Calorie credit economy

[cyborg]

Part 1

Assumptions

System
Whole system includes people, civilization, ecosystems
Human existence is oriented toward securing money
Money value subject to irrational, malicious or random external conditions
Wealthy collectives afforded greater right to representation than individual
Present design encourages self or collective interest at cost to the whole
Economic class division fragments society, internalizing conflict
Value is assigned in an extrinsic, material quantity manner
External scarcity increases value; abundance decreases value
Infinite growth and resources assumption maladaptive and unsustainable

Corruption
Demand: producer slows necessity output to inflate price (housing, petroleum)
Quality: analysis and material expense avoided to reduce cost (hardware, software)
Durability: needless replacement generates profit, increasing bulk solid waste (appliances, automobiles)

To be continued

[Kodos]

Energy based currency?

[cyborg]

In the mid-nineties, my musings briefly wandered onto the subject of barter, money systems and alternatives. The original concept would have money measured as watts of stored energy. Hoarding stored energy would devalue currency. When energy gets consumed by desired or necessary activity, currency value increases.

In later years, I was exposed to the technocracy movement's online "program of social and economic reconstruction" and "union of enlightened scientists and philosophers seeks to bring order to the world", its proposed methods and its history. The technocrats would measure the value of goods scientifically according to the energy required to produce a given unit. If I remember correctly, they also proposed a form of energy currency for an exchange medium.

Alternatively, calorie credits would be native to an individual and assigned by a management system according to what the individual producer's body will require for the day's tasks. A farm worker requires more calories for a day's production than a journalist. A large, tall person requires more calories each day than a petite, short person.

Calorie credits would be allocated from an administration to the citizen according to the day's forecast production activity. Production activity could be chosen by or assigned to that individual, although I'm sure most of us would prefer to choose our activity for the day.

Available activity would be listed by the administration according to society's forecast needs and available licensed citizens. An agrarian-oriented arcology would always have unlicensed, low skill farm labor as an available task open to everyone. We want to be able to deliver the best calorie value to our citizens each day. In contrast, licensed, high skill helicopter pilots would be rare and seldom called upon for daily assignment.

[Kodos]

Ive had this idea myself (not as a command economy as you seem to want), it will become a lot more practical when we can produce energy efficiently through solar or breeder reactors.

[cyborg]

Yes, that was the idea should a stable, depopulated, petroleum-lite civilization need to come about. I'm not sure we really need widespread heavy industrial activity on the scale we have now which mostly serves hoarding of profit, not needs. I can see a few industrial sites and research centers needing reactors, but the city-state arcologies would do fine with solar and able bodies.

[1-800]

Advances in information technology, most obviously the Internet, obviate the need for urban population centers, especially 'world cities' such as New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, etc., which inevitably end up as playgrounds for parasitic cosmopolitans.

At the same time, advances in technology that can destroy cities, such as nuclear and biological weapons, makes the continuation of a civilization based around population centralization not only undesirable but downright dangerous, for all concerned. In one way or another (I'm betting on rapidly spreading pathogens, whether man-made or natural, combined with economic shock brought on by the twilight of cheap oil), the cities will be emptied within the next few decades.

Then we can transistion to a 'subsistence based taxation', which is far more just (and sustainable) than our current income based system: until a citizen accumulates assets above the subsistence level (say, a plow, a mule, and forty acres--just to give an idea), he should pay no tax. Above subsistence level, his net assets would be taxed.

[Kodos]

Advances in information technology, most obviously the Internet, obviate the need for urban population centers, especially 'world cities' such as New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, etc., which inevitably end up as playgrounds for parasitic cosmopolitans.

1. Its more efficient for industry to ship most of their stuff to a few centers... around the coast. Especially with higher energy prices.

2. Although this is not really an arguement this was said during the industrial age.

3. The trend for the past 30 years has been for the % of the urban population to increase.

4. Life in the boonies is generally very boring unless you grew up with a group of guys who live there who you can go paintballing with or something. And you better have a car, which presents some difficulties post cheap oil.

[1-800]

1. Its more efficient for industry to ship most of their stuff to a few centers... around the coast. Especially with higher energy prices.


It is energy efficient to ship to urban centers for two reasons:

Central hubs (like NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, LA) minimize the amount of road construction needed.

Load consolidation in fixed capacity vehicles, as it is far too expensive to make trucks, planes, boats, freight cars in many different sizes.

If you can get around these issues, it is much more efficient to grow locally and ship any excess supply to other self-sufficient communities. Therefore, variable sized transport units that do not rely on roads are what we need. Ballons, anyone? I am looking into this.

Also, I do not think that energy prices will remain sufficiently low enough that long distance transport, rather than local production, will remain an attractive alternative for much longer. Of course, this also means that population will have to be re-distributed; there is no way that Phoenix, Arizona or Los Angeles, California can support the populations that currently live there.


2. Although this is not really an arguement this was said during the industrial age.


It's true.


3. The trend for the past 30 years has been for the % of the urban population to increase.


And with this we have seen pathogens that are steadily increasing in both virulence and transmission rate: AIDS, multi-drug resistant TB, SARS -- even some 'pathogens' which aren't yet classified as such, such as Asperger's, ADHD, Tourette's, etc., which are primarily genetic in origin, yet have viral triggers that set them off, much like Type II Diabetes (I'm looking into writing a paper on this). And we haven't even touched on man-made pathogens yet.


