MONETARY: Working and Consuming in Utopia

[Keith Wilde <kwilde@ca.inter.net>]

My comments are prompted by the following exchange between Medaille and Ryan:
 
John:   Everything is free? 
 
Bill:  At the theoretical limit, yes, in terms of cost to the end user.
It's related to the engineering concept of efficiency. We'll never get
there, but we can get closer to it than we're at now. 

John: Sounds a bit utopian.
  
Bill:  Probably.

This seems to confirm my impression that the principal similarity between
social credit and the Kelso-Adler perspective is the vanishing need for
"labor" as engineering improves and becomes embodied in tools and other
infrastructure. And it is Utopian in the most literal sense, for reduction
in the amount of time required to be spent in necessary work was one of the
primary planning objectives in the society described in Thomas More's
fanciful account. They did it, More said, by looking always for improved
technique, by maintaining records and assembling data for use in their
planning sessions, and by organizing production, distribution and other
activities so as to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the
application of "labor" while at the same time aiming always to improve
effectiveness in terms of quality. 

A great deal has happened since the publication of Utopia, which coincided
roughly with the invention of the printing press and the establishment of
double-entry bookkeeping. So much so that both Douglas and Kelso-Adler
perceived that work in the traditional sense had become obsolescent was
verging on unnecessary. (That idea seems to me to be the main conceptual
hurdle that the authors of binary economics have in mind when they speak of
the necessity of a "paradigm shift".)  The notion of a workless world came
up several times in the Economics of Ownership forum (another window of the
COG Virtual Think Tank), and always as an outcome to be desired. 

If readers of this discussion flip over to the Mondragon window, however,
they will find quite a different attitude toward work, imbued as it is with
sentiments about the dignity of work and its desirability as an expression
of what it means to be human. 

The relationship of humans to their tools is an unfinished chapter in
binary economics, and it seems likely that an exploration of the issue is
germane to social credit as well.

Keith Wilde
Ottawa
kwilde@ca.inter.net
613 990-8125 


Keith Wilde
Ottawa
kwilde@ca.inter.net
613 990-8125