[Ergosphere]

See Technocracy and Energy Accounting

The energy accounting criticism is new to me. I've heard of Mises' economic calculation problem before with respect to socialism, but not with regard to Technocracy's energy accounting.

Are there any valid points to this criticism?

[Figlio di Moros]

Mises was a moron, not an economist. Or do you want someone to validate your argument by engaging in abstract, unsubstantial diatribes?

[Ergosphere]

Why the hostility? I didn't write that criticism.

Anyway, I was just curious as to whether or not Mises' economic calculation problem applies to energy/resource accounting. This seems to be the major criticism towards The Venus Project and TZM (which also seems to depend on a form of resource accounting) from Austrians like Stephen Molyneux.

[quetzalcoatl]

Why the hostility?

While I don't pretend to speak for Figlio, his response to your post shouldn't really be a surprise to you.

Introducing Austrian shibboleths into a post-scarcity thread is akin to peeing in the punch bowl at a garden party. It's guaranteed to win you few friends, and the distasteful clean up will send your guests scurrying for their cars.

But since I'm feeling expansive, I'll just assume you're just naive and not actively malicious.

To the extent that the economic calculation problem has any validity at all, it is within the context of scarcity economics. If I've determined at the outset that the price of a good or service is to be set at zero, then the necessity of a market mechanism to calculate my asking price is superfluous. One may as well complain about the lack of propellers on a rocket engine.

Beyond this, the difficulties of economic calculation are overstated even in a capitalist economy. The US performed legendary feats of top-down distribution in WW II, and (considered in context) the economic achievements of the Soviet Union were astounding if not ultimately sustainable. Amazon.com performs feats of economic calculation every day that would make Mises' head spin. The notion that everything must crowd sourced trough some kind of formal market structure is just wrong.

[Wexoch]

Peter Joseph just did a lecture about this subject, you can find it here:

Considering Peter Joseph supports a Technocratic/Natural Law/RBE economy I suppose he will explain why economic calculation is no problem. I haven't had the time to watch it myself yet

[Socrates91]

I think that people missliding tend to fall into a strawman by atacking or referaing to entires types of political and economics models. Technocracy does not necessary mean zeigeist or venus project, or the technocratic movment of the 1930s.

[TechnocracyTNAT]

"In retrospect, the economic stupidity of our national leaders of the last decade is but a demonstration of the charming naivete of economic adult infantilism. Our national leaders of the past two decades have always proclaimed the inherent soundness of the Price System. Their voices have always been raised in defending and boosting their own America. Their America was a glorious hunting ground where private corporate enterprise was permitted the privilege of creating debt claims against others faster than they were created against them. It was heads I win, tails you lose; no one else could possibly win. Every consumer was a sucker, legitimate prey for the corporate enterprise of yesterday and today.

In the race for lower operating costs and more profits, corporate enterprise in America employed more and more technology. The technologist and the engineer devised new processes, discovered new materials, and installed faster machinery. Each new discovery, each new process, and each new machine consumed more extraneous energy in a given time period, but always its ratio of production to its energy consumption kept increasing. The efficiency of each new process or equipment increased with the growth of total equipment. As the total number of energy-consuming devices grew, so did the production, efficiency, and speed of these devices increase. Production and distribution became larger and larger consumers of extraneous energy, that is to say, they consumed more and more energy from coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric power."

- AMERICA PREPARES FOR A TURN IN THE ROAD 3/16/35
archive.org/details/TheWordsAndWisdomOfHowardScott