4. Life in the boonies is generally very boring unless you grew up with a group of guys who live there who you can go paintballing with or something. And you better have a car, which presents some difficulties post cheap oil.

Boredom in the 'boonies' results more from the displacement of cultural activity to the suburbs/city than from the intrinsic characteristics of rural life. And you only need a car for to sustain a rural lifestyle if you plan on commuting into the suburbs or the city for work, shopping, leisure, etc: all activites that will continue on in rural communities (thereby making them less 'boring') once the cities and suburbs are emptied.

[cyborg]

Call it planned subsistence. It wouldn't exactly be mundane country life. The city-state would have housing for about 20,000 inhabitants and food, shelter and even clothing would be built in and supported locally. A gift economy can take root as people pursue high culture activity in their spare time.

Hiking, hunting, climbing, swimming and martial arts would be readily available. Family or bachelor pursuits would take place much as it does now. With solar power, we could run information systems and some evening lighting. Anyone could partake in certification, education or technical training. All of this is mostly free with assigned citizens for support.

As for calorie credits, if saving these units serves some purpose like taking personal days off at home, one may always diet in advance.

Since we directly assign tasks to a citizen resource pool and the need for state welfare is reduced (assuming we simply exile criminals, psychos and other hard cases), taxes would not be needed.

[Ratatoskur]

The inertia of the global democratic system is too much to enact reasonable change in a timely fashion, IMO. It's hard enough, and takes many months for sheeple to choose between a couple of sycophants, so re-aligning society towards a sane and sustainable fashion probably takes more time than for projected population growth to reach critical mass. Then, in the future, gubbermint will probably be too busy controlling the population and fighting massive wars for increasingly meager resources to be able to bother with arcologies and anything sane. Sustainability is a project I believe is best undertaken by the best and brightest now, via some private investment programs, under the radar of the mass and gubbermints (since if word got out that a private eugenic sustainability investment program was in the works, that would be discriminatin', and we all know what that means; quotas, lotteries and resentful legal vandalism).

[delete]

The inertia of the global democratic system is too much to enact reasonable change in a timely fashion, IMO. It's hard enough, and takes many months for sheeple to choose between a couple of sycophants, so re-aligning society towards a sane and sustainable fashion probably takes more time than for projected population growth to reach critical mass.

Even stuff with inertia, sometimes hit a wall and stops pretty quick, and things that can't go on forever, stops at some point.

If some major catastophy was to happen with our food suuply, some countries would experience famines severe enough for civil society to break down. Total breakdown of society one place, leads to massive refugee loads on the neighbouring countries, probably also struggeling with feeding their population.


Then, in the future, gubbermint will probably be too busy controlling the population and fighting massive wars for increasingly meager resources to be able to bother with arcologies and anything sane.


Egypt's population, estimated at 3 million when Napoleon invaded the country in 1798, has increased at varying rates. The population grew gradually and steadily throughout the nineteenth century, doubling in size over the course of eighty years. Beginning in the 1880s, the growth rate accelerated, and the population increased more than 600 percent in 100 years. The growth rate was especially high after World War II. In 1947 a census indicated that Egypt's population was 19 million. A census in 1976 revealed that the population had ballooned to 36.6 million. After 1976 the population grew at an annual rate of 2.9 percent and in 1986 reached a total of 50.4 million, including about 2.3 million Egyptians working in other countries. Projections indicated the population would reach 60 million by 1996.
http://countrystudies.us/egypt/55.htm

Population 78,887,007 (2006 estimate)
Population growth
Population growth rate 1.75 percent (2006 estimate)
Projected population in 2025 103,352,882 (2006 estimate)
Projected population in 2050 126,920,512 (2006 estimate)

A lot of these people will die, if egypt was kept from importing food for a year or two.


Sustainability is a project I believe is best undertaken by the best and brightest now, via some private investment programs, under the radar of the mass and gubbermints
For this to succeed in the long run, you need to keep up the respect for private property. If the egyptians was to invade N-europe, all this will mean nothing.

I don't worry to much about sustainability, as we humans are going to be forced to do it anyway. I worry about the habitate destruction, and the loss of species, due to population preasure in the third world. If nothing drastic happens here, all talk about sustainability becomes meaningless.

[cyborg]

For this to succeed in the long run, you need to keep up the respect for private property. If the egyptians was to invade N-europe, all this will mean nothing.

It is true that everyone (http://www.relocalize.net/_tmp_maps/index.html) would eventually need to implement the plan (http://www.arcosanti.org/theory/arcology/arcologies/nudgingSpace.html), as a response to survival necessity like oil shortages and plagues.

A coalition of city-states could still form armies as needed in the early stages, perhaps early-middle 21st century. Assuming low orbit theater supremacy (laser, orbit-to-air missile) was maintained by the new order, they could dominate the war from the top down, forcing the fight onto the ground on the new order's home terrain, N. Europe, usually a strategic advantage. Since everyone has progressed to a petroleum-lite society, Egypt would be unable to maintain supply lines for an extended campaign.