Technocracy -- A new social/economic system

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A new system that is not ruled by rewards and punisments, corruption, patronage, ass-kissing, threats, bribes and kickbacks. Abolish the primitive carrot or the stick method of primitive animal behavior (NT behavior?) Could it be possible?

Yes it can. A rule based system of energy inputs based on universal natural laws.

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Discussions are welcomed!

Here's a question: why would I *want* a system not ruled by rewards and punishments or the carrot and the stick in other terms? I would think I would want a system where I was rewarded for what the value I created and thus expressed my independence/individuality through that.

Technically, I would consider technocracy to be a variant of socialist ideology and liable to fail due to the lack of information based upon its focus upon what seems objective and ignorance that conflicting subjective/intersubjective values tend to dominate human desire, and thus a focus on technical detail is rather blind as the economy is really not run on machinery, but rather creativity. Ultimately, technocracy seems to be a grab at economic control, which makes it a threat to human liberty. As Friedrich Hayek once stated "Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for."

Pah. I have an idea gathering dust on the shelf which actually has a chance of working. Your form of technocracy wouldn't stand a chance unless resources were unlimited. People NEED incentives/rewards/threats. Resources need to be rationalised somehow.

However, a mix of socialism and capitalism works just as well as machinocracy.

Last edited by Anubis on 28 Feb 2008, 7:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And socialist ideology failed for what reason?

What is the premise in socialist ideology that is different from technocracy?



I see technocracy as much similar to parecon than central administration and dictation of what people ought to value. Capitalism makes value judgements too on what people ought to value without actually making this explicit. But, are these assumptions universally true? There are just as many counterarguments that are as valid to the universally accepted assumptions of Capitalist ideology.



Where are these disincentives to creativity that are in Technocracy? Furthermore, what is "creativity" and what is "incentive"?

Many sociopaths including serial killers are very creative. What was their incentive for chopping up people and eating them?

From an entirely objective and value neutral point of view serial killers and the suffering they cause are very efficient way of stimulating the economy. Book sales from serial killer biographies increases the circulation of money in the economy and the both the muck rakers are happy as well as the consumers who buy the books.

Again, many unfounded assumptions on how people neurologically react and what they perceive to be incentives and performing a creative act.



Again, another unproven and unprovable implication with both economic control and human liberty not clearly defined and ambiguous concepts.

Grab at economic control implies threat to human liberty is not universally true in all circumstances and given human psychology is a dubious statement. There are cases where most people would feel quite satisfied with "economic control" not in their hands and not subjected to individual preferences or "liberty", but based upon universally accepted social norms.



In short, some sort of value judgements on what is "good" and what is "bad". This really depends on the person you talk to and what he is capable of doing, including ignoring ethics, to gain economic control. In the absence of a universal unit of production input then anything can be considered "valuable" as well as fluctuate in value dependent on the greed for any particular commodity. And, in the absence of any legal constitution for what constitute moral social norms, the commodity itself can be whatever the holder of wealth wants it to be. The larger the amount of "wealth" the greater the power to dictate his personal preferences as to what is personally valuable to him (or them) irrelevant of any universally accepted ethics.

Unless you have a circular threat system where a crude rock-paper-scissor system of defeating any one party from getting total power, how are you going to accomplish setting up your incentives/rewards/threats system without one party eventually getting all the rewards and none of the threats?

In the end this doesn't work because of both the instability of the system and the crudeness of it's motivational mechanism for rewarding people who are the best at faking sincerity and humane values for satisfying their animalistic incentives. The elites will eventually be human chameleons with a dominant aggressive personality compatible with a more primitive reptillian neurology, but able to entirely fake sympathy, empathy and cooperativeness. A horrible future if you ask me.

Because socialism is a bad system, mainly I would argue that advanced economies need the price system and thus cannot get past it.
Honestly, I cannot really find a lot of deep differences. Both are ideologies of improvement via planning, the rest really does not matter so much.


Perhaps there is less central control, but there is still control taken. What does capitalism say that people "ought" to value?

The difference is that it is not a market framework so much as a planned framework run by technicians. Creativity is a rather hard to define concept, but it substitutes well with innovation, especially of the sort where such innovation is unorthodox. Incentive is something that pulls an individual towards doing a particular task, in my case, I am speaking of an outside force that attracts people to tasks that they otherwise would not find as desirable.
Their incentive was the fact that they already, innately, wanted to chop people up and eating them.


I would argue against that, serial killers remove productive members of society. The long-run economy grows based upon supply. Therefore, serial killers, by reducing labor supply end up slowing down economic growth in the long run. Especially given that the large number of them do not end up being very popular anyway, but human lifetime earnings still end up being rather high. Not only that, but if we look at utility, serial killers scare people and increase the demand for police forces beyond what it would normally be, both of those end up being costs. I would really just say that this is an issue of what we can see vs what we cannot.


