[p2p-research] Kolakowski is dead...

[Michel Bauwens]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> What makes the time dark is the threat of "abundance."  We have abundant
> pollution.  Abundant population.  The marginal costs of producing those
> things and the equipotential gain of all of us treating the world badly...is
> the threat.


well, of course, you need abundance in the right things, love, culture, and
externalities-respecting sufficiency in the other things ... and individual
luxuries and idiosyncracies when they are not too destructive ...


>
> Abundance must, I argue, tie to relevance.  Relevance is only determined by
> markets.  Where am I not seeing the key point?


Capitalist markets  have been notoriously bad at determining relevance, they
have been a total failure ... indeed, what are you not seeing ... as you
yourself indicated a few days ago with your oil price example ... does that
price reflect relevance .. what about the housing prices before the meltdown
...




>
>
> How would we define sufficiency?  I like drinking bourbon--and place high
> value on the pleasure.  A sufficient amount is zero--I admit.  But my
> sufficient amount is about 3/4 of liter every two weeks.  What do I do about
> those sorts of "needs."


Here's part of the answer, by Roberto Verzola:

from
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/roberto-verzola-finite-demand-makes-relative-abundance-possible/2009/01/31

Roberto Verzola: Finite demand makes relative abundance
possible<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/roberto-verzola-finite-demand-makes-relative-abundance-possible/2009/01/31>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]Michel Bauwens
31st January 2009

 A very *important contribution to abundance
theory<http://p2pfoundation.net/Abundance_vs._Scarcity>
* by Roberto Verzola<http://rverzola.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/finite-demand-makes-relative-abundance-possible/>
:

*“It is almost by definition that economists predominantly focus on
scarcity, when they define economics as the study of “the most efficient
ways to allocate scarce resources to meet infinite human wants”. If, indeed,
people had infinite wants, then not even all the resources of this finite
world will be enough for a single person.*

*But I contend that consumer demand is not infinite. There exist physical,
physiological, psychological and cultural limits - both actual and potential
- to consumption which can keep individual as well as collective needs and
wants within finite bounds.*

*If demand is finite, then satisfying this demand becomes a real
possibility, and relative abundance is within reach.*

*The following three concepts will help show that demand can remain within
finite bounds:*

*Satiation. Economists define satiation as the consumption level which the
consumer most prefers. *

*The closer he is to this level, writes economist Hal Varian, “the better
off he is in terms of his own preferences”.This satiation level is also
called bliss point. Beyond it, the consumer becomes indifferent towards
getting more of the same good or may even prefer to have less of the good.
While many economists still cling to the hedonist principle that “more is
always preferred to less,” some acknowledge, at least in theory, that a
satiation level exists for some, if not most, goods. Varian, in particular,
says that most goods have a satiation point and that “you can have too much
of nearly anything,” which contradicts the “infinite wants” assertion in
most definitions of economics.*

*Saturation. While satiation may apply more to the psychological attitude of
a consumer not wanting more, saturation is more about the physiological or
physical incapacity of a person to consume more. *

*Beyond the saturation point, one’s body will either become incapable or
involuntarily reject additional servings of food and drinks. One can only
wear so many clothes, or shoes. One can listen to only so many CDs or watch
only so many videos. There are only twenty-four hours a day after all.*

*To reach the brain, a sense stimulus takes around 10-20 milliseconds. To
respond in a conscious way, neuro-scientists have found out, the brain takes
longer - around 500 milliseconds (half a second).2 This suggests that our
brain can only enjoy at most two distinct events every second or about
170,000 every twenty-four hours. For a world with some six billion people,
that adds up to maximum of one quad (i.e., quadrillion) consumption events
per day. That is a huge number, it is true, but finite nevertheless. Most of
us will probably be too saturated long before that point.*

*However, the concept of saturation as distinct from satiation is missing in
consumer theory and most economists still cling to the “infinite wants”
idea.*

*Satisficing. Even before we reach our satiation or saturation levels, we
may already reach our “satisficed” level, in which the quantity we have of a
particular good or bundle of goods already suffices to satisfy, and beyond
which we would only weakly prefer more.*

*The idea that consumers satisfice rather than optimize when fitting their
wants to their budget was first raised by psychologist Herbert Simon, who
subsequently won the Economics Nobel Prize in 1978.*

*Any of these “sat” concepts - certainly all of them, together - are
sufficient to argue that individual and likewise aggregate demand have
finite bounds.*

*This justifies the following assertion: some consumers have a satisficing
level for some goods. We will leave to future research the debate whether
the weak assertion of “some consumers” and “some goods” can, in some
contexts or periods, be changed to a stronger assertion of “some consumers
for all goods”, “all consumers for some goods”, or even “all consumers for
all goods”.*

*The above assertion leads directly to a formal definition of abundance: when
a person can afford enough quantity of a good to reach his/her satisficed
level, then the person enjoys a state of abundance for that good. *

*The concept is not new. Gandhi must have been referring to abundance when
he said, “the Earth has enough for everyone’s need”. This definition also
allows a good’s state of abundance with respect to one person to be
quantified. For instance, if a person’s satisficing level is five pairs of
shoes, but s/he can only afford two pairs, then s/he enjoys a state of
abundance of 40% (two out of five) with respect to shoes. This makes it
simple to relate abundance to its inverse, scarcity: the person needs three
pairs more to reach the five-pair satisficed level. Thus s/he faces a
scarcity level of 60%.*

