[p2p-research] what to think of the market

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/22/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Innovation doesn't require markets ... there was innovation long before they
> were markets ...
>
> the Roman army was very innovative ...
>
> the Soviet Union was very innovative ... remember the Spoutnik and Cuba has
> been extraordinarily innovative surviving its Peak Oil ...

Innovation requires either a market, or the internalization of costs
and benefits of innovation in individual actors or small groups,
before we can know whether a given innovation was worth it.  That was
one of Hayek's critiques of the Soviet planned economy:  that it was
full of innovations and blockbuster projects undertake for prestige
value, with no  idea of whether better (if less flashy) use might have
been made of the same resources.  That's also IMO one of the problems
with the large corporation as a planned economy:  its internal capital
investments are so irrational, and nobody seems to be in possession of
the knowledge or common sense to evaluate whether they were a good
idea given available resources and the alternative uses of them.   For
example, the hospital that puts most of its capital investment
resources into buying a Da Vinci surgical robot and offering the
newest, most costly procedures that benefit only a tiny fraction of
the public but carry great prestige value--while their patients with
more mundane medical problems go five days without a bath or linen
change, or lie 45 minutes in their own shit waiting for a bedpan.  The
American corporate economy is awash with gold-plated turds (like e.g.
Word 2007, which replaced the at least reasonably functional 2003
version) that are more complicated and tech-intensive, but less
responsive to end-user needs than what they replace.  It is awash with
all kinds of supply-push-driven "features" that don't seem to answer
anyone's actual needs, with the new technology amounting to new steps
in a Rube Goldberg device that are added without any consideration
whatever to  cost-benefit analysis, or specifically to whether the
added utility (if any) offsets the increased lifetime-costing.


-- 
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