On intrinsic motivation and how a better understan...

2011-10-23T20:40:38.003-04:00

On intrinsic motivation and how a better understanding of it will reshape our socioeconomics, see Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

You are right on the divide-by-zero errors in mainstream economics. I talked about that in "Post-Scarcity Princeton".

The way mainstream economists get around that is assuming infinite demand. Then they can divide infinite productivity by infinite demand to balance things out.

The problem is, as you have pointed out in another entry, people are starting to use their leisure time cheaply through the internet to help others fill their leisure time. See also Malsow's Hierarchy of Needs on the move to self-actualization. And see also "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" as an enviromental ethic. There is a law of diminishing returns, or even eventually negative returns, on more goods and services.

And of course a concentration of wealth leads to monetary problems too with having consumer demand, and automation and energy replace a lot of human labor, reinforcing the concentration of wealth to owners of capital. But even if wealth was not being concentrated, demand would probably still not keep up with productivity improvements. See also a humorous short story called "The Midas Plague".

Put that all together and you get the situation we are in. And it will only get worse until some form of radical change -- like a basic income, or a bigger transition to a gift economy, or better participatory government planning, and/or the wide spread of advanced 3D printing and household robots for subsistence production.

Essentially nothing happens to the supply and dema...

2011-04-17T12:38:02.932-04:00

Essentially nothing happens to the supply and demand curve, it's just that the economy shifts from monetarism to a gift economy, or economy of attention. There will always be scarcity (most obviously scarcity of time) and I don't think that money is going away any time soon, but over the next few decades - assuming no major collapses, catastrophes or retrenchments befall humanity - monetarism is likely to become a less important factor in the economy.

You can see an example of a post-scarcity economy in open source software. Atoms don't follow the same logic as bits, but downward mobility in automation will also mean that surplus value can be generated in a way which to some degree facilitates "wealth without money". This also has consequences for concentrations of political power, and power relationships in general, so I expect that advanced automation of a ubiquitous kind will be resisted by the status quo.

Comments on Eric Reasons: Scarcity, Abundance, and the Knowledge Economy. Ti...

On intrinsic motivation and how a better understan...

Essentially nothing happens to the supply and dema...