lifetime, perhaps a gold rush in some mountainside, or a discovery of a huge pile of guano in an isolated island or cavern. Will it last for a few human lifetimes? Then it is a short-term abundance, like oil is turning out to be. If it will last many lifetimes more, then it is a medium-term abundance, like, possibly, coal. Forests, rivers, lakes, inland seas and other long-term sources of abundance should last beyond human existence. But because of our own profligacy, ignorance or indifference, these long-term resources have instead been turned into short-term resources that will be gone in a few generations.

This are huge challenges, which should be of interest to all. How do we stop a precarious resource from imminent collapse? How do we turn a temporary abundance into a long-lasting one, that can serve not only a few but many generations, if not every generation that is yet to come. The seventh generation principle of native American Indians, it is said, reckoned decisions in terms of their effects up to the seventh generation.

Shouldn’t we, given the greater power of our technologies, look even farther into the future?

Future generations cannot negotiate for themselves. Neither can plants and animals. Thus, some humans must take up the cudgels for these voiceless stakeholders. Negotiating for access is hard enough when a resource is abundant, how much more when it becomes scarce, and furthermore, one has no voice? This situation demands not only the utmost of cross-species and cross-generation empathy from us but also the deepest appreciation of the interconnectedness of generations and species.

* Social sectors.

Certain types of abundance are accessible to all, other are accessible only to those who have the wealth to exploit them. When the sun is up, poor and rich alike can enjoy the tan, the warmth and the Vitamin D. Anyone can set up a solar water heater, a solar food cooker, or a photovoltaic panel. But only corporate giants can access the oil and gas within the deep bowels of the earth, and the process these into the various fuels they need. It should thus be obvious which abundant energy source should receive the highest priority in terms of government research, subsidy and preference.

* Across species.

Appropriating the world’s abundance exclusively for the human is a utilitarian perspective that is increasingly under question. A less anthropocentric view concedes the right of other species to exist, and therefore to survive. It further concedes other species the right to their own living space, a concession that everyone must eventually make, if not for the sake of these species, then also for the sake of future generations. This explicit concession is already enshrined in the design principles of at least one farming system. Permaculture parcels every farm into several zones. Zone 5 is wilderness, a cascade of abundance reserved for other species and not to be casually intruded upon even by its so-called human owners, and then only as visitors.5 Reserved wilderness areas within the permaculture farm allow us to witness, study and appreciate at close range how nature’s abundance, left to its own, plays itself out.

* Elemental basis.

The thing that stymied me was the prominence of blocking and banning as the primary tool of governance. I simply couldn’t place that among the recognized tools of governance in any historic context.

And then I happened to take a look at the oldest surviving account of secular law — the Code of Hammurabi of 1750 BC.

Of the 282 laws that Hammurabi of Mesopotamia carved into the stone tablets, take note of the very first one:

1. If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.

Evidently, banning (ostracism) was a common practice in the tribal cultures in the Middle East some 4000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization. Capricious and spurious banning was evidently such a common and egregious abuse of tribal overlords that Hammurabi made it a capital offense to ban someone without proving just cause.

And yet, on Wikipedia, indefinite blocks and bans without due process are a common occurrence. That is to say, the prevailing governance model of Wikipedia corresponds to a pre-Hammurabic tribal ochlocracy that is so anachronistic, it predates the advent of the Rule of Law.

When Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders drafted the US Constitution, one of the provisions they put in Article One was a prohibition against Bills of Attainder. A Bill of Attainder is the technical term in the law for declaring a person to be an outlaw (without respect to having violated any specific law that applies equally to everyone). The Founders excluded Bills of Attainder from the tools of governance because 4000 years of political history had demonstrated that such a toxic practice is corrosive and ridden with corruption, and invariably sinks any government that comes to rely on it.

The irony here is that Wikipedia purports to be the “sum of all knowledge” with an educational mission that reaches out to students, teachers, and scholars around the world. And yet those exercising power in Wikipedia have not yet learned the oldest and most profound lessons in the annals of human history — lessons enshrined in the first written law and in the first article of the US Constitution.