*Economics usually assumes that business firms maximize their profits by
producing until their marginal cost (the cost of the next additional unit)
equals their marginal revenue (unit price of the good). If, in addition to
this behavioral assumption, we also assume diminishing returns or decreasing
returns to scale, this will eventually result in increasing marginal costs.
Thus business firms will, in theory, reach their satiation level when they
reach their maximum profits.*

*This also means, however, that profitable firms employing technologies with
constant or increasing returns to scale will face constant or decreasing
marginal costs. They will therefore have no profit maximum and likewise no
satiation level. These firms will conform to the theoretical hedonist image
for whom “more is always preferred to less”, and whose desire to purchase is
limited only by their budget and nothing more. They will also try to keep
increasing their scale of operations, as they go after higher and higher
profits - making them an engine of globalization. Here is a possible answer,
by the way, to what some economists consider a mystery, that “neoclassical
theory has no full explanation of why firms grow at all, nor why it is that
the typical pattern of the growth rates of firms seems to lead inexorably
towards persistently increasing aggregate business concentration.”*

6 notes and references available
here<http://rverzola.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/finite-demand-makes-relative-abundance-possible/>
.


>
>
> Ryan
>
> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> In this case, abundance is simply the technical term appropriate for  the
>> marginal production costs of the digital environment, and the equipotential
>> overflow of the freely aggregating contributors ... the hypothesis is that
>> in a distributed network, there is always 'somebody' out there with the
>> required skill for the particular task ... However counter-intuititive that
>> may seen, it usually works.
>>
>> Of course in terms of material things, 'suffiiency' is the better term,
>> this is why we talk about 'sufficient money' to replace scarcity-based
>> money, and not ' abundance money'
>>
>> I think you are on to something with your 'boundaries' argument too ... it
>> is because the boundaries between the inside and outside are so loose, that
>> the equipotential contribution can be found ... in case of wikipedia,
>> because of the notability, this mechanism has been broken, hence the
>> stagnation of the english wikipedia ..
>>
>> I concur with your phooey .. and again would add my abundance related
>> argument: when you think there;s only one way for change, and that you know
>> this way, it becomes important and mandatory to fight for this 'right
>> understanding'; opposed to that is the pattern matching of the p2p approach,
>> which can always find interesting patterns to interconnect, even in dark
>> times
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, I think I agree though the term "abundance" puts me off because it
>>> sounds inherently silly.  We have abundant outmoded code.  It isn't a boon.
>>> What is a boon is high-access to relevant tools. Relevance is part of the
>>> P2P discussion...soon resilience will be, too.
>>>
>>> Abundance isn't a good.  Widely available items that are wanted and
>>> needed is the boon. Maybe that is implied in abundance, but the word itself
>>> strikes me as...self-defeating.
>>>
>>> I wonder if the decline of organizational centrality is simply leading to
>>> low-threshold (and I like this concept...you are on to something)
>>> participation simply by absence of the boundaries imposed by the vanguard of
>>> the peers (aka Wikipedia editors!)
>>>
>>> What puts me off about communism most isn't the idea of the commune, I
>>> rather can accept that intellectually, what alienates me from the left is
>>> the hypocrisy of the so-called vanguards who expect everyone else to sit in
>>> the back of the bus while they fly first class because of their
>>> "leadership."  Phooey on that.
>>>
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Michel Bauwens <
>>> michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One of the key aspets of p2p governance I think, is to engineer
>>>> 'abundance' i.e. free choices, where-ever possible, thereby enabling
>>>> productive participation without necessating intenstive deliberations by any
>>>> groups ... this deliberation itself also becomes mostly technical, itself
>>>> also open mostly to the contributory process ... But never totally, as
>>>> linux/debian/apache have all different arbitrage mechanisms ... I'm not sure
>>>> if this was a learning experience from the often failing, because too high
>>>> treshold, participation processes required in sixties/seventies style
>>>> efforts ... It seems that p2p groups want to avoid this high treshold
>>>> discussions opting for the efficiency that is determined by their
>>>> object-oriented sociality i..e whatever productive cause that made them
>>>> rally in the first place
>>>>
>>>> Michel
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Michel Bauwens <
>>>>> michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> yes, pluralism both in the economy and governance is necessary to avoid
>>>>>> any kind of totalitarianism, including a p2p one ... Imagine the world rule
>>>>>> by wikipedia admins ..<g>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Michel
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Funny.  That WOULD be a catastrophe...
>>>>>
>>>>> It wasn't but a couple (or a few) years ago that Wikipedia as
>>>>> governance model was extremely popular in graduate school discussions.
>>>>>
>>>>> The future of organizations is low participation, low linkage, high
>>>>> capacity for customization.  P2P helped write that agenda.  Wikipedia was a
>>>>> step toward the low impact governance we're tending toward.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ryan
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>>>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>>>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>>>
>>>> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
>>>> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
>>>> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>>>>
>>>> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>>>>
>>>> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
>>>> http://www.shiftn.com/
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
>> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
>> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>>
>> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>>
>> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
>> http://www.shiftn.com/
>>
>
>


-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090720/7b954347/attachment-0001.html>