Thank you for giving a name to something I have been pondering a lot. I have come to this conclusion by thinking about automation and technological unemployment. If people own land, or productive tools, they can be self reliant and exist without jobs from corporations, or help from the state. Naturally people would organise as a cooperative or a market of services, exchanging services for services, because they have little money and no corporate jobs. Yet they can work, so they can create a kindergarten for children of the neighbourhood, or a medical clinic, or a mechanic repair-shop, or a construction company, and so on.
By combining these skills a neighbourhood, or a city could be self reliant. In the future, with the advent of solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and other empowering technologies it will be even easier to be self reliant. I see this as a better solution to UBI which depends on the state, which is corruptible and the corporations, which are greedy. People would retain their agency, unlike in the UBI scenario, where they would be wards of the state.
There is no purpose to automation that does not exist in the service of humanity at large, but only for a few. Automation must be owned by the people directly. We need to have the means of production in our hands in order to survive. There is one single job the advancement of automation can't take from us - the job of taking care of ourselves! And that's hard work.
- People who can not work because they simply can't hold down a job, period.
- Externalities such as neighboring (or even distant) communes dumping wastewater into rivers etc., or polluting the ground, or air... you get the idea. What about natural calamities, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and such?
- Conflicts over scarce resources. Water, for example. Communes that rely on a common source of water will likely have conflicts. How are they resolved?
- Any commune is exceedingly unlikely to be good at producing all the things it needs. Trade will need to develop. Does 'self-reliance' exclude the possibility of trade?
- How large should a commune be, to enable innovation? Without innovation, there will be stagnation that will harm the commune in the long run.
- How would a commune handle people that are 'different'? How about criminals within and without?
I don't think distributism requires a closed system.
A few of its guiding principles may answer your concerns:
* Subsidiarity teaches that things should be handled at the lowest or least centralized level that is competent to handle them. That doesn't mean that small organizations should be expected to bite off more than they could handle. It may very well be that a giant, multinational corporation is the lowest-sized organization that can handle operating something like an airline, and that is not inconsistent with distributist principles.
* Distributism, as an economic system, is not at all incompatible with things like a strong social safety net. However, it is worth pointing out that if the ownership of productive property were to become more widespread, the need for such a safety net would be decreased.
We live in a world where (to quote GKC [1]):
> Lancashire merchants whenever they like > Can water the beer of a man in Klondike > Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay; > And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
The advantage of centralization is that we can stop the poisoning all at once (because there is only one place doing the poisoning). However, when the meat is poisoned many more people suffer food poisoning than would if the food packaging were distributed.
[1]: http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Songs_of_Education125.htmlThe "distributism" described above is the dream of virtually every rural community. People choose to live in rural communities because it's a little piece of heaven for them: they are surrounded by people they know, they have clean air, the earth is right beneath their feet, the stars are bright, the pace is slow, and so on. They want to serve their neighbors and receive services from their neighbors. How is that mindset pathological?
I am always encouraged by innovations that help rural folks be more self-reliant so they can work toward their dream of self-sustaining, independent communities.
So, you either choose total independence and low technology or interdependence with other groups and advanced tech.
Although that independence would be like a group of proto humans that knew about fire and how to use it, but not how to make it, and thus carefully guarded it and kept it fed, lest it go out.
I don’t see a way around this, since you always have to start from the same raw materials.
1: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-20/rural-ame...
1) Our general trend is towards urbanization, humanity is now more urban than rural, and every quality of life index shows cities give more good to more people better.
2) Millennials, hipsters in particular, in American markets with crushing real estate prices have recently begun reverse-migrating away from the cities and to more rural areas with romanticized lifestyles creating some new demographic, and real estate, trends.
In terms of pure statistics we're looking at a sub-group with a different trend than the overall group. Most potatos aren't from my backyard, but those potatoes are only getting prettier while the many thousands at the market are getting uglier ;)
However, I will agree that my initial response was lacking and would have been better if not stated at all.
I suspect that you also have more corruption and/or abuse of power because (a) the previous entries all empower sociopathic individuals, (b) you have a larger pool from which to find such sociopaths, and (c) you have more positions of power for said sociopaths to fill.