I think you are adding assumptions to my assumptions. I did not deny that creative acts exist outside of monetary compensation. Newgrounds games and other sources already deny that, I argue that a more efficient amount in created with external incentives. You seem to have some grasp of economics, think of a supply and demand model, as prices go up, the amount supplied also goes up. This does not claim that the amount supplied must be 0 when prices are 0, but rather that the more we pay, the more we get. That last part, will also likely be made into a strawman if we only consider what we pay to be direct monetary compensation, as I do not mean that, but rather include compensation to mean all of the perks too.

Economic control and human liberty do perhaps need better definition, however, the terms still have some value even lacking certain amounts of definition as both sides likely have certain ideas about the meanings of the terms even without looking them up, and I would argue that if you dislike the term's lack of definition, then define it and we can argue about that definition to improve it.

Well, you are assuming that I am mostly concerned with utility maximization. I am not denying that some individuals may prefer control outside of their hands and based upon social norms, however, you cannot make the claim that all individuals will want something, nor can it be known that social norms are superior to individual preferences, especially given that there is no universally accepted social norm, but only nearly universally accepted ones.


Let's see, yes, anything CAN be considered valuable and fluctuate in value based upon the demand for it, and without strong moral social norms, the commodities can be a greater variety of things, thus allowing an individual who is given more currency to match the level of production he is seen as being responsible for the greater ability to contract with other individuals or organizations to purchase whatever commodity seems most desirable to him and more desirable to him than other competing individuals.

Never has happened, you need greater centralization for this to happen as eventually the parties die and disintegrate. Your situation might happen if we had one immortal surrounded by mortals but even dynasties often die when the head of them dies.

Honestly, it isn't just faking sincerity but also maintaining a reputation for it. Frankly, animalistic incentives don't matter, nor do the qualities of the elite. What ultimately matters is that individuals who want can act upon those wants and receive what they seem to provide to others.

What's your argument?

But, the orginal question was why socialist economies failed, irrelevant of whether or not they are good or bad.



The claim here is that all planning is bad. Planning can be accomplished in many ways which do not place unreasonable constraints on the freedom to innovate or consume for people who voluntarily choose to participate.

I would argue that lack of planning and imposition of safeguards to prevent abuse of power has done more to damage human welfare than the imposition of civilized rules and plans for effective uses of resources.

There is no need for dictatorial control over personal behaviour or consumer preferences, but let's not be naive about human nature and the desire for some to take advantage of a situation for personal gain at the expense of the goodwill and trust of other people. Few people will cooperate in working for a productive plan if more opportunity exists to play them for suckers in a game rigged for freeriders and dominators.



The assumption here is that the victims are more productive than the inputs to their labour. Without clearly seeing the objective picture of what's going on, you have no way to judge the productivity of the victims. Perhaps by removing them the killer is saving farm inputs into feeding unproductive people.

In other words, what's productive? In a circulation based economy where the circulation of money is the ultimate measure of productivity there is no way to judge whether this circulation is actually of any real social, infrastructural or ecological benefit.

Not doing anything at all yet taking the time to think, read or develop social relationships can be productive, but how is this measured in a circulation based economy? It can't.



It costs the victims and scared people in having them rush out to buy locks and security systems, but it's a boon to the security alarm businesses and locksmiths.

Again, from the point of social relations and general human welfare, mass murder is detrimental, but from the point of view of increased circulation of money which is what the economy is measured from, it's a good thing.



Capitalism and to generalize this a bit more all price systems say people ought to act in a way that increases the circulation of money either by "working" or through investing in an enterprise that "persuade" other people without money into working. The work itself does not necessarily have to be productive in any real objective meaning of the term, but only defined economically as productive.

This "ought" to assumption can be proven false in many situation where increased circulation of money does not necessarily lead to the increased general happiness or contentment of people nor does it lead to long term ecological sustainability in which this contentment can take place.



In other words, there exist the possibility in a monetary system that human body parts of people who are no longer considered useful by the monetary elites become tradeable commodities for people with the biggest cache of monetary assets and who seeks extended lifetimes at the expense of those without money. A horrible future would be an understatement. A hellish future would be more like it.



I guess you've never heard of dynastic empires where political and monetary power is passed down familial lines. Human insecurity leads to people wanting to live on through their children.

Um... I wasn't using "bad" in the moral sense, but rather that the system itself was flawed. My argument for the price system though is based upon a few things, one the level of information that needs to be sorted out between various ends and allocations requires prices and that these prices be set relative to all other prices. The first part can be done by anyone, the second part can only be effectively done by a market, for even the greatest of computers cannot perform all of the calculations necessary.


