Programming Note

Those who read via the main site will now find that I quote Pink Floyd’s “Money” as a sub­ti­tle rather than stat­ing “Free mar­kets solve 99% of our prob­lems. This is a blog about the other 1%.”

I think the orig­i­nal tagline was mis­lead­ing, and the more I think about it the new lyri­cal line bet­ter serves the pur­pose of the blog. Col­lec­tive Con­scious is about the prob­lems in life where free mar­kets can’t work, because some­thing stands in the way. We have cor­ner solu­tions, first-​​mover prob­lems, col­lec­tive action prob­lems, infor­ma­tion asym­me­tries, and so on. Almost noth­ing in the world is prop­erly han­dled by a free mar­ket, and besides, even if it were, free mar­kets only solve the prob­lem of effi­ciency and not that of equity. What I meant by the for­mer tagline is that most pric­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tional prob­lems could be brought to effi­ciency by free mar­kets, and I still believe this to be true.

But as I’ve blogged, I’ve become more and more con­cerned about ques­tions of equity as they relate to col­lec­tive action prob­lems. Reg­u­lar read­ers will see this in my blog­ging about income and wealth inequal­ity, as well as political-​​power inequal­i­ties. I’ve become more and more con­cerned that the human con­di­tion is not fully sat­is­fied by effi­ciency alone, and that the free-​​market model makes a great mis­take in assum­ing that the sole moral imper­a­tive of eco­nomic orga­ni­za­tion is effi­ciency and max­i­miza­tion of pro­duc­tive capac­ity. It is not.

If we can­not fairly dis­trib­ute the fruits of our labor, then peo­ple can­not be said to have lived well. If at the end of their lives, peo­ple find they have cre­ated noth­ing of value, but sim­ply worked and saved and wor­ried so as to spend their whole income by the time they pass away, they can­not be said to have been more than instru­ments of the cap­i­tal­ist society.

It is my project, and I believe the true lib­eral project more gen­er­ally, to avoid this. It is my project to encour­age own­er­ship among the work­ing class — to allow peo­ple who presently have no access to any cre­ative resource other than their own work — to cre­ate and own prop­erty with­out hav­ing to beg, bor­row, or steal. It is my project to exam­ine sys­tems that share resources more fairly, dis­trib­ute income more equi­tably, and under­stand how those sys­tems and their out­comes can be repli­cated in the USA and around the world.

For that, we look to alter­na­tive sys­tems. We look to the strong wel­fare states of Europe to see how col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing and coop­er­a­tive own­er­ship gives work­ers a cre­ative stake in the busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments that pro­vide essen­tial prod­ucts and ser­vices. We look to the social cap­i­tal­ism of China to see how cen­tral­ized own­er­ship of cap­i­tal directs its prof­its to solve col­lec­tive action prob­lems. We look to the mar­ket author­i­tar­i­an­ism of Sin­ga­pore to see how reg­u­lated free mar­kets avoid adverse selec­tion and encour­age endoge­nous risk-​​sharing. And we look to the fail­ures too, the prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion of Rus­sia or the stag­nant pro­tec­tion­ism of Japan or the fas­cist security-​​statist Ger­many to see how eco­nom­ics can go so very wrong.

I believe the quote I’ve cho­sen sums up the con­flicts and val­ues that I explore here more fully than does the neolib­eral adage. We all want a more equi­table dis­tri­b­u­tion, but nobody wants it to come at a cost to them.

24 February 2011 – 8:21 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Collectivism, Socialism, Communism, Economics | Comments (827)