You have all of these problems in small groups, but many of our policing/accountability systems don't function well in very large groups.
I could just as easily argue that smaller, more insular groups promote distrust of outsiders and lack of empathy, which might lead to more wars. I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds plausible to me.
In the end, actually examining data is what's needed. Until there are facts to assess, we're just spouting wild conjecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number has a decent collection of the research I know of. There is a little hand-waving involved when it comes to "why", but it's notable that multiple researchers over decades disagree about the number, not the base concept. Likewise, studies related to the base concept of the non-technical Brooks Law support the non-linear impact on communication as a group grows (off hand I can't find a study on that, but I know I've read of multiple).
Edit: Also https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/... points out some research about the distance/abstractness I mentioned.
Anecdotally, plenty of governing and/or economic systems (e.g. communism) have historical success in small groups and no examples of success in large groups, but that's a completely different kind of evidence.
The corruption/abuse item is not part of the research, which is why I separated that as "I suspect" Given the above, and what we know about leaders (executives, politicians) and how sociopathic tendencies are an asset to personal success I find it very plausible but I have no actual evidence, thus "I suspect".
> I could just as easily argue that smaller, more insular groups promote distrust of outsiders and lack of empathy
You could, and I'd actually be interested to see any research on the topic because I've not thought about that one but it does match our general experiences about exposure and tolerance to social differences. That's orthogonal to my point though, as I was only addressing internal workings, not interactions between groups.
My main point was that the theory was labeled as something you suspect, but the evidence you listed to back up that theory sounded like it was being presented as fact. You've provided resources to back up the claim, at least to some degree (as you note), which is what I was looking for, so thanks. :)
> You could, and I'd actually be interested to see any research on the topic because I've not thought about that one but it does match our general experiences about exposure and tolerance to social differences.
I don't have any, but I also would be interested to see it. I was using it as an example of something that sounded true and that I suspected was true that I had no real evidence of, and thus should be hesitant to assert as true. Unfortunately, by its nature that makes it interesting to a certain type of person, so it ends up teasing us. :/
How is that self-reliant? It’s different from most of the current developed economies, but it’s still division of labour and relying on others for some things.
There certainly is, to the few that are served. Increased productivity that doesn't require manpower/hours has been captured for centuries.
A capitalist economy provides many incentives to privately hold productivity gains from automation, while providing virtually none to relinquish them to the public.
Giving up these ventures would require such a massive reduction to the quantity and quality of human life, that it would be unacceptable to the vast majority of people.
The Haber process ended humanity's hopes of creating a society based on self reliance.
People have predicted the population bomb many times for hundreds of years, and every time they have been wrong.
Scientists predict human population to peak in 2040 anyway. I think that we can make it till then.
The world supports the current population quite well, right now.
> According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right, and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state capitalism), a few individuals (plutocracy), or corporations (corporatocracy). Distributism, therefore, advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership.
> Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative. Thomas Storck argues: "both socialism and capitalism are products of the European Enlightenment and are thus modernizing and anti-traditional forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
So not to be snarky, but how is this anything more than simple "Marxism, minus the parts that don't work with Catholic religion, plus Catholic religion"?
The assertions of Distributism are that:
* Everyone has a right to private property (ad contra of Marxism) * That right to private property is not absolute (ad contra of laissez faire capitalism) * Laws should aim for the maximum distribution of the means of production, rather than the optimal throughput of productivity possible with those means (ad contra of if-it-is-not-100%-it-is-not-a-monopoly capitalism)
This is inspired by Catholic principles and promoted by Catholic thinkers, but it is certainly something one can come to without being Catholic.
Won't you just get run out by others who are focused on productivity and can beat you in trade and undercut your prices while delivering higher quality?
By a lot of accounts nomadic life was much better than early farm life. Didn't help the nomads in the end though.
Clumsily named, the aspects of "distributism" being lauded here only seem to involve convincing people to partly own instutitions rather than simply transacting with them as a third party. Seems to me that this reading of "distributism" is just capitalism plus a social norm of a bias toward involvement and ownership, rather than just employment and consumption.