The claim is that planning is bad. Also, "unreasonable" is subjective. Human free choice is something that I would like least to have constrained.


I would argue that this is false, and that unplanned societies with safeguards have been more successful than societies that were planned. Frankly though, I don't care about maximizing human utility necessarily.

I am not naive about that. Frankly, I think that capitalism is effective because it's theoretical basis is upon self-interested units responding to incentives.


Well, let's put it this way: the victims were productive enough to deserve farm input because they could afford food. If we are arguing that this serial killer is a murderer of homeless people though, it is perhaps possible that he did increase utility, however, it is still more likely that he shifted resources away from areas normally more valuable to those less valuable.

Well, I was assuming that you were judging the economy by circulation, as frankly, I really don't care much about GDP necessarily. I would argue that there is no real basis for judgment at all other than human free choice as any "benefit" only matters so much as someone values it, thus meaning that the underlying variable for benefit is subjective. The only way I can see to make the system better is to maximize the freedom for subjective choices to be made.


I don't think it should be measured either. Measurement is a basis for judgment, and I don't care as much about judgment as I do about maximizing human freedom.


But locks and security systems they wouldn't buy normally. Doing what you say is like calling a rock slinging boy, a public benefactor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of ... ken_window Such is obviously a stupid idea, something noted by French economist Frederic Bastiat many years ago.

Ok, but guess what? MV = PY Increasing the circulation of the currency will only increase V(circulation) and in the long run(in terms of economics), Y(production) is constant, therefore according to neo-classical theory all you do by increasing circulation is just increase prices, and if you do so too much, you have hyper-inflation. You also are failing to make the distinction between normative and positive economics. The measurement of circulation is positive economics, the idea that more circulation is good is normative economics. Frankly, you are assuming that based upon the characteristics of the price system(positive economics) that the idea that greater circulation of money is better is true (normative economics), I assert that you are committing a fallacy in terms of the distinctions between the branches and that your assertions about circulation being "good" seems more based upon a flawed understanding of Keynesian theory that ignores the long-run and very long-run models, where Y(production) is not a function of M(money supply) or V(circulation).


Actually, I agree with most of the world that you put forward as "horrible" and "hellish". The only thing I can see wrong with it, is that you have the rich deciding what to do with the poor, which seems a violation of self-ownership. Now, if we stated this that the rich were buying necessary vital organs from still living people and taking them while those individuals were still alive, but with that organ donor's permission(contract includes death and organ removal), then I would be fine with it.


No they don't. You are asserting they do, but if you just stuffed money in a mattress, no cops would come after you. It just isn't in your best interest to do so. Productivity is defined against other people's interests, so if other people get value from your work, it is productive. So, honestly, your problem also relates to the fact that the economy is an intersubjective system, which is what it should be as human existences are also lived subjectively.


The "ought" assumption does not exist. Frankly, the ideal long-run monetary mechanism works like this:
MV = cY where the prices are c, a constant, and economist Milton Friedman actually advised that we set up the federal reserve to work essentially like that so we could have very good price stability.


No, I've heard of those. I just haven't heard of any where the second generation does as well as the first. Like I said, if there were an immortal person then perhaps your idea would be correct, however, families tend to fragment and people tend to go their different directions, and rich old coots tend to give away lots of money to charity. After all, the dynasties you speak of were really governments and not market institutions.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 28 Feb 2008, 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How do you do that without particpatory economics? People are constrained by money in the hands of somebody who can hire them and what they decide to do with that money. People have less power to do what they want in a circulatory economy than you assume.

The free market. Who ultimately hires the people? The consumers. Who are the consumers? Everybody. Most employers really don't care what you do with your own money anyway. If they did then that would add to the costs of employment as few people would want such restrictions. Honestly, I think your assumptions are wrong as you don't see how broad circulation is, as it impacts everyone.

And the subjective judgement here is that they came about money in a way that make them "deserve" farm inputs. Can the possibility exist that the victims came about money in idleness, through inheritance or through criminal activities? And what is criminal other than a moral code on what is permissible behaviour which again is subjective and filled with enough contradictions that somebody engaged in legal, but immoral and even life threatening activities can "deserve" to buy necessities like food.

The word "deserve" itself is full of implied moral value judgements.



Again, subjective value judgement as well as no objective understanding into the causes of people not having money.



How can you maximize it? In the psychological and economic game where someone other than you holds the means to participating in the economy, "freedom" is constrained to either accepting the offer for money in exchange for work or sustenance hunting which may very well lead to extinction. This is regardless of centrally managed monetary economies or decentralized "free market" economies by the way, so politburo bureaucrats dictating the economic activity for the masses is still unfree.

Again, how can you participate in a voluntarily free way within a circulatory system without either being in control of the monetary reserves which makes you the dictator of how to use those resources or have no control over monetary reserves beyond those needed to buy necessities which makes you a subject for someone who is a dictator?



