next-system-project-comparative-framework

Related: Crowd Control

"'Questions for Authors of Works on New Models and Systems'" -- TheNextSystem.org/next-system-project-comparative-framework

>> Core Goals. Briefly, what are the principal, core goals your model or system seeks to realize?  Partly, this is a question about the scope of the conceptualization you have developed, so be sure to note whether it speaks to economic, social, political, and environmental outcomes or only some of these.

Design a new way for groups to organize production that adjusts the flow of value between individuals within the group in 4 ways:

Product is the investor's return.
Promise is a worker's investment.
Profit is the payer's investment.
Subgroups may split the property.

These rules are applied to private land and tools aquired debt-free through crowdfunding.
This property is used to establish and maintain production of those worker's basic needs.

===Economic
The economic scope is defined by the amount of property and promises under the Intra Owner Trade Agreement (IOTA).

But since profit will be treated as the payer's investment in more property, the number and/or size of groups will grow for as long as any group is selling surplus at a profit.

The external economy will become less crucial as groups of groups buy and build replacements for eventually every good service.

===Social
The quality of life will initially be quite low, especially for the pilot project, but will increase quickly as the first shared structures are built that should have micro apartments for transitional housing.

Housing should be designed around low-tech solutions such as straw-bale, passive-solar, evaporative-cooling, etc.

===Political
The system does not address political representation beyond the agreement between each individual.  There is no defined central control structure.

===Environmental
The environmental impact is restricted to the property under contract.

The scale of pilot project should probably be around 100 to 1,000 investors of money, 10 to 100 investors of work, and 10 to 100 acres of land.

>> Major Changes.  What are the principal changes you envision in the cur rent system - the major differences between what you envision and what we have today?

By changing the purpose of ownership, work, and profit, these rules adjust the tragectory and purpose of production, and eventually all of society, toward localized abundance and permanent solutions.

Workers and other investors gain real property ownership in all the property needed to maintain an extremely high quality of life without paying roalties to others.

This assures delivery of all goods and services the group needs, for long as they can continue to supply the work required.

When we own property simply because we want product, and when work is something to be minimized, automation and robotics are seen as solutions.

Treating profit as the payer's investment causes those who overpay to slowly gain the property required to avoid paying profit in the future.

>> Principal Means. What are the principal means (policies, institutions, behaviors, whatever) through which each of your core goals is pursued?

Crowdfunding is used to aquire land and tools without debt to create a privately owned, mostly-self-sustained microcity.

Policy enforced through an internal set of rules as a sort of "Terms of Operation" or Constitution similar in purpose to an HOA or Tenancy in Common Agreement.

Though every group has the freedom to choose what they want to produce, some life-critical institutions are required for the safety of the group, and so all food, medicine, soap, paper, cloth, building materials, etc. will ideally (eventually) be created within that cell.  Both immediate needs and Vertical Integration must be part of how investments are used to scale.

Behavior is modified by changing rewards for investing and working - finally making it safe to allow full abundance and at-cost access.

>> Geographic Scope. What is the geographic area covered by the model? If the nation-state, specify which ones or what category you address.

The pilot project probably needs between 10 and 100 acres of farm land.

The quantity and variety of goods and services will be limited in the beginning, but 3 months is enough to grow grains, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, spices, chickens.  On the other hand, some nut trees may not produce for 20 years.

If any group, subgroup or individual sells any surplus, they may charge any price, but must treat some percentage of profit as the payer's investment, causing those who come late to incrementally gain ownership in their own property and eventually to also avoid paying profit for that product.

This approach to profit-sharing uses those funds to buy more land and tools which vest to the payers, causing those latecomers to incrementally become owners in the growth of this system, usually by purchasing more farm land and other needed startup property.

Treating profit as the payer's investment causes all consumers to slowly gain ownership in all the property needed to produce all they need and so eventually also allows them access without paying profit, interest or economic-rent.

Individuals may own as much property as they can afford, and may arbitrarily refuse to sell what appears to be surplus.

>> Temporal Scope. Recognizing the large uncertainties, if there is a transition to the revised system about which you write, what would you suggest as a timeframe for the new system to take shape? Where on the spectrum from imminently practicable to purely speculative would you place your proposals?

This system must boot in stages, with the pilot project likely more expensive the smaller and difficult since we will learn so much and attract more wisdom.

The timeframe of completion depends mostly on how fast we can scale, and that can be partly adjusted by changing the percentage of profit used NOT as the payer's investment.

>> Theory of Change. What factors or forces might drive deep change towards the system you envision? What is the explicit or implicit theory of change in your work? What is the importance of crises? Of social movements? Of available examples of change? What's the biggest problem or impediment for adoption of your model?

Identify property, product, promises and profit as vectors of production that may be steered, even back upon themselves, to balance and stabilize the system.