That is Communism, not Marxism.
I challenge you to convince me to willingly join in your Marxian ideal, until then I will fight it when it comes to my door, like so many in the USSR understandably didn't, comfortably boiled frogs as the record shows them.
a) I don't have a Marxist ideal, don't put yourself in a defensive position against an antagonist that is not there. I just don't mix up Marxist economic theory with Communism and Leninism.
b) Your view of history is perverse, and insulting to the many people that resisted and were killed off by Lenin & Co when they took power.
Show me the scores of people taking a stand while being placed under arbitrary arrest. Yeah, sure some people resisted, a whole lot more memorable than the millions who walked with their captors straight to the grave. It's not like they didn't resist because they were bad people or something, they just had no tools to deal with any of this, who on earth did?
For the most part, you're taken by night or in transit, and they show up to dig up your trash to find your cherished letters or the wrong souvenir, you're still wondering if all the other people who were arrested did what they were accused of. What does resisting that even look like?
This was all to prove some fantasy of a man with a weak spirit and infinite capacity to look outside himself for fault; and for Lenin and Stalin it was just their ticket into town.
> a) I don't have a Marxist ideal, don't put yourself in a defensive position against an antagonist that is not there. I just don't mix up Marxist economic theory with Communism and Leninism.
I didn't say you had one, really, I said that if one were to be instituted, it seems it could only happen by force. Marx's conclusions are the fundamental source of the most inhumane behaviours of the USSR, the specifics are just gory decoration. It doesn't matter if the dissidents happen to be suppressed by genocide, imprisonment, or exile; only by suppressing the dissidents can you institute the envisioned solution. There is a considerable proportion of society which will simply not agree to have their life's work taken from them. Tell me what the important difference is between a solution which passively requires genocide, and a realized implementation of that solution.
Granted I'm underslept right now, so say whatever, I'll see it when I'm back on earth.
Communism is where all property is publicly owned and each is given what they need.
A commune is a self-reliant community, likely to be small - individuals need each other. A communist state is still a state, it is not decentralized like a commune, but very centralized. Instead of relying on each other everyone relies entirely on the state.
I am also very much in favor of distributed, self reliant communities. Yet I want to preserve the advantages of a global linked economy.
I hope that Blockchain technology will help us to achieve this.
I tried to capture some of the thought vectors here: https://gist.github.com/AndreasS2501/2dc6c5813f5fd8abc79aad4...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/74672/60298_ei...
It doesn't clearly state how many farmers lease land, but 39% of acreage is rented.
The 98% statistic appears in the follwing item, but concerns white vs black land ownership, not rental vs. ownership:
There are Kibbutzim, full blown cooperative communities spread across the country (which were the initial backbone of the country but have decline over time). They share income depending on the Kibbutz, but some of these communities are very productive and very well off.
There are also Moshavs that aren’t quite as collective but still cooperative. Everyone in the Moshav shares a fixed piece of land in the community but production and income is controlled by the individual laborer. However, the community will still share costs together, like machinery, supplies, marketing of output.
Both are 70 year+ running models and proven to be successful no reason they can’t everywhere else.
Newman's Own is one interesting (and successful) example I can think of that's an otherwise for-profit company acting effectively as a charity. Are there papers/books about how effective this would be in practice?
Our family have been members for over 20 years. I'd rate their health care as "good", but the real benefit is that we have NEVER had a billing dispute, because almost NOTHING is "out of network". On the rare occasions we've needed non-Kaiser health care (such as ER visits while traveling), we just give the bill to Kaiser, and they take it from there.
When the insurer owns the hospitals and contracts all the doctors, customer billing is almost friction-free.
Healthcare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupa
Media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust_Limited
Retail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership
Finance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Building_Society
Lots of stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group
Similarly, it makes more sense to have a non-profit coffee-buying employee group to buy coffee (at places that don't provide it for free) rather than pay a vendor to bring it in. But that's not because profit-making is an inherent drain on efficiency, but because the "judgment" that those profits are "buying" ... doesn't add much value.