The consequence of adopting such an anachronistic governance model is that Wikipedians are fated to relive and reify the long-forgotten lessons of history. They relive those lessons by reprising the same kind of political dramas that fill the history books since the dawn of civilization.

The most fundamental sources of power in society arise from the ownership and control of land, enterprises and money. The current ownership system was developed to serve the needs of past rulers who sought absolute powers. As a result, there is no limit as to the extent and value of property, which any person can possess. New rules are needed to decentralise the power of owning things. Ecological rules, which follow the self-limiting and self-regulating principles, found in all living things.

The concept of land ownership evolved from usage. In earlier society, any rights to land depended upon usage. As society developed and centralised political structures evolved, personal usage by the ruling class became impractical over the territory subjected to their power. As the ruling class made the rules, rights to land without usage were developed, maintained and furthered by force and conquest. By this means the concept of ownership was established.

Because Australian Aboriginals did not have a ruling class they did not develop the need to have a word for ownership in their many different languages. No do we have a word in modern languages to describe the Aboriginal relationship to land. In my 1978 Australian Parliamentary Papers (No. 135 & 438) on Economic Development of Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory, I had to invent a new word. This was “ownee” which has the same relationship to owner as appointee, licensee and franchisee has respectively, to appointor, licensor and franchisor. That is, the former is subject to the power of the latter.

The Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who was educated in London as lawyer, saw the need for a “non violent” ownership paradigm different from the existing one. He developed the notion of “Trusteeship” in South Africa where traditional relationships to land are similar to those of Australian Aboriginals. He introduced the concept to India where it was seen as representing the philosophy of the Upanishads who also shared the traditional paradigm. The idea of Trusteeship is that any owner of property is only holding it as trustee for society. Gandhi saw the need for people to obtain a “legitimate” return from their property but that any surplus should belong to society.

To make the idea of Trusteeship operational and consistent with ecological principles, we need to introduce the concepts of ’stakeholders’ and ‘dynamic tenure’. Stakeholders are those people, whose lives are affected by property, be it land, enterprises or money. Dynamic tenure transfers ownership from one class of individual to another depending upon the relationship of the individual to the property. With urban land, the Stakeholders would be the occupiers and neighbours, while with corporations they would be employees, customers, and suppliers including those providing community services like health, education and social security.

With dynamic tenure, corporate stakeholders would obtain co-ownership interests only after the shareholders had obtained monopoly rights to profits for a sufficient time period to provide the incentive for them to invest. In this way shareholders would obtain the “legitimate” return described by Gandhi. It would make corporate investment consistent with the time-limited rights provided to all investors in intellectual property like patents and copyright. However, rather than lose all rights at once as for intellectual property, the rights of shareholders would gradually diminish after, say 10 years, at 5% per year, to provide stakeholders 100% ownership 20 years later without cost. All assets of the company would then be sold to a successor corporation.

Mature corporations would finance the development of new technology and market growth through transferring parts of their operations to corporate “offspring” so as to attract new investors. In this way, corporations would give birth, die and have limited size like all living things. I have described such ecological entities in my writings as Ownership Transfer Corporations (OTC’s). OTC’s would allow those people whose life was affected by corporate operations to have some say in their control. This would create feedback information and control mechanism to greatly improve self-governance and social accountability of the corporate sector.

As most stakeholders would be local residents, the introduction of such ecologically designed corporations would create a highly decentralised locally owned and controlled society. Local residents know best the type of products, services and production techniques, which could best sustain their host bioregion. This would create the basis for establishing a sustainable economic system based on highly diversified self-financing, self-governing communities.

The replacement of the current static, monopoly, perpetual shareholder system of owning corporations with a dynamic, co-ownership, time limited, stakeholder tenure could also be applied to land and buildings. Ownership of apartments would transfer to tenants as co-owners at the rate investors wrote off their value for tax purposes. Ownership of non-residential buildings would revert, after they were written off for tax purposes, to a Community Land Bank (CLB). The CLB would become the local government authority and own all land in its precinct. It would issue shares to all voting residents pro-rata to the area of land occupied by their homes, whether of not they were rented or owned.

