[p2p-research] what to think of the market

[Michel Bauwens]

I was merely pionting out that people have been innovating in very different
social models, way before the capitalist market became dominant, and often
outside of market relations, think of patronage, gift economies, the
invention of fire and the wheel etc..

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:11 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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