There is a mysterious side to economics. It’s called “the market”. It’s as undefined as “the universe” is to new aged believers. It is assumed that consumer demand will eventually direct cashflow towards producers of the best goods and services. It is assumed this process can afford to be blind to resource reserves, including human resources and ecological ones. It is, because there are no forcing parameters for human wellbeing or biodiversity and biovolume to be found in our fincial system. Economics basically moves blindly and hopes for the best. The most important incentive for this attitude is that it maximizes cashflow and power of banks, who use that power to keep it that way.
Any alternative to this is always labeled “communism”. It is always associated with Stalinist industrialization, production of boots, 5 year targets for farmers living in a 1984 bland anonymous world without color. Did you catch that? The fearfull image of communism is the face of industrialization, the key outcome of free market economics. There is a simple reason for this : People are very uniform in their desires and needs. You can know exactly what they will like in advance, you can estimate that if you produce a new iPhone with x new features you will sell them to x billion users (desperate to feel unique), that you can thus manufacture them in massive factories at dirt cheap prices. Now if you only could find the cheapest “labour”, well hurray! for China’s police state! You see the Latte sipping not working person in New York managed to monetize attention, reverence and thus, through the mechanisms of free market economics, condemned a nameless chinese person to practically live on a factory floor, exposed to chemicals, working 14 hour shifts. That 0,004% of people in NY (living in blissfull denial) are no better than Kim Yung Un running his detention camp.
But what is the real process of a person living in a western society, if you for a moment trace his/her effort and try to relate it to what such a person consumes? So for a moment lets pretend we had to plan exactly what needs to happen to keep a city dweller in Holland alive..
Now our view of economics is that everything depends on three factors : Energy, Raw materials and Skills. Those factors can be renewble, non-renewable, human, robotic, natural or synthetic, its always the same formula that is involved in producing anything.
More about Money in the Roboeconomy here : http://greencheck.nl/?p=7929