Communism it ain't

[faendryl]

"Inasmuch as money is at its base a proxy for allocation of a finite set of goods, it is inherently unsuitable for use in an information society." Discuss

Comments

[stolen_tea]

Hm, yes. Price in money seems to be a function of demand over supply. When either of those get too big or small, the system seems to break down. Which makes me wonder whether it's directly demand/supply, or if there's some exponential stuff going on there...

[faendryl]

At the risk of sounding even more communist (well, perhaps not): it seems that one way to resolve this particular problem might be that creators are paid for information creation in material goods, but information is not paid for individually in material goods. Still, the interaction is a problem for allocation. Perhaps to be even more radical: information and physical economies cannot coexist within a logically coherent system.

[stolen_tea]

But in the absence of compensation for any particular piece of information, who determines the value? It does seem odd that with copyright, you can expect to receive money indefinitely for work you did in the past; that doesn't happen in any other trade that springs to mind.

As for the coexistence, that's interesting, and I shall have to ponder it... :)

[faendryl]

Yeah, the value determination is the nice gain you get from a monetary/market system (depending on who you ask...). I note that capital-style private property is at least sometimes conceptualized as generating a revenue stream infinitely into the future, to which you apply time-discounting to get an idea of the total value in dollars now.