First of all, I'm not simply referring to Capitalism, but any system which gives someone the power to dictate the usage resources based on something that simply cannot be used in a participatory way by all parties involved. It's an obvious fact that if everything is monetarized and money is saveable and circulatory then I simply cannot choose not to participate in a transaction that my life depends on if my savings of money is limited. The people with the largest cache of money savings are the only truly voluntary participants regardless of whether they are governments, businesses or individuals.



ought to and have to are two different things with different meanings. Ought to means you are obligated to somehow by a system which values it. You are not forced to with direct threat of force. How are the outcomes going to be different in any way if direct force vs. systemic deprivation produces constraints to choices? The net effect on personal freedom is the approximately the same.



What if I value coercive cannibalism because I can only "make a living" by killing somebody and selling their ground up corpse for hamburger meat?

It benefitted me enormously, but it didn't benefit my victim and it only benefits the police if you can pay them enough to both detect me and apprehend me. But, perhaps I can bribe the police off with some hamburger meat.

Well, inheritance does not stand against what I meant. Somebody legitimately made the money by serving somebody else. Criminal activities are another category that does not have to be considered though, as "criminal" implies that they violated the system. We also don't know what is moral either, only what we think is moral and what others do.
Well, I meant "deserve" in terms of somebody else decided that they were worth the money. Frankly, "deserve" implies somebody else's value judgment in the way I am using it, such as a hitman deserving pay for killing somebody. In the strictest moral sense the man deserves death, but I am only referring to the logic within the system and not trying to imply anything other than the moral choices of others.

Nope, not subjective at all. Based upon ideas about human behavior, namely about utility maximization.

Well, everyone hold the means to participating in the economy. My neighbor holds the means for participating in the economy. No, getting stuff is constrained by having others give it to you. This goes in line with the idea that people own their labor. You can sustenance hunt, but it is more efficient that you trade your labor for the efforts of other people and thus divide tasks. I disagree with you on your assertion.


Because nobody is in control over all of the monetary reserves. People are in control over the monetary reserves that they got via their labor or that somebody else has given them. Frankly, property is not dictatorship but rather an expression of individuality, and I would argue that it is a psychological necessity for individuality as noted in the latter part of the following blog post: http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2007 ... opert.html


Sure, you can choose not to participate. It just wouldn't be a wise action from your perspective. No, cache does not impact participation. You are assuming that egalitarianism is necessary for participation and that all access is necessary for access. I disagree with these assumptions, and instead argue that participation only involves individual choices, and capitalism maximizes the individual nature of the economy by tying economic resources to individuals.

Then the families of your victims will most certainly value removing you from society forever.

Yes, it didn't as it was coercive. I think I already said that I didn't view coercive action as legitimate. If you had a willing person be ground up into hamburger meat, well, that would be a different story.

Why? Supposing that the family member was a freeloader who could not find work in a competitive market or have enough money reserves to pay for vocational training?

Based on monetary economics wouldn't I be doing the family a favour by getting rid of the dead weight?

From a financial incentive point of view the family members should be sharing in the hamburger feast!



But, coercion is simply a subjective judgement that requires an observer to the event. If there are no witnesses to me killing someone and grinding him up for hamburger meat the event in fact does not exist. The hamburger meat might as well popped out of thin air.

You have to take into account individual subjective preferences. I may not financially benefit from my sister in any way, and she in fact leaves me financially worse off when my parents spend money for her college education that could otherwise be spent on mine, but I would still be upset if you killed her. Not all cost/benefit analysis is purely in monetary terms, people also derive benefit from companionship, group identification, association and interaction with other people, etc. The opportunity cost of you killing my sister for hamburger meat would exceed the benefit from any meal.


All right then, O'Brien. If the Party says it didn't happen, then it didn't. I believe there is an objective reality, though we may never be able gain a full understanding of it with our limited senses. So no, the hamburger meat did not pop out of thin air. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Nihilists are idiots, and if you want to argue from a nihilist point of view there is not point to debating you. As far as coercion, the vast majority of people prefer not to die, so unless there is a direct recorded statement to the contrary we always assume this to be the case.

Well, let's put it this way. It is true in most societies that if nobody cares if a person is gone that their disappearance won't matter too much.


You'd also be doing the individual themselves a disfavor, however, technically, your argument isn't based upon monetary economics but rather based upon anything that considers the preference of that family.


There is a reason why oral contracts usually aren't considered valid. Not only that, but really your argument has reached a point of ridiculousness. We aren't even arguing about economic systems so much as murder and cannibalism.

Essentially speaking, I tend to agree with Orwell on a lot of the things he stated. I might add on to his first claim that I am cynical enough to think that most people have their prices.