Not only that but the healthcare industry has extraordinarily high financial and legal barriers to entry.
If there is a company with enough muscle to force themselves into the business, it's Berkshire.
Unlike Amazon and Berkshire, two of the best managed companies humanity has ever created?
> Extraordinarily high financial and legal barriers to entry
Unlike financial companies?
They already sell it: https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Medical-Supplies/b?ie=UT...
I've also heard they play a bit of a game of tetris to fill truck trailers in a way that completely stuffs them full enough that packages don't move around.
You missed half of what I wrote, "instead of in 20 oversized but mostly empty boxes." The context was in a single order from a single supplier, whose product was already at the warehouse, shipping on the same date, to the same address, for the same delivery date, using the same delivery carrier, of almost identical items that almost assuredly are on the warehouse shelves right next to each other.
> I've also heard they play a bit of a game of tetris to fill truck trailers in a way that completely stuffs them full enough that packages don't move around.
That may be the case, but I am referring to the incorrect packing of boxes not trucks.
From Amazon's point of view, they're doing both correctly.
Their algorithm apparently optimises for packing completely filled tucks leaving the warehouse first, then optimises for minimal packaging second.
If they need a few more boxes of a particular size, to completely fill an outgoing truck, they will split some orders appropriately so that those boxes appear on the conveyor at the right moment.
This means that sometimes you receive an SD card in an A4 size box, because that was the only item that was available when they needed an A4 box to fill a truck - and the algorithm decided that the trade-off was worth it.
They could have arrived from the supplier in small batches (or even one-by-one) over time if it's a low-volume sort of thing. Amazon might intentionally spread them throughout the fulfillment center in some situations to expedite packing and reduce the distances their robots have to travel.
They might have just needed twenty boxes to finish the tetris puzzle to send a truck out the door.
Unrelated: one of the worst parts of insurance is the customer service quality. How does an internal, non-profit insurer staff itself to do this well? If they commit to this even at the risk of it being unprofitable, that would be most awesome —- but I’m skeptical.
But the same motive applies to co-ops. The member-owners of a co-op don't want their costs to be inflated by improper billing or inflated prices, because if they are able to reduce their expenses, then the member-owners benefit in the form of lower premiums.
In both cases, the shareholders want to get their money's worth, it's just that in the case of a for-profit company, those shareholders are often external investors, but in the case of a cooperative, all shareholders are also members.
Healthcare costs are so bad they're now a large, direct competitor to the Amazons and Berkshires and JP Morgans in a business well-being sense, as resources are finite. I like having these giants stepping up to the plate and targeting the healthcare system on cost. They tend to get their way; if a political rock (eg insurance companies) gets in the way, it'll get moved out of the way.
It reminds me of the 450 hospitals getting together to set up a not-for-profit generic drug company recently -
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/hospitals-plan-to-create-the...
And one of the reasons for the most complicated billing system in the world is for-profit Insurance companies.
Whenever I want to feel sad, I think about how the most brilliant minds of our times are probably making a fortune at such zero sum transactions as gaming the health system and tax code.
Not really. In fact, Medicare is responsible for most of the current billing system, not private insurers.
Insurance providers write custom lines of business for employers per state and allow those employers to customize the coverage however they like. This happens annually with revisions done to exclude or include coverage as the employer dictates.
Insurance companies, and employers, come up with byzantine rules for what's covered, when it's covered, where it's covered, who is allowed to provide care, prerequisites before approving coverage, what brand of products are permitted in treatment, and on and on.
The net effect is that the rules are multi-variant to the point that they cannot realistically be validated or tested by humans. There are entire industries dedicated to maintaining rules management engines specifically for validating policies, coverage, and claims.
As someone who's actually had to deal with this complexity and implement software to facilitate it, I can assure you that Medicare is not at all simple, by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even standard or consistent within Medicare within a geographical region, even if you limit the scope to Part A and Part B, excluding coverage provided under Part C and Part D.
