My conclusion is that, to talk about abundance is a very misleading message. Commons have much to offer us – sharing ideas without intellectual property constraints will help us, sharing scarce production and energy and pooling production arrangement and infrastructures will too, sharing may bring us into human relationships with many psychological and emotional rewards…. Continue reading
Searched for "Verzola"
The Differences and Commonalities Between Shared Code for Immaterial Production and Shared Design for Material Production
Proposed by Magius: “Let me make some theoretical considerations about open production. Imho the two big differences between immaterial production (ip) and material production (mp) now are: 1. design/product 1.1 in ip, the design and the product are the same (code is an “executive design”) 1.2 in mp the design and the product are not… Continue reading
Regarding the book “The Blue Economy”: is it too technocratic?
Book: The Blue Economy. Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis. by Gunter Pauli The publisher’s description is followed by a commentary by abundance theorist Roberto Verzola: Description “Mere months after the 2008 financial meltdown, the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported the loss of 50 million jobs. Developing economies were deeply affected… Continue reading
An introduction to the economics of abundance (2): the demand side
It is the profit-motive, it seems, that keeps us away from abundance, not “infinite” human wants We continue our presentation of this landmark essay: Source: 21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance. by Roberto Verzola. International Review of Information Ethics Vol. 11 (10/2009) Roberto Verzola on The Demand Side of Abundance: “Abundance archetypes represent the supply… Continue reading
An introduction to the economics of abundance (1): the supply side
To even acknowledge at all the existence of abundance is a huge conceptual leap for many economists, whose fundamental assumptions are based on scarcity. Some economists even say that abun-dant goods cease to be interesting because the problem of scarcity has been solved. But if abundance solves the problem of scarcity, shouldn’t economists devote as… Continue reading
Dealing with (e-)waste, the scarcity of social equity, and the potential for abundance in the knowledge economy
Real economic abundance can come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abundance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual point of… Continue reading
Classical capitalism, peer production, and the consequences of limited demand
What we can at best hope to do is shift the emphasis away from the fourth path (post-scarcity technology used to create artificial scarcity) and towards the first three (a basic income, a gift economy, and/or peer production — all using post-scarcity technology to create abundance). A meditation by Paul Fernhout, who distinguishes four reactions… Continue reading
Why combining GM foods with organic agriculture is a bad idea
Vandana Shiva: “Monsanto’s contribution to the suicide economy is by extracting super profits from farmers in the form of royalties and by intentionally transforming seeds from a renewable resource that farmers can save to a nonrenewable resource that they must buy in the market every year … The government should impose a moratorium on GMO… Continue reading
It is time to establish Abundance as a field of study
Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies This is an absolutely important initiative, forwarded by Joseph Jackson. I would consider the launch of this journal, which represents a necessary break with the scarcity-paradigm of the current economics profession, to be a civilisational and scientific milestone. More details, including a list of possible members and a plan… Continue reading
Is the internet subsidized by the poor?
We reproduce an intriguing critique by Roberto Verzola: “It was appropriate technology advocate E.F. Schumacher, author of the widely-acclaimed book Small is Beautiful, who once said that technologies often carry a built-in ideology which is so deeply embedded that one can’t have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant. Among… Continue reading
Reliability vs. efficiency (2): system reliability should take precedence over efficiency
We continue Roberto Verzola’s important contribution to a ‘green’ p2p economics theory. After the critique of the efficiency criterion, he focuses on system reliability as a better criterion for economic development. We publish the first part of the article, and refer to the original for the more detailed technical elaboration which follows our excerpt. Roberto… Continue reading
Reliability vs. efficiency (1): the critique of efficiency as key economic and policy criterion
This is an update to Roberto Verzola’s views on gain maximization vs. risk minimization, which we featured here. In this piece, he proposes reliability as an alternative criterion for socio-economic decision-making instead of efficiency. This first part starts with a critique of efficiency. Roberto Verzola: “Efficiency is a measure of how well transformation of matter… Continue reading
From Gain Maximization to Risk Minimization
Under conditions of abundance, the ideal economic agent is not the gain maximizer competing for self interest and incidentally making markets efficient, but the risk minimizer cooperating with others to intentionally make their common resources more reliable. Roberto Verzola makes this very interesting distinction in economic governance modes in his important essay on “Undermining Abundance“…. Continue reading
Abundance as a field of study (2): a typology
We continue our presentation of Roberto Verzola’s essay, ‘Studying Abundance‘. Following yesterday’s explanation of the different aspects of abundance, Roberto now formulates a typology distinguishes five different kinds of abunance. Roberto Verzola: “Taking into account these various ways of classifying abundance, we suggest the following tentative classification to highlight the differences among the various types…. Continue reading
Abundance as a field of study (1)
We discussed a major essay by Robert Verzola, in which he outlined the ‘war against abundance in the physical world’, in two parts on the 15th and the 16th. This was in fact his second essay on the topic, as explained here. His third essay is a draft on ‘Studying Abundance‘, and an explicit critique… Continue reading
The war against abundance in the physical world (2): towards policies for abundance
We continue the presentation of the very important essay by Robert Verzola. This time, excerpts of what he has to say about a positive policy geared towards producing positive feedback loops of abundance. Roberto Verzola: 1. Marshalling the abundance of nature “Creating abundance is a matter of reproducing a good over and over again, until… Continue reading