R. Anders Schneiderman wrote:
> That [participatory plannings way of handling collective consumption] would take
>care of some problems, but what about:
> 1) people who don't have kids who won't support increasing the education
> budget for elementary schools?
> 2) people who vote against increasing spending on extending public
> utilities needed to support a growing population (since their needs are
> already being taken care of)?
You're right here. People in a neighborhood, or a ward, or a city, or a
state, or a nation will NOT always agree on what public goods they want.
Sometimes this is due to disagreements on facts: I think pollution
reduction will have a much more beneficial effect on people's health
than many do. Others think that military spending makes them more secure
than I do -- to put it mildly! So because we disagree on the facts we
have differences over how much pollution reduction and national
"defense" to ask for in OUR public good package. Sometimes disagreements
are over values. Even if we agreed on the facts about the health and
security consequences of pollution reduction and military spending I
might value health more and others might value military security more.
And these differences might be just differences, or due to rather
obvious differences in the situations of different people such as me
being asthmatic and someone else living close to a border where contra
like thugs cross to rape and pillage. Childless and nine children
families, and those serviced by existing infrastructure as opposed to
those needing entirely new infrastructure are examples of the last kind
of reason people in a community will differ over what package of public
goods they want. Incidently, in my community right now the up county
(wealthy) residents with new infrastructure won't vote for
infrastructure repairs needed by us (low income) down county dwellers.
The bastards!
I have no magical solution to any of these kinds of differences and
disagreements -- based on differences of opinion, value, or situation.
[Except my up county "neighbors" will no longer be wealthier than I am!]
Every community will have to hammer these things out as democratically,
equitably, and hopefully with as much solidarity as they can manage.
But these differences are not what is usually meant by people worried
about the free rider problem in provision of public goods. They mean if
we leave it to the market for people to buy as much pollution reduction
or military defense as they want to, few if any will buy any at all
since each enjoys such a tiny fraction of the benefit and all have an
incentive to ride for free on the purchases of others. Hence the market
bias against public good provision versus private good provision.
> These are very common free rider problems that local communities have today
> when they practice some form of democracy. Again, this isn't an argument
> against participatory economics. I just don't see how it's going to get
> rid of the free rider problem. It seems to me you'd need other additional
> institutions/mechanisms to alleviate it.
See above.
> >> >People get effort ratings from their peers at
> >> >work that entitle them to consumption rights -- which they can save or
> get
> advancements on (borrow).
> >Will it [the system for evaluating work performance for consumption rights]
> >matter a whole hell of a lot? Not really since we're talking
> >about differences in consumption rights of maybe one to two at most -
> >nothing like the one to two million in capitalist economies, or the one
> >to two hundred that would occur in market socialist economies without
> >arbitrary limits on the marginal revenue product wage rates that would
> >result from free labor markets.
> Could you say a little more about this? First off, could you give a better
> sense of what you mean by one or two? Are we talking about another pair of
> movie tickets? A week's vacation? A bound edition of Talcott Parson's
> greatest sayings?
Sorry. I meant ratios of the lowest person's income to the highest
person's income of one to two for a participatory economyu, versus one
to 2 million in capitalism, or one to two hundred in market socialist
systems.
>
> Second, if your evaluation influences your consumption rights by very
> little, is it really going to influence behavior very much? And if it
> doesn't influence behavior by very much, doesn't that undermine the premise
> your evaluation system started with (i.e., that "people should enjoy
> economic benefits according to how much they endured economic sacrifice")?
I was simply guessing how much difference there would ever be between
the efforts, or sacrifices made by two people working full time at jobs
that are already balanced to share tasks that are particularly dangerous
or pleasant. I thought it was hard to imagine differences greater than a
ratio of one to two.
> > [responding to my concerns about the potential evils of peer review:]
> >You're right. Lots can go wrong with peer review. But lots goes wrong
> >with bosses review! If people should enjoy economic benefits according
> >to how much they endured economic sacrifice -- which is the assumption
> >behind participatory economics -- then we have the problem of assessing
> >effort or sacrifice. Who better to do this than one's workmates. Which
> >is not to say that there are not better and worse systems for going
> >about this. Collect what kind of information? Collect opinions from
> >whom? How? Self-evaluations? Appeals? Grievance procedures? Rotation of
> >effort rating committee members? These -- and many others -- are all
> >issues that individual workers councils will have to solve as best they
> >can to their own satisfaction.