> Insurance companies, and employers, come up with byzantine rules for what's covered, when it's covered, where it's covered, who is allowed to provide care, prerequisites before approving coverage, what brand of products are permitted in treatment, and on and on.
This is exactly what Medicare itself does. The private insurers generally structure their terms in ways that are similar to what Medicare does. They're not identical, but it's not like Medicare is some haven of simplicity by itself that the private insurers complicate. Medicare itself is unbelievably complicated and abstruse by itself.
> There are entire industries dedicated to maintaining rules management engines specifically for validating policies, coverage, and claims.
Yes, that's true. And that would be true even if you only looked at Medicare patients.
Medicare is by volume the larges provider but size is actually a benefit because it means that it's dealt with more frequently and is more familiar to care providers.
A care provider isn't multi-regional, thus when they deal with Medicare it's mostly consistent. The interface is at least similar. However they can have 100 patients with United Healthcare and each patient will have a unique and different line of insurance.
Medicare isn't simple, it's just a small piece of a very big shit sandwich.
This is dead wrong. It's easier to deal with a small ha regional insurers than it is to deal with Medicare on the whole. And as I said in the original post, even within a region, Medicare is very heterogeneous.
> Medicare is by volume the largest provider.... Medicare isn't simple, it's just a small piece of a very big shit sandwich.
As you said yourself, it's the largest single piece of the sandwich. It also happens to be the core of it as well. Most of the complexity in the billing process stems from how Medicare structures and organizes its own billing, not the other way around.
I'm saying that the marginal complexity introduced by private plans is actually quite small compared to the complexity that Medicare already creates. Furthermore, the complexity that private insurers introduce is both directly and indirectly linked to the way Medicare structures its billing and reimbursement policies.
They are actually overlapping problems, since some of those private lines are Medicare Part C or D plans (and some are Medicaid managed care plans, and some are both Medicare Part C and Medicaid managed care plans.)
Medicare, Medicaid, Private Insurers, and the need for all of them to coordinate between each other all contribute significantly.
The need for all of them to sometimes coordinate with non-healthcare payers (e.g., property and casualty insurers) for some claims also adds some complications.
The ACA requires insurers to spend 80% of the premiums they take in on direct healthcare costs for their members. Inflated billing and high drug costs are actually helpful if they want to make a nice big profit. To a point, at least - they've gotta find the right balance between profit and people being unable to pay their premiums.
Higher medical expenses don’t help. It only creates higher premiums, which members then blame on greed.
There are plenty of legitimate problems with providers, drug laws, and insurers. But insurers definitely don’t benefit from higher expenses.
AKA, 10% of 2 trillion is more than 10% of 1 trillion.
They are interrelated, yes. But fundamentally we are at a place where providers, especially hospitals, are billing insanely high rates for services compared to other countries.
What Americans think of as “health” “insurance” fits this model. Providers are in the business of soaking their customers the various tax-favored third-party payers for all they can. Of course prices rise continually. People are stirred into a frenzy about rising costs and demand that politicians just do something! The insurers get more tax-favored money that providers happily mop up.
Out of network means the insurer and provider have not previously negotiated a rate. And emergency services are among the most expensive bills out there.
The way to change the game in healthcare is to eject the legacy bullshit. Own the experience as a vertical, don’t accept Medicare/Medicaid and the price controls that come with it and you slice out a lot of the overheads.
I wonder if they will be setting it up as a health insurance cooperative, an organizational structure in which the primary goal is to serve its members, rather than to generate value for external shareholders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_cooperative
It's not at all unprecedented for publicly traded companies to create cooperatives for their employees. Employee credit unions are one example.
Co-ops were part of an early proposal while the ACA was still shaping out, but unfortunately, due to pressure from for-profit health insurers, they were later shot down: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/health/policy/17talkshows....
As a fan of distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism, I would love to see an increase in health insurance cooperatives, and cooperatives in general. Under a cooperative structure, the members/policyholders fully own the company, so it's not beholden to outside shareholders seeking to profit at the expense of its members. Any profits that a cooperative generates are returned back to the members/policyholders in the form of lower premiums, or improvements to services.