While thoughtful, this missed an opportunity to write about a deeper dynamic.
Most of us spend our lives chasing the creation of transactions (with employers or the market, whether grants, purchases, or contracts) and maximizing the benefit we receive from those transactions. While I appreciate that this holds us to producing in ways that others adversarially agree is valuable and can incentivize efficiency... It also holds us in competition against rather than cooperation with. It focuses us on transaction creation, not on life improvement. If something would make everyone better off but that value can't be captured it often isn't done. If something should efficiently make us all happier but costs the decision maker any money it often isn't done.
These are necessarily generalizations. Instances of it being otherwise occur. Some contexts, like families and collectives allow for contradictions to my statements. These rarely scale.
I think of the dynamic that children will happily help out the family and do chores. Many parents find that when compensation for chores is offered the children become less helpful. They switch from joyfully (or at least meaningfully) participating in the family endeavor that supported and supports their growth and well being (and if lucky showered them with love). They switch to demanding compensation for everything and end up doing less to help.
If this describes our economic engagement, how much more could we all be happily accomplishing at greater efficiency with our time and energy?
I recognize this could sound like it would depend on some idealistic prosocial world. What assumptions hold that in place? What if the little supports we give and the forgone advantages were noted to our credit? What if our game theoretic strategies for engagement influenced the rules under which we labored and the willingness of others to interact with us? How do we better optimize?
It doesn't need a prosocial world, just a small space. With some effort, we could make a few square kilometers with both democracy and socialism. We could start a town.
I think the town would need these things to be successful:
- All land in the town is owned by a non-profit. The non-profit's board is elected by the town. It's private property, like a university.
- Businesses in the town are owned by non-profits. The non-profit's boards are elected by the town. The non-profits also provide venture capital and mentorship for new businesses.
- Everyone receives the same monthly income. Everyone must work at least 10 months a year, 35-hours a week. Folks who can work but refuse to work must choose between staying in a mental clinic and leaving the town.
- There are strong barriers to using outside money. For example, rent may only be paid from one's town-paid monthly income.
- Health care, education, and child care are free.
- Immigration to the town uses a lottery system, with buckets for various socio-economic and ethnic groups, so the people in the town represent the people in the country. The town charter specifies quarterly immigration quotas up to a target population (50% growth per year, from 50 people to 500k in 25 years).
- Voting is mandatory, ranked-choice, without districts, and without propositions. Elected leaders must be women and may serve only one term. All election candidates must take a knowledge exam and their answers are published for voters to scrutinize.
- Personal motor vehicles are not allowed inside the town. Everyone moves by walking, bicycles, and subway. Zoning is high-density mixed-use, like many cities in Europe and Asia.
- Products are transported between buildings via underground automated systems, like airport luggage delivery systems, in standardized crates. Trash, compost, and recyclables go in sealed crates. There are multiple delivery companies with rails/tracks stacked in the under-street corridors. Large items can be delivered by small electric trucks driving slowly on the roads.
In my understanding, a cult is hard to leave. For the town I want to start, anyone can walk out at any time. They can to take a chunk of money with them, determined by what jobs they worked and how long.
Cooperative communities exist in USA and around the world and can be nice places to live. Most are based on religion or ideologies like permaculture or veganism. I want to live in a secular cooperative community that prioritizes quality of life. It's how I imagine human societies could be 200 years in the future. We already have a post-scarcity economy, it's just unequally distributed.
Many people give up the ability to walk to live in suburbs. I'm willing to give up the ability to be rich to live in a nice city.
It requires (although implicitly) that everybody in your family also sign up. And it certainly doesn't sound like a place in which visitors are welcome. Also: what if there isn't enough work to go around for your mandatory minimum work amounts? What if the citizens (and jobs that need doing) aren't all perfectly spherical entities that are interchangeable?
You should read about the Kibbutz settlements [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz]. These were social settlements, that succeeded for a long time. However, many of them stopped being so social due to capitalistic pressures from the environment.
One of the biggest factors is that the Kibbutz is a business: it has income and expenses. If it doesn't produce enough income, it will fail, and indeed a successful Kibbutz is one that has a successful factory or other, producing goods or services that are sold to outside customers.
Yes! The success of the town will be determined by how much money its businesses can bring in from outside the town. I hope to start tech businesses to sustain the town and enable growth.
The big difficulty of traditional cooperatives is that they are subject to local markets for necessities: housing, health care, energy, transportation, and food. By starting a cooperative as a town, we can save big on many of these things.
For example, a cooperative in San Francisco has huge capital costs for each resident for housing. The cost per resident in major cities is dominated by housing. A cooperative built in a rural area has negligible housing costs. But building in a rural area brings some interesting problems.
Health care is also a large cost. The town will have its own clinic to save on that. If the town can grow fast enough, it can build its own hospital and save enormous amounts on health care. The hospital can also earn money by treating people from the surrounding area. I wish to retire in a town with a hospital.
Much modern housing is built without energy efficient options. This is because buyers are either ignorant or they prioritize short-term costs over long-term costs. An extra $200/mo in energy bills isn't so much when you're paying $1000/mo in mortgage. But once the mortgage is paid off, that $200/mo feels like a lot and they regret the decision to skip the architect consultation, triple-pane windows, and heat-recovery ventilators. A cooperative can have the expertise and foresight to optimize for long-term housing energy efficiency. This is good for the environment, the residents, and the cooperative's finances.
Cars use lots of energy. They wear out and depreciate. Accidents destroy quality of life and waste tons of money on medical bills. Roads are extremely expensive to build and maintain. Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. A town without cars and trucks won't have these costs.
Most of us spend our lives chasing the creation of transactions (with employers or the market, whether grants, purchases, or contracts) and maximizing the benefit we receive from those transactions. While I appreciate that this holds us to producing in ways that others adversarially agree is valuable and can incentivize efficiency... It also holds us in competition against rather than cooperation with. It focuses us on transaction creation, not on life improvement. If something would make everyone better off but that value can't be captured it often isn't done. If something should efficiently make us all happier but costs the decision maker any money it often isn't done.
These are necessarily generalizations. Instances of it being otherwise occur. Some contexts, like families and collectives allow for contradictions to my statements. These rarely scale.
I think of the dynamic that children will happily help out the family and do chores. Many parents find that when compensation for chores is offered the children become less helpful. They switch from joyfully (or at least meaningfully) participating in the family endeavor that supported and supports their growth and well being (and if lucky showered them with love). They switch to demanding compensation for everything and end up doing less to help.
If this describes our economic engagement, how much more could we all be happily accomplishing at greater efficiency with our time and energy?
I recognize this could sound like it would depend on some idealistic prosocial world. What assumptions hold that in place? What if the little supports we give and the forgone advantages were noted to our credit? What if our game theoretic strategies for engagement influenced the rules under which we labored and the willingness of others to interact with us? How do we better optimize?