What If You Were a Resource Based Boy, Living in the Resource Based World?
Who needs money, anyway? Certainly not a resource based economy
By MARTIN REZNY
Do you like money? Do you have any? Does having it or not having it make you happy or sad? Do you think money needs to exist? What do you think would happen to the world if it suddenly all disappeared?
I recently turned one of my old Words of Tomorrow essays about money being a rogue technology into a video essay, and in response, Frank van den Oever asked me what my thoughts are about the resource-based economy (RBE). Which would be an economy where money isn’t used.
Well, I guess you could have some sort of monopoly money or Disney bucks. What’s important is that in an RBE, using money isn’t necessary or in any way fundamental to the functioning of the economy as a whole. In particular, money should have nothing to do with managing resources.
To give you an example what an RBE may look like in practice, think Star Trek Federation, except all the space exploration is optional. Warp drives or teleports aren’t needed to have an RBE, although replicators and holodecks might be, but let’s not get ahead of myself. Here are the basics.
In an RBE, whenever people need stuff, they ask for it and they get it — food, shelter, energy, clothing, transportation, information. They don’t need to pay for any resource. All resources are being produced in sufficient quantities to cover everyone’s needs, which can be objectively quantified.
That sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Why aren’t we living in a resource-based economy already, you might be asking. Isn’t it obviously the most rational way to go about doing a technological civilization? And indeed, our technology makes it quite possible to feed and house everyone.
The central ideas, the political philosophy behind the concept of resource-based economy is that money is a tool to manage resources that are scarce, and that scarcity of resources is bad, but also unnecessary, if one properly applies the scientific method in a utilitarian mode to maximize happiness.
That’s still sounding pretty rational, but unfortunately, there are a number of major complications in running an economy this rationally in reality. Let’s briefly look at the three biggest ones:
a) Some resources are subjective and necessarily scarce.
Even in the fantastical world of the Star Trek Federation, there’s still such a thing as social credit. Some people have higher standing and get to live in more fancy places and accommodations, have more friends or fans, have access to rare cultural artifacts, and so on. This is very important to people.
To bring it into the context of our contemporary world, everyone can have a copy of Mona Lisa, but only a single person or organization can have the original. Everyone could get some kind of house or flat somewhere, but there are only so many people who can live in the centers of cities close to all the best venues. Everyone can enlist in the army, but only a handful of people can rise to the rank of general. Scarcity is the whole point here.
RBE offers no solution to this, other than ignoring it, or still using some form of calculable money or credit to determine who is more or less worthy of getting the exclusive social goods. There is no scientific equation that can objectively determine who should get the original Mona Lisa.
You can involve some rational factors in the decision-making process, but which ones you pick is ultimately subjective. If some scientist decides, then you’re doing a tyranny; if you leave it to a vote, you’re doing a democracy; if you set up some form of competition, then, well, you’re doing a market.
b) People need to be pressured into efficiency.
While I personally don’t see any real indications that if you took care of people’s basic needs, they would just sit on their hands all day and do nothing, I do believe that without facing some kind of limitation, people tend to get extremely wasteful. A wasteful economy isn’t rational.
We may be able to use science and technology to produce enough food and energy for everyone right now, but not necessarily if the population were to grow beyond a certain threshold, and definitely not forever. The more wasteful the economy is, the lower the maximum sustainable population threshold is, and the less time we will have left as a civilization.
Money, or a capitalist economy, or the free market is a great way of maximizing efficiencies through the pressure to minimize costs and maximize profits. Unfortunately, too much efficiency is also bad, and the free market tends to result in exactly that, squeezing people too hard while creating fragile supply chains and unsustainable externalities.
One could argue that a combination of rational enlightened technocracy and the free market is a way how to get the best of both worlds — regulating market forces to optimize rational utilitarian efficiencies without screwing over the majority of people. Maybe that could still be an RBE, somehow.
c) It is unclear how we could transition from capitalism to an RBE
There’s exactly one clear scenario right now for how to start an RBE — if a bunch of scientists and AIs packed their bags, launched themselves into space, and founded an off-world colony. Alternatively, maybe it could be enough if they created a self-sustaining city in international waters.
