[p2p-research] Exchange with S.M. Stirling on Decentralized Production

[marc fawzi]

Hit the send button by accident...

Full response:

> Why do we have one huge sun instead of a thousand tiny stars in our
> solar system?
>
> Or why is there a lower limit on the size of stars in the first place?
>
> Energy production in the universe seems to be concentrated in massive stars.
>
> If you think of the large centralized production facility as the sun
> and the customers of that facility as the planets then you start to
> see that it follows an established natural pattern, which must be
> driven by a very basic and universal issue.
>
> But it does not mean that we cannot have peer production. It just
> means that there is a lower limit on the size of the production
> facility in order for it to sustain an ecosystem (think: solar system)
> around it.
>
> For example, in the P2P Energy Economy model, it's hard to see how
> individual energy producers would have any substantial surplus if they
> had tiny solar generators and it's even harder to see how there could
> be a flow of energy from peers with surplus to peers with deficit if
> everyone had a surplus. This is the basic and universal issue (or two
> issues,) IMO. For each given type of product (e.g. energy, milk, cars,
> etc) we can't have everyone be a producer because the "flow of energy"
> is the "economy of life" and without a deficit on one side and a
> surplus on the other there is no flow (or movement) of energy (and no
> flow of energy equal no life, literally.)
>
> So in order to have both the maximum surplus of the thing being
> produced and the maximum flow of that thing from the surplus side to
> the deficit side, the production tends towards centralization (within
> each geographic or virtual market)
>
> However, peer producers can become the stars (or suns) to their own
> solar system (or customers) by becoming big enough relative to the
> size of their market. The reason peer producers would eventually have
> to get more and more massive, thus replicating the very pattern of
> centralization peer production is supposed to dissolve, is because if
> one peer producer grows in size they will be able to reach higher efficiencies
> (there is an optimal point of course) and take customers away from the
> other peer producers so then every peer producer will be motivated to
> grow in size to stay in business and that's how we go back to square
> one.
>
> Having said that, it's important to bring down the existing order and start
> afresh from the bottom up. The reason being that given enough time
> a complex system that repeats itself (i.e. iterates, as in evolution being
> an iterative process) will eventually get it right, i.e. gets better with
> each repetition.

;-)

