The Other School of Economics

#humans

In her recent post on edufutures.com Annabel Astbury raises a point that your correspondent has been wondering about from time to time:

“The amount of times that I see people on Twitter ask a question that could be just as easily ‘googled’ demonstrates to me how people want to have interaction with others.”

Her answer is that “the very act of asking a network shows that you want interaction with people”. “Humans are social creatures – they are curious and generally want and try to maintain or create relationships.” Asking a question that could be otherwise obtained from a reference book or google is a way to create an excuse for social interaction: “the responses indicate a desire, I feel, of people to interact with others.”

This very much resonates with Orwell’s Common Decency – one of our favourite themes – as well as with some more recent research conducted at Harvard Law School by Professor Yochai Benkler.

Benkler has been called “the leading intellectual of the information age”. He published a seminal book “the Wealth of Networks” in 2006 discussing the effects of net-based information production on our lives and minds and laws. Benkler has gained admirers far beyond the academic spheres. He released his book online with a Creative Commons license.

In 1776, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, which is viewed by some as the blueprint for the capitalist system. The Wealth of Networks, in its title, implies that Benkler sees the networked economy generating wealth largely in a social sense rather than in a monetary sense. Benkler argues for a reasoned and balanced approach between the commercial and the social aspects of the internet. He takes a deep look into the issues of how the ‘Net affects cultural production, social justice, and economic development.

I have reproduced below extracts from the book, which are really worth sharing; or as they say these days ‘which really nailled it for me’.

“Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness.” – Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 2006

In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn, oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production.

In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network connection, he or she can do so — alone, or in cooperation with others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so; if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals acting for complementary reasons.

The result is that a good deal more that #human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system.

Sometimes, under specific conditions, these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people to work on information projects more efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations.
The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own.

Enhanced Autonomy

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions:
(1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves;
(2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and
(3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

This enhanced autonomy is at the core of (a whole series of other) improvements. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

Analysing the effects of networked information economy on individual autonomy

- First, individuals can do more for themselves independently of the permission or cooperation of others. They can create their own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century.

- Second, and no less importantly, individuals can do more in loose affiliation with others, rather than requiring stable, long-term relations, like coworker relations or participation in formal organizations, to underwrite effective cooperation. Very few individuals living in the industrial information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new Library of Alexandria of global reach, or to start an encyclopedia. As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases.

- The very fluidity and low commitment required of any given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them.

These ways in which autonomy is enhanced require a fairly substantive and rich conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept. But even from a narrower perspective, which spans a broader range of conceptions of autonomy, at a minimum we can say that individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others–the owners of communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby to affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do.

Moreover, the diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for any given individual is qualitatively increased. This gives individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make.

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