Apologies for the quickfire questions. I'm just trying to break in, here.
Kolzene wrote:Perhaps I can clarify here. What things are produced is determined bottom-up (anascopically), by the population through their behaviour in consuming, because that is based on subjective desires and needs. This is done through the Energy Accounting system. How those things are produced is decided upon by the technical administration, top-down (katascopically), because that requires objective, technical expertise to find the best way of doing that.
I find this a simplistic theory. What determines the behaviour of the population's consumption? In short there will be a cultural power gap, which will be filled (politically, religiously, corporatively, etc...) which will be beyond any scientific or Technocratic decision.
Now,
why do you think that production should be determined "democratically"? Is it the idea that democracy discovers the "true" needs of a people? Can you consider that if you now established a technocracy in the US and another one in the Middle East, with no other immediate political elite, you would have very different demands?
No, they would not be, because they would have no political power. Instead, those "in charge" of the technology are given responsibility in operating it correctly. Since this can be measured, if at any time a person is found not to be doing their job, then an investigation is started and may result in the person's dismissal from that position if they are found to be incapable of continuing to do their job. Think of it like being a bus driver; if you were to deviate from your assigned route, or not be on time without good reason, then you would be replaced with someone who would get it done properly.
Who does the replacing? If there is a law, who enforces it? A system doesn't work on its own, even if it's clear-cut and obvious how it should work, which it rarely is.
Is Technocracy a version of Anarchism?
I don't see how something like that could happen in a Technate. If I understand your example correctly, you are talking about overwhelming force from the outside. Like I said, the system is designed so that anyone deviating from their job would be investigated and dealt with. I'm sorry that I can't think of how to be more specific than this. Every scenario I can think of doesn't come close to working like this. Like maybe, someone gets control over a new kind of nuclear bomb to hold the Technate hostage? Something like that? Because first of all, what could he possibly gain by that? And second, such a device wouldn't even exist until at the very last stage of a very well-thought out katascopic process that would have built-in redundant security features to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. The project would not even proceed unless there was good reason to think that the security measures would be more than enough. And that's assuming that the Technate did something stupid like make a nuke anyway. Ok, let's assume it's for blowing up asteroids threatening the Earth. No "person" would be allowed to control such a thing. The system does. This is the difference between engineering and politics, and why there is no "ownership" in a Technate, or political power.
Yeah, but just because there "isn't" ownership or political power, meaning mainly that it is not permitted, does not mean that no one will try to take it. Again you say that anyone deviating from their job would be investigated and dealt with. The problem I highlighted was: who investigates the investigators and deals with the dealers? Where does accountability stop, and how does it work? Yes, if there is someone, or a group of someones, who is heading say a nuclear weapons factory or an army, what stops them, perhaps as a group, from using those things to take political control? There could be a multitude of whys -you don't even need to come up with one- perhaps they're not happy with what the people are demanding, perhaps they come to realize that people in fact do need to be lead from the top-down because otherwise what they demand is the destruction of the world, perhaps they don't agree with a process or other, or with the whole system, perhaps they have religious motivation, or think that a society where everyone is allowed what he demands is immoral, or simple pure egotistical will to power. There could a million variations of why someone thinks to threaten or take over a Technocratic society.
Is there an army in a Technocratic society? Who commandeers it? Democratic or authoritarian?
What if in this society I, as a civilian, want to buy hand-grenades or a bazooka, do I get those? (And in abundance?)
Then we are talking about different definitions of the word then. Abundance literally means more than enough. Meaning that you can get all you want, whenever you want. The minute there is any constraint on its availability, then you lose abundance and have scarcity. It may be a lot of scarcity, but it still is scarcity. Some examples to help illustrate this: The only real abundant thing we have today is air. This is because you can get all you want, whenever you want. On some days in major cities when the smog is too thick for many people to be able to go outside safely, then they have lost their abundance of air, because they can't get fresh air whenever they need it.
Here is the dividing like between abundance and scarcity, and that is: can you sell it? Right now I could offer you a can of fresh air (non-compressed), and you would not buy it. However, if you were suddenly locked in a bank vault with limited air left to breathe, suddenly that can of air has a great deal of monetary value, doesn't it? You can apply this to anything. For instance, today, I can still sell you various kinds of foods. In a Technate, you could not do this (aside from there being no money for the moment), because any person you asked to sell your food to would already be able to get all they want delivered to their home anytime, or at any public eating place, for free. Why would they spend anything (assuming they had something to spend that was limited) in that case? You could not sell that person a bus pass or train ticket because they already can take those whenever they want. That is abundance. It does not mean lots, it does not mean more than before, and it does not mean (like many people think) limitless. It means "more than enough", and you get that when no one can sell it to you any longer.