Marc




On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 1:02 AM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do we have one huge sun instead of a thousand tiny stars in our
> solar system?
>
> Or why is there a lower limit on the size of stars in the first place?
>
> Energy production in the universe seems to be concentrated in massive stars.
>
> If you think of the large centralized production facility as the sun
> and the customers of that facility as the planets then you start to
> see that it follows an established natural pattern, which must be
> driven by a very basic and universal issue.
>
> But it does not mean that we cannot have peer production. It just
> means that there is a lower limit on the size of the production
> facility in order for it to sustain an ecosystem (think: solar system)
> around it.
>
> For example, in the P2P Energy Economy model, it's hard to see how
> individual energy producers would have any substantial surplus if they
> had tiny solar generators and it's even harder to see how there could
> be a flow of energy from peers with surplus to peers with deficit if
> everyone had a surplus. This is the basic and universal issue (or two
> issues,) IMO. For each given type of product (e.g. energy, milk, cars,
> etc) we can't have everyone be a producer because the "flow of energy"
> is the "economy of life" and without a deficit on one side and a
> surplus on the other there is no flow (or movement) of energy (and no
> flow of energy equal no life, literally.)
>
> So in order to have both the maximum surplus of the thing being
> produced and the maximum flow of that thing from the surplus side to
> the deficit side, the production tends towards centralization (within
> each geographic or virtual market)
>
> However, peer producers can become the stars (or suns) to their own
> solar system (or customers) by becoming big enough relative to the
> size of their market. The reason peer producers would eventually have
> to get more and more massive, thus replicating the very pattern of
> centralization peer production is supposed to dissolve, is because if
> one peer producer grows in sizthen they will have higher efficiencies
>
>
> Marc
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Kevin Carson
> <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was surprised and pleased to find that S.M. Stirling had visited my
>> blog discussion of his book Island in the Sea of Time.
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2009/02/long-emergency-sm-stirling-and.html
>>
>> He left a comment which led to an interesting exchange:
>>
>> STIRLING:  Note that the economy of Nantucket in the "Island" books
>> doesn't -stay- small and decentralized, or rather doesn't stay any
>> smaller or more decentralized than is required by the small
>> population, relatively low productivity and hence the limited
>> opportunity for division of labor and application of comparative
>> advantage.
>>
>> As Adam Smith pointed out, the limiting factor in the division of
>> labor/specialization is the size of the effective market.
>>
>> By end of the trilogy they've got a mini-steel-mill built in Britain;
>> in Ironbridge Gorge, in fact, the original cradle of the Industrial
>> Revolution.
>>
>> The reason nobody builds cars in small machine-shops isn't that it's
>> technically impossible. It's perfectly feasible.
>>
>> It's just not -economically- possible; the result would cost too much.
>>
>> That's why most manufactured goods are made in great big honking
>> plants; you get more for less that way.
>>
>> If you got rid of all the big manufacturing entities, you could cobble
>> together something from local resources.
>>
>> And the process of reconcentration would begin immediately, driven by
>> the same ineluctable economic logic that caused it the first time, and
>> by the (instinctual) urge of most humans to follow the "least effort
>> principle".
>>
>> ME:  I originally intended to address some of the points you raised
>> (not only Leaton's enthusiasm for the Thames valley as the "Silicon
>> Valley of the first industrial revolution," but the seeming recreation
>> of many forms of anti-market privilege by Nantucket like land grants
>> in the colonies instead of allowing free Lockean homesteading). But I
>> decided it was outside the immediate scope of my post.
>>
>> My main area of disagreement with you concerns your assumption that
>> the rise of mass-production industry resulted from the "ineluctable
>> economic logic" of superior efficiency.
>>
>> In fact, I believe that with a few exceptions, small-scale factory
>> production on the Emilia-Romagna model (integrating general-purpose
>> powered machinery into craft production, with small batches and
>> frequent changes between production runs, geared to local demand on a
>> just-in-time basis) is *more* efficient than mass-production when the
>> latter's costs of long-distance shipping and push-distribution are
>> taken into account.
>>
>> I agree with Borsodi and Mumford that the invention of the electric
>> motor eliminated the main imperative behind the large factory
>> (economizing on horsepower from a single prime mover), and put the
>> household and small shop on an even footing with the "Dark Satanic
>> Mill." Most of the economies of machine production are captured with
>> the bare adoption of machinery on a small scale; the modest additional
>> reductions in unit production cost with large-scale machinery are more
>> than offset by increased costs of distribution and marketing.
>>
>> In a free market, American industrialization arguably would have taken
>> the pattern of a hundred Emilia-Romagnas. Instead, the state tipped
>> the balance with massive railroad subsidies, "intellectual property"
>> law, tariffs, regulatory cartelization, etc. Electrical machinery,
>> rather than living up to the full decentralizing potential of
>> Mumford's "neotechnic" revolution, was fitted into the older
>> organizational forms of the paleotechnic era. So what we wound up with
>> was Sloanist mass-production: enormously expensive product-specific
>> machinery, which mandated large-batch production 24/7 to minimize unit
>> costs, which mandated in turn corporate control over external society
>> to make sure the stuff would be bought up and the wheels could keep
>> turning. When you figure the enormous amounts of crystalized labor
>> wasted to keep the system running (the buffer stocks of unfinished
>> goods and the inventories of finished goods awaiting orders, described
>> by Waddell and Bodek in Rebirth of American industry; and the
>> mountains of discarded products in landfills that could have been
>> better designed around modular components for easy repair and long
>> life), it's not really that economical.
>>
>> In fact the costs of extending Adam Smith's market area exceed, in
>> most cases, the savings from increased division of labor. The problem
>> is that the state subsidized those costs and externalized them on
>> taxpayers.
>>
>> In some cases, like heavy engine blocks, the large mass-production
>> factory really is most efficient in absolute terms. But in most such
>> cases, I would argue that the product is itself an answer to an
>> artificial problem created by the state. The present extent of demand
>> for cars results from state subsidies to sprawl and monoculture. The
>> civilian jumbo jet almost certainly would never have come into
>> existence on its own nickel, abseent the heavy bomber program to fully
>> utilize the expensive machine tools required to produce it.
>>
>> The most prominent case I can think of of a genuinely valuable product
>> that requires large-scale production, is the microprocessor
>> foundry--but even there the scale of demand would be considerably
>> reduced by easily reprogrammable chips (in which case chips would be
>> harvested from landfills on the same pattern as local minimills
>> harvesting scrap metal).
>>
>> Without government subsidies to economic centralization and
>> capital-intensive production methods, IMO our economy would look a lot
>> more like Borsodi and Mumford, and a lot less like Chandler and
>> Schumpeter.
>>
>> I have an extended critique of Alfred Chandler's Whig theory of
>> industrial progress in Ch. 2 of my org theory book:
>> http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/chapter1.pdf
>>
>> It's distilled in a blog post here:
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/06/alfred-chandler-critique.html
>>
>> Anyway, thanks much for your comments.
>>
>> --
>> Kevin Carson
>> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
>> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
>> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
>> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
>> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>>
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