> >On the oft cited negative example of faculty tenure committees: To
> >paraphrase Shaw again: "Tenure committees are absolutely the worst form
> >of human interaction.... With no exception." I know that from 15 years
> >of personal experience and am tired of getting beaten over the head with
> >it in discussions of participatory economies where it is of absolutely
> >no relevance whatsoever! How is this example different from: Respected
> >elites tortured people during the Spanish Inquisition? Yeah. People have
> >done shitty things to other people. So...
>
> Actually, it's very similar to the Spanish Inquisition, the difference
> being that if you confessed, the Inquisition stopped, whereas faculty
> meetings never end. :)
> Faculty are fun to pick on, but they aren't that different from those of
> doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. As the Sociology of Professions
> literature has shown ad nauseum, when folks gain considerable power to
> regulate themselves, they tend to abuse it.
Point well taken. But is there any reason to respond to this difficulty
by abandoning the ideal of self-management -- or self-regulation as you
put it?
> Rather than having workers evaluate themselves, why not have evaluations
> something that's done on multiple levels, with the evaluation of one's
> work-mates only one small part of it?
>
> For ex, suppose you had a series of health clinics whose workers were being
> evaluated. At the start of the year, the regional community collective had
> decided that their priorities for health had changed and that the focus of
> attention was going to shift into preventative and public health
> (sanitation, toxic emissions reductions, etc), with health clinics playing
> a less central role than they had in the past.
This decision logically implies a shifting of workers from clinics to
sanitation -- which the a participatory economy hopefully would arrange
for.
> Suppose that most of the
> folks in the health clinics felt resentful about the shift in priorities;
> not only had they lost some prestige,
I don't see why?
> but now sanitation workers were
> getting a bigger share of consumption rights because their work was more
> important
More important would not give them more consumption rights.
> and involved more sacrifice.
That would earn them more consumption rights, but I don't see why that
would result from the example you hypothesize unless there were no
reallocation of labor resources so those at the clinic had less to do
and those in sanitation had more to do than before. But there should be
a reallocation of labor.
> A handful of workers at each clinic
> had tried to enthusiastically implement the health clinic's part in the new
> plan, but most workers did their best to passively botch it--and they
> resented those who tried to make it work.
>
> Under your approach, the workers who tried to subsume part of their
> self-interest to the desires of the community would get stomped in the
> evaluation, because their co-workers were pissed off at them. Under a more
> fair system, the workers who tried to implement the plan would fair better
> because although they'd get lousy evals from their co-workers, these evals
> would be outweighed by strong evals from members of the community, and the
> regional community collective--assuming, of course, that the workers were
> politically savvy enough to have made sure that folks in the community knew
> what was going on.
>
> The reason I'm hammering away on this point is that I think it's reflective
> of a larger difficulty that undercut most plans for participatory
> economics: they don't take politics and power seriously enough. I think
> some form of p.e. is the way to go, but most descriptions I've seen
> describe a world that's at odds with our experiences with democracy. They
> paint a picture that's too rosy by far. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic,
> but I have a hard time imagining how we'd convince most folks to buy into
> some form of p.e. that assumes people will somehow be transformed into
> ideal citizens rather that the complex bundles of altruism and selfishness,
> kindness and vengeful behavior we see today.
>
> Anders Schneiderman
I tend to agree with you about the average level of pessimism out there
about how well people can manage themselves in group situations. My
co-author and I disagree about this, but that's just a disagreement over
fact, not values. Which doesn't mean I agree with that average level of
pessimism about how well people would do managing their affairs under a
system of rules and procedures that were democratic, fair, and
efficient. But I think it is important to think through how forseeable
potential conflicts and problems could best be avoided or ameliorated --
not assume that everyone will behave altruistically, or even fairly.
The reason for having peers rate effort was they would be most likely to
have accurate information and they are the most affected by their
workmate's efforts or lack thereof. However, your idea of having
outsiders involved in the evaluation as a check on vengeful behavior in
evaluation seems perfectly sensible to me. Perhaps I should have
emphasized that HOW THIS IS DONE IS UP TO EACH WORKERS' COUNCIL TO
DECIDE. You might get me to vote with you if we worked together to have
some sort of outside evaluation accompany inside procedures.