A duplex title system would by created for homeowners. One title would be redeemable shares equal to the value of the land occupied. The second title would be a lease to the home. The negotiable lease would provide exclusive ownership rights for as long as the owners were occupiers. All tenants would acquire co-ownership rights in CLB shares and their homes, without cost as stakeholders, through dynamic tenure in much the same way as residents acquire rights in squatter settlements.

Like an OTC’s, CLB’s minimise external ownership and so vests control with resident stakeholders. All windfall gains and wipeouts in land values are averaged out over the community. Net gains in value can be used to finance community improvements to create self-financing communities. The CLB, like the OTC creates a more efficient, equitable, socially accountable, self-governing and environmental sustainable basis for structuring society.

Dynamic tenure, which is a feature of both OTC’s and CLB’s, would introduce a new way of distributing national income through property rights, rather than through the traditional ways of work and welfare. In other words, dynamic tenure creates a technique for privatising the tax and welfare system to create a new type of economic system described in my 1975 book, Democratising the Wealth of Nations.

The structure of money also needs to be based on ecological principles as described in my contributions to Building Sustainable Communities edited by Ward Morehouse. In this book, I suggested the use of energy dollars to finance power generation from sustainable sources like solar, wind and waves, etc. Selling pre-payment vouchers to consumers would finance the generators. The vouchers denominated in units of energy would become an inflation proof kilowatt-hour reserve currency.

The reserve currency would provide the backing to create hand-to-hand bearer energy notes. As the reserve currency would have limited life and operating costs would need to be covered, the hand-to-hand currency would have a negative interest rate. The theory and practice of negative interest rate money has been described by Professor Irvin Fisher in his 1933 book Stamp Scrip and more recently by Professor Dieter Suhr who describes it as “Neutral Money” in his 1989 book The Capitalistic Cost-Benefit Structure of Money.

It is the invisible structure of money, ownership, control and corporate governance, which determine the form, and content of the visible structures built by society. Considerable thought goes into designing and building the visible structures but not the invisible ones, which control them. Instead, we simply replicate the existing structures, which have evolved through a centralised political process to maintain centralised power.

There is currently a unique historical window of opportunity for countries in transition from socialism to not simply clone the existing defective system of private property rights. It was to share the concept of dynamic stakeholder tenure that I made two visits to Czechoslovakia and a visit to the Peoples Republic of China during 1991.

The political systems of the world are evolving to more democratic forms but the structure of property rights has so far remained unchanged. The existing ownership rules are inconsistent with creating an effective democracy. Too much wealth is held by too few. This is because the present rules of owning land, enterprise and money provide profits in excess of the incentive to invest and so concentrates wealth with the already rich. Such surplus incentive, or surplus profits, is created by our static perpetual rules of ownership. Dynamic tenure provides a technique to distribute surplus profits to the stakeholders and so provide community returns as envisaged by Gandhi.

The first similarity between the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) principles and Anglican moral theology is the emphasis upon participation in community.

The foundation of free software is the formation of community. Similarly, Temple defines freedom as “self-control, self-determination, self-direction. To train citizens in the capacity for freedom and to give them scope for free action is the supreme end of all true politics” (68). So, the principles of the FSF seem to increase one’s “self-control, self-determination, self-direction” by allowing one to share what one has with peers and to take software in new directions. In this kind of interchange, the computer user and programmer “may feel that he [or she] has a real share and for which he [or she] may take some genuine responsibility” (89). Possessing the source code of a program and also having the right to modify and distribute it, one could, say, fix a crashing word processor and share one’s improved word processor with one’s friends. Rather, in the style of Jacques Maritain, the responsibility is kept at the grassroots level, that which is of closest responsibility.