Ok, on the one hand, it's almost a capitalist ideal, but in its execution it's anti-capitalist. Understood.
Apologies for the incessant "how" questions, but please tell me how you could produce an abundance of food for 6 billion people? Even air is threatened under the wrong conditions.
What about things of which an abundance is not necessary, like say, I don't know, weapons? Wouldn't they still have a price?
Kolzene wrote:
No. Not in North America anyway. From the dreaded Wikipedia (citations and links added to counter anyone's problems with that):
[*]The total fertility rate in the United States estimated for 2008 is 2.1 children per woman, (CIA - The World Factbook -- Rank Order - Total fertility rate)
[*]which is roughly the replacement level. (CIA - The World Factbook - Notes and Definitions
[*]However, U.S. population growth is among the highest in industrialized countries, (CIA - The World Factbook -- Field Listing - Population growth rate
[*]since the vast majority of these have below-replacement fertility rates and the U.S. has higher levels of immigration. (CIA - The World Factbook -- Rank Order - Total fertility rate and CIA - The World Factbook -- Rank Order - Net migration rate)
So industrialized nations tend to have low population growth, often too low which needs to be mitigated by immigration. Now, what effects a full abundance will have on this I think is hard to say, because I can see factors affecting it both ways (both more opportunities for doing things other than raising families make people do so less, as well as simply having more free time to raise a family making others do so more). Now if you are talking about world overpopulation, yes, that is a problem overall, and if there is a solution to it, we'd be in a far better position not only to find it if we had Technocracy, but also in a far better position to help.
Ok, so industrialized nations are at replacement reproduction levels, but aren't there still too many humans to produce an abundance for?
[quote"]This is the important difference: if someone had complete ownership to arbitrarily decide on the use of an item, it would not fit into this plan and could not be guaranteed to contribute to society's goals. In fact, someone could easily decide on a use for something that is contrary to either an individual's, group's, or all of society's detriment. That is a problem with today's concept of ownership, particularly when it comes to corporate ownership, because then we get things used for goals not in an individual's best interest, nor society's, most often instead for profit and the benefit of the shareholders or other corporate owners.[/quote]
I see. So you've answered a question I put to you above (about hand-grenades) but still are open to the question about who guards the guardians, and if there are no guardians how do laws work?
But a more fundamental difference between capitalism (or indeed any Price System) and Technocracy is really the abundance vs. scarcity thing. Now I know we have a difference in definitions here (at least before my last post, not sure about now), but building on my last post, all any Price System can do is try to find ways to distribute scarce materials and services, so that either you end up with a guaranteed lower class (capitalism), or a whole society that, while they all have the necessities of life, do not have a standard of living anywhere close to what their resources and production are capable of (socialism). A classic example of this is in agriculture: If farmers were allowed to produce all they wanted, they would of course produce as much as they could in order to maximize their profit. This benefits them personally, but not society, because once technology allows them to produce an abundance of food, then the price of that food falls below what they can sell it for, putting them out of business, and we end up with a situation where we can produce more than ever, but no one can actually get it. This is the failure of a scarcity-based economic system to distribute an abundance. It is just like the example I gave in my last post concerning air (you can't sell it if it is abundant), and is exactly what happened to cause the Great Depression. So abundance and scarcity economics are completely incompatible, and one of them has got to go, so unfortunately we chose to get rid of the abundance rather than change how we do things. This resulted, to continue the agriculture example, in the government needing to subsidize farmers so that they would actually cut back their production in order to raise prices. This has the effect of a) wasting government money (and thereby making it more scarce for doing other important things) and b) decreasing the food supply. So this benefits the farmers, and gets the food available to people again (so it is seen as good), but how does this compare to simply producing all the food people want, and giving it to them? Then nobody has to worry about not having enough to eat, and also has a much greater selection, which increases the quality of life. There are numerous examples of this if you'd like more.
Understood.
All in all very interesting, but up till now, it still seems to me that "my system", the Platonic touch to Technocracy (it seems) is a more realist, dare I say practical?, version of Technocracy.