[p2p-research] Sustainable Abundance: Distributed vs Decentralized

[marc fawzi]

This is in follow-up to a comment by Paul (OpenManufacturing.net) regarding
historical evidence against decentralized abundance.

Paul wrote:
<<
Another disaster created in part by a direct focus on decentralization
happened in China in the late 1950s:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
"The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen – both within China and outside –
as a major economic failure and great humanitarian disaster with estimates
of the number of people who starved to death during this period ranging from
14 to 43 million."

When I was in college in the 1980s, one of the reasons the department
chairman of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department there was
mostly unsympathetic to the idea of decentralization of industry was his
Chinese ancestry and dislike of what happened there (something I only really
understood much later).

So, one can point to several serious economic disasters which were related
to trying to promote prosperity by revolutionary means (education,
decentralization, the market) that each got a big part of the picture wrong
(respectively, schooling, terror, and kleptocracy).

It's ironic that as decentralized abundance gets easier, it seems to also
get more disproven as possible historically.  :-)
>>

I'm just wondering how distributed (or virtually centralized, distributed)
version of sustainable abundance, and, more specifically, my version of it,
i.e.: 'predictive central inventory management + fair scheduling of
suppliers' (see latest Peer Bank
<http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model#Peer_Energy_Bank>model,)
differs from the decentralized implementation of sustainable
abundance (other than the major difference between distribution and
decentralization)?

I know the decentralized version of 'sustainable anything' is significantly
more complicated than the distributed (or virtually centralized) version,
but I also know that the decentralized version is workable in theory (I just
don't think it will be as efficient I don't think it will have any pragmatic
advantage over the distributed model)

I personally think that sustainable abundance (of energy or anything else)
can be done by virtually centralizing the automated and fair administration
of abundant resource sharing, using predictive inventory control & fair
scheduling algorithms, and I believe that it's probably all or or most of
what's needed as far as economic self-regulation goes in a P2P economy
(people may still commit crime but it's outside the scope of economic
self-regulation, which is the mechanism for sustaining abundance of a given
resource)

Why would decentralized abundance fail (fail to sustain itself) if there was
a proper self-regulation mechanism?

Feel free to cross post the reply or join the debate on the open
manufacturing list <http://openmanufacturing.net> (thread: Personal Open
Manufacturing Manual)

Marc
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