With Free Software, one is able to take this responsibility that is simply not permitted with conventional software licenses. So, the computer user is not left in a state of despondency, unable to fix broken programs or unable to extended them to new purposes. In one example, Stallman tells the story of a woman working for a bank. The bank needed their software to take on some new functionality. However, their software had been purchased as object code from a company that would not share the source code. In order to get the new functionality, this woman was hired to re-write the source code, from scratch, and then to add the new feature. Such time and effort had to be wasted to protect secrets. Most good programmers, Stallman notes, “have experienced this frustration. The bank could afford to solve the problem by writing a new program from scratch, but a typical user, no matter how skilled, can only give up” (Why Software Should Be Free).

Surprisingly, Stallman, an avowed atheistic computer programmer, points out the spiritual harm in this practice. He points to despondency: “Giving up causes psychosocial harm” to the spirit of self-reliance. It is demoralizing to live in a house that you cannot rearrange to suit your needs. It leads to resignation and discouragement, which can spread to affect other aspects of one’s life.” Temple finds similar problems with long-term unemployment. For the unemployed as well as this bank programmer, they were not “happy in their idleness; most of them were conscious of futility and frustration…. They were degraded into a condition of universal dissatisfaction” (35). With closed, secret software, users arrive, as the long-term unemployed do, at “a sense that they have fallen out of the common life” (34). If, alternatively, one could contribute to the community of computer users (Free Software is a prerequisite for this), then one of Temple’s objectives would be met: “Every citizen should have a voice in the conduct of the business or industry which is carried on by means of his labor, and the satisfaction of knowing that his labor is directed to the well-being of the community” (97).

For Temple and for Stallman, working for the well being of community is a precious jewel. They both recognize the definite quality of people to be social creatures.

Temple draws on Jacques Maritain to demonstrate this:

- Personality is social, and only in his social relationships can a man be a person. Indeed, for the completeness of personality, there is needed the relationship to both God and neighbors. … These relationships exist in the whole network of communities, associations, and fellowships. It is in these that the real wealth of human life consists. (71)

Both Stallman and Temple seem to take Aristotle’s understanding of the person as zoon logikon. That is to say, a person is by definition a talking animal. Speech and socialization are emergent properties of humans not unlike spinning webs is an activity of spiders. Something that does not spin webs is difficult to classify as a spider. Likewise, something that does not socialize is difficult to classify as human. “The isolated citizen cannot effectively be free” (70). As a result, Temple recognizes that long-term unemployment pulls one out of society resulting in the loss of participation in community, the loss of self-identity and freedom, and the degrading from what God has created one to be. So also for Stallman, if one cannot freely share programs and ideas, one has lost the possibility to participate in the global community of computer users. He frames this participation as an act of service toward the neighbor, cast in the golden rule. So, “Freedom, Fellowship, and Service,” and characteristics of social order pointed out by both Temple and Stallman. Although Stallman is not explicitly Christian in his formulation, Temple’s thought is in the shadows. They would both likely agree that “these are the three principles of a Christian social order, derived from the still more fundamental Christian postulates that Man is a child of God and is destined for a life of eternal fellowship with Him.”

Above, the definition of participation has been taken for granted. From its context, participation has something to do with sharing with one’s equals and peers, a certain giving and taking, but its exact nature has not been explored. If one turns to Richard Hooker, then one finds his definition: “Participation is that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us and we of him, in such sort that each possesseth each other by way of special interest, property, and inherent copulation” (Lawes 5.56.1). This definition carries great weight for Hooker, as he rejects how “some men expound our being in Christ to import nothing else, but only that the selfsame nature which maketh us to be men, is in him, and maketh him man as we are” (5.56.7). No, something much greater is here! He turns back to Cyprian and recognizes “the highest and truest society that can be between man and him which is both God and man in one” (5.56.8). This society indeed is found in the believer, where Creator and creature are united. But one, as a creature, only follows after the union of God and Humanity in the Incarnation. So, human participation (society) is only raised up to so fine a level as it is patterned after the participation of Christ and Christian that in turn only has its pattern in the participation of divine life economically and immanently.