This is pretty much the idea championed by the Venus Project, the probably most developed RBE scheme. It could happen, they sure have the architectural stuff figured out thanks to late Jacques Fresco. But even if it did, and even if the colony worked, that doesn’t save the rest of the world.
Most people in the world can’t just pack up and leave and start a new world somewhere else, either because their countries won’t let them or because most good places in the world are already taken up by countries who won’t give them up. Rich global elites certainly won’t help abolish money.
One could try to do it the old-fashioned socialist way, with the poor people taking the rich people’s stuff, but that would involve a lot of violence, hatred, injustice, and perhaps a nuclear war or two that would serve as a terrible foundation for a futuristic humane technological utopia.
At the very minimum, large numbers of people in the world would have to be convinced that the new model is better and vote for reforms that would transition societies gradually toward the RBE ideal. A small, functional RBE colony somewhere could be a start of that perhaps, a proof of concept.
So, How Workable Is Resource Based Economy?
Personally, truth be told, I haven’t thought of RBE in a while. I used to be interested in the concept back in the days of the Zeitgeist documentaries, so while I was in college. I do believe there are some good ideas in there, but I’m increasingly convinced that RBE is better as a part of the solution rather than the whole solution to the problem of running a world.
Consider the Venus Project. Jacques Fresco was an architect who had some pretty neat ideas about how to build cities. What if we decided to build houses out of modular, 3D-printed steel components, very quickly and efficiently, and in such a way that they would be able to resist natural disasters like floods, fires, earthquakes, or tornadoes? We could do that.
In capitalism, what we do instead is focus on building cheaply, in part because most people can’t afford any better, but in part also because if the buildings keep being destroyed, we can keep rebuilding them (and make more money from more construction). Efficient? Yes. Rational? No.
Theoretically, we could put regulations on the free market to ensure that the minimum standard is near-indestructible, very safe housing, or infrastructure, or anything else really. Even plane crashes could be made survivable, just not in the cheapest possible planes. Science can do that.
We could also implement some sort of universal basic income or dividend, which is a monetary representation of effectively deciding to just provide basic resources to people. We could tax externalities and curtail other irrational efficiencies of capitalism, thus being an RBE, but with money.
I have never been an extremist or absolutist, so I have no need for only one single political philosophy to be 100% correct and for every other philosophy to be 100% wrong. My political preference always was to try to take all of the things that work and fuse them into a single system.
If you leave the ruling to scientists only, you will get a technocratic dictatorship where many liberties are taken away and where bureaucracy grows rampant (and very rigid and inefficient). If you leave everything to the markets, reality will often be ignored, and many people will lose everything, while the winners will often be psychopaths or sociopaths.
There’s also the historical precedent problem — socialist revolutions and central planning have been tried and really didn’t go well. Without an actual free market, the planners didn’t know what the real demand was, so the supply usually failed to meet it. What’s even worse, due to the violent nature of the initial takeovers, the psychopaths were in charge anyway.
But who knows. If the initial conditions of the transition were peaceful and democratic, the leaders could be truly rational and benevolent, and maybe one could develop an AI that could impartially and perfectly perform some kind of centralized planning. Well, of the necessary physical goods, at least.
In the end, what I think is an essential part of RBE philosophy that definitely should be adopted, if we wish to survive as a civilization in the long term, is a rational long-term perspective. Neither capitalism nor democracy have that. These systems may be optimizing the economy for our needs and wishes now, but we need to be looking beyond now.
For example, it is certainly cheaper, and therefore more efficient in the capitalist sense, to build our power infrastructure above ground, unshielded from electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs. But what that means is that when, not if, a major solar flare strikes Earth, our grid will be fried.
Similarly, a nuclear power plant may be a great investement in many cases, but it takes something like two decades to build, and you are an elected politician and your term ends in only four years. So, maybe you’d like to build something less efficient, clean, or resilient, but doable quickly.
If these examples sound like civilization failures to you, then perhaps you’d agree that we could keep democracy to make some kinds of decisions and markets to make other kinds of decisions, while also creating a different institution as a check, with the goal of ensuring rational long-term planning.
What do you think?
