Reconomy

Reconomy model submitted to the 2014 Fuller Challenge. Initially posted as a comment by Kevin Parcell.

At http://dgrph.com/1nXJQDB

...you'll find an application to the 2014 Fuller Challenge with this problem statement and list of five "systemic problems":

"Attrition of natural and economic systems has brought us to the onset of a vicious cycle towards their mutual collapse, even while our greatest resource—our human potential—has been progressively underutilized, leaving billions of us struggling to meet our basic needs. Reconomy seeks to reverse this cycle by employing persons in addressing these five systemic causes:

— All goods and services, including money, generally flow to the highest bidders, while work flows to the lowest bidders, generating an ever-widening global wealth gap by stripping most persons and communities of the tools required to develop and steward their own resources.

— The unique offerings, needs and potentials of most persons tend to be illegible to the institutions that direct people collectively.

— Local economies have insufficient populations to independently sustain all the specialized knowledge and skills necessary for their full, self-reliant development, leading towards their gradual domination and eventual extinction by the global marketplace.

— Intangible losses to human and natural systems from economic development are increasingly illegible with increasing distance from those losses.

— The survival of traders within the global marketplace usually requires that they underprice their competitors, prompting them to seek to avoid the costs of conserving intangible value."

From here, a set of solutions is suggested in the proposal. I believe this issue can also be usefully considered from the perspective of mechanisms/patterns/building blocks:

Life that isn't nurtured and nurturing locally tends to wither and destroy; that which is so, is so collaboratively, generally by accident, participating in the promulgation of resilient self-reliant local community, that is the natural commons; this is natural law so it scales fractally, each community part of the fractal, or, rarely, self-sufficient in sustainable poverty, otherwise soon to be extinct. The global commons is what broadcasts the excess, seeding new local communities, and supplementing existing need.

Humans will live likewise to live in sustainable prosperity, otherwise will live in sustainable poverty or wither and die. We can see a little bit of how things collaborate, perhaps enough to steward the process and achieve unlimited growth of life and beauty, especially by acting as part of local communities, part of the local commons, and part of the global commons.

Looked at this way, for example, we can see that money has undone resiliency by facilitating extraction of local resources to flow to the globally affluent, like rain falling only on oceans, and how a global knowledge commons can do some corrective geoengineering by nurturing local community.

A specific example is how this leads us to a useful piece of corrective geoengineering, which piece is a mechanism for supply of national currency needed to build local systems:

That great "ocean" of affluence is in the hands of a small portion of the human population because the systemic problems cause our economy to "rain only over oceans". The solution suggested in the proposal is local "People Power Stations" that provide continuous access to local credit, clean energy and a global network of mutual support. Such support structures would also need some continued access to that "ocean" of national/global currency to acquire goods and services that can't be produced locally, such as mobiles and the global internet. In this regard, our global network of mutual support can nurture local communities by facilitating social entrepreneurship to build and manage the Stations:

Our global members can contribute global resources and have the value credited to their accounts in the local system. Within the context of patterns/building blocks generative of the commons and the analysis in the linked proposal, we can understand that stripping local systems of economic resources has resulted in local deficits and an excess in the global commons, such that USD and other global currencies can accomplish/purchase much more in local systems now than in the global system, much as rain where there is a deficit has greater influence than where there is not. This dynamic is described by economists as Purchase Power Parity, considering, for example, that 30-40 cents purchases as much in India as $1 purchases in the USA.

Thus, for instance, a member in the USA can contribute $100 towards the acquisition of a community-scale renewable energy system for a Station in India and receive $100 of credit in that local system (about 6000 Rupees), which then permits our members to individually or collaboratively build social enterprises in the target community that export excess production of green goods and services for a profit, in a "Fair Trade" manner.
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