To complete the chain, Stallman asserts that people (especially programmers) must be ultimately free to share computer software with one another. In his past experience as a programmer for MIT, Stallman watched his department crumble as talented workers left for higher-paying jobs. As he stayed in contact with those developers, he learned that the companies that they joined made “them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat each other as friends” (Manifesto). The end is division and not communion. Recalling Maritain, one would be caught “programming alone.”

So, he proposes an alternative:

- By working on and using [Free Software] rather than proprietary programs, we can be hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, [Free Software] serves as an example to inspire and a banner to rally others to join us in sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony which is impossible if we use software that is not free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness that money cannot replace. (Manifesto)

To Stallman, Free Software has a characteristic that is not unlike Hooker’s view of Sacraments. While sacraments are more than didactic (5.57.1), they are still “moral instruments of salvation, duties of service and worship” (5.57.4). For Stallman, there is a great act of hospitality and communion in this act of sharing; here participation is happening, as there is such an “interest, property, and inherent copulation.” This participation gains meaning from and gives meaning to human participation in Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

Computer programming informs and is informed by participation from Hooker’s sacramental theology in another way. He goes on to describe two parts of human participation in Christ:

- Thus we participate Christ partly by imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partly by habitual and real infusion, as when grace is inwardly bestowed while we are one earth, and afterwards more fully both our souls and bodies make like unto his in glory. (5.56.11)

The sacraments affect the Church step by step and make one gradually more a participant in the divine life. Computer programming models this process. When a programmer turns an idea into source code, the code is not immediately acceptable to the computer. The programmer must translate the source into object code, which the computer can run. The steps are traditionally this: the programmer enters the source code into the computer and edits it, the compiler refines the source code into assembly code, then the assembler assembles that into object code, then the linker connects multiple pieces of object code into an executable, finally the computer can run the executable and return results to the user. Each step refines the program a little more. Step by step, it becomes something that the computer can accept. At the end of the process, the execution of the program, the distinction between computer and program is blurred as they each participate in one another.

The process is dumb. Computer programs act slavishly to transform inputs to outputs. The conversion of source code into executable is a predictable process, without variation. But as mundane as it may be, it is also one of the most basic processes of computation. In Stallman’s initial announcement of his Free Software project, he announced that he will be making “a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things” (“new UNIX implementation”). These basics are the sacraments of computing, effecting a sanctifying change in human ideas.

So, when one takes the process as a means to understand sanctification, one enriches the processes. In parallel, the Christian receives the grace of the Sacraments throughout life. Step by step and phase by phase, the Christian is transformed and made more acceptable to God. Then, at the last, one participates in God so fully that distinction between the two is difficult to make. Perhaps the strength of participation has lead historically to Christological and Trinitarian doctrinal battles (5.54.10).

In this way, computer programming points to something higher. There is an iconic relationship whereby the programming process becomes a window to the sanctification process. The words of George Herbert’s “The Elixir” become relevant here: “A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room, as for they laws, makes that and th’ action fine.” So, the mundane and dumb process is lifted up to a new meaning and significance: iconographic representation of the sacramental process. Even further, the use of the software also has iconographic importance. The type of participation that Stallman encourages itself is a window onto the type of participation that humans have in society as zoon logikon, the type of participation that the persons of the Trinity share, and the type of participation that still awaits perfection in human relationships with God.

William Temple suggests “all things should be done in the Christian spirit and in accordance with Christian principles” (59). So, in the case of construction, “if a bridge is to be built, the Church may remind the engineer that it is his obligation to provide a really safe bridge; but it is not entitled to tell him whether, in fact, his design meets this requirement…. In just the same way the Church may tell the politician what ends the social order should promote; but it must leave to the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends.”

This series will consist of four separate posts: 1) this post, on sunk cost and credit, 2) a discussion of the suburbia’s economic prospects and the challenges of commuting and production after peak oil, 3) the potential and limitations of producing food, water, and energy in suburbia, and 4) the impact of decentralization, self-sufficiency, and lessons from history as they inform our “solutions” to suburbia.

More profoundly, while many people think that Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Obama already owns.

And his relationships are not the just traditional tie