[p2p-research] Fwd: P2P Energy Economy: request for critical feedback

[Stan Rhodes]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 8:15 AM, Florent <fthiery at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> let scalable/distributed "city" models exist
>> Are you saying Capitalism (or "The Free Market", or whatever
>> 'governance' is currently running) doesn't *let* scalable/distributed
>> "city" models exist?
>
> Not really. At least, not scalable in a durable way. More that the
> perverse effects of capitalism's scalability are that primary, locally
> needed resources (food, energy, ...) tend to get always more
> centralized (giant supermakets, death of local commerce and
> production, death of hand manufacturing and specialties (culture !),
> privatization of community goods and services ...).
>

A lot of centralization is economically inevitable, driven by the
combination of economies of scale and cities that develop as hubs of
commerce, neither of which are capitalism-dependent.  Those basic
trends are not effects (certainly not perverse ones!) of capitalism
per se.  (Interesting aside: Paul Krugman recently won the nobel prize
in economics for providing a deeper understanding of these mechanisms
in economic geography.)  That said, within those trends are particular
permutations resulting from how our governments define, for example,
land property rights, and their related taxation.  Some of these
permutations certainly qualify, at least in my mind, as perverse.

If we look at what current technology makes possible that was
impossible before, we can see where some of the factors are changing,
such as economies of scale within evolving organizational models.
This may change the trends, leading to less centralization in some
areas/industries, but that's not because centralization was a mistake
in the first place.  Again, this is contrasted to legal constructs
such as land property rights.  I hope I've drawn a clear
distinction...

A worthwhile simulation reduces the extraneous variables in its
virtual world.  That's really hard.  Obviously, players in a game play
different depending on the game, and the usefulness of the simulation
is determined by the accuracy of it in predicting real-world behavior.
 Two examples of this, different in their failings to accurately model
human behavior, come immediately to mind: John Nash's equilibria and
Edward Chamberlin's "falsification" of the standard neoclassical model
of a perfect-competition market.  If one were to make policy in view
of such findings (and in Nash's case a lot of people most certainly
did), one might end up with quite a mess.

It seems like centralization has become a de facto badguy
(decentralization being the hero), much like globalization.  In the
words of Chomsky, "Many words of political discourse have two
meanings: a literal meaning, and a doctrinal meaning that is used for
political warfare. The term 'globalization' is no exception."

I leave you with a couple questions about the following:

> Of course this scientifically-oriented approach to studying local
> community models (based on needs/resources flows and network-derived
> principles such as scalability and robustness) can easily appear as
> non-ethical/technocentric/arbitrarian.

What approach are you speaking of?  What models are you looking for /
talking about?

-- Stan