>> Specifics: Economy. Insofar as your work addresses the nature of the economy, how (if at all) do the following fit into the future you envision?

>>> (a) How are productive assets and businesses owned? Does ownership differ at different scales (community, nation, etc.)? Do forms of ownership vary by economic sector (banking, manufacturing, health care, etc.)?
Groups use the IOTA to own and share property under their direct control.

>>>(b) How are public and private investment decisions made?
By each individual co-owner making their desire known to the other co-owners.

>>>(c) What is the role of private profit and the profit motive? Who owns and controls economic surplus?
Each individual owner of property is the individual owner of the product in that same amount.

Each individual co-owner of product may arbitrarily declare surplus as they see fit.

Some percentage of profit must be treated as the payer's investment as described, but that amount is not a strict number as much as it is a lever to pull.  Compare with percentages charged for interest.

>>>(d) What is the role of the market for goods and services? For employment? Other?
The market sets price when selling surplus and when interacting with the outside economic system in general.

Each co-owner accepts the product itself as ROI, so no final purchase occurs.  This causes the "market price" for goods and services produced onsite to be exactly the costs of production because the final purchase of the product does not occur - or rather, it happened when the Sources and Skills were secured.

Workers are paid in real property ownership over the Sources required to produce the goods and services they need.

Each owner may mark some product as surplus, but is never required.

Any product that is sold, exchanged, distributed,  to others without

>>>(e) What is the role of planning in your model? How is it structured? How, if at all, made democratic?

Planning

There is no central authority.  Governance is designed by each group and must meet IOTA Terms of Operation to qualify as a For-Product entity.

>>>(f) How are the international economy and economic integration handled?

>>>(g) How do you address economic localization, globalization, decentralization, 'glocalization,' and similar issues? Where is the primary locus of economic life?

>>>(h) How do economic competition and cooperation play out?

>>>(i) Do commodification, commercialization, and the commons surface in your analysis?

>>>(j) How is private property handled in your analysis?

>>>(k) What mix of business enterprise sizes do you envision?

>>>(l) How do you envision the future of the large corporation and what specific measures do you envision for corporate governance and control, internal and external?

>>>(m) What role do you see for innovative corporate forms, coops, public enterprise, social enterprise, and public-private hybrids?

>>>(n) What is the evolution of the workweek (hours worked, say, per year)?

>>>(o) What is the envisioned future of organized labor?

>>>(p) What are the roles of economic growth and GDP as a measure of growth in your system? What is the priority of growth at the national and company levels?

>>>(q) How is money created and allocated?

>>>Some Specifics: Society
>>>(a) How do you envision the future course of income and wealth inequality? What factors affect these results? How do you envision the future course of economic poverty? What factors affect these results?

>>>(b) Are special measures envisioned to protect and enhance children and families? To advance the underprivileged? To promote care-giving and mutual responsibility?

>>>(c) How do racial, ethnic, and religious justice figure in your work?

>>>(d) What role do gender and gender issues play in your work?

>>>(e) What, specifically, is the role of community in your model? What measures and factors affect community health, wealth ('social capital'), and solidarity, and how central are local life, neighborhoods, towns and cities?

>>>(f) Do you envision a change of values, culture and consciousness as important to the evolution of a new system? If so, how do these changes occur?

>>>(g) What are the roles of the consumer, consumerism, and advertising in the system you envision? Self-provisioning? Sharing, renting, and bartering?

>>>(h) How do "leisure" activities-including volunteering, care-giving, continuing learning-figure in your work?

>>>Some Specifics: Environment
>>>(a) If your system addresses environmental concerns, how do you conceptualize "the environment"? Do you envision the economy as nested in and dependent on the world of nature and its systems of life?

>>>(b) Do you address a rights-based environmentalism (e.g. right to clean water) and the idea that nature has legal rights? Do we have duties to other species and living systems? Are any of your goals non-anthropocentric?

>>>(c) Do you envision addressing environmental issues outside the cur rent framework of environmental approaches and policies (e.g. by challenging consumerism, GDP growth, etc.)?

>>>(d) How do you handle environment-economy interactions, trade-offs, and interdependencies?

>>>(e) How do you address transnational and global-scale environmental challenges?

>>>(f) Does your work explore the links between large-scale environmental challenges (like climate change) and other economic and political issues?

>>>Some Specifics: Polity
>>>(a) To what degree would your proposed model require Constitutional change? What specifically might be required or recommended?
No changes are required at the government level.

>>>(b) Does your model have anything to say about liberty and how it may or may not relate to the design of your model? And how, specifically, is liberty nurtured and protected?

>>>(c) How does your model address questions of political and institutional power?

>>>(d) How does your model deal with problems of scale? How much decentralization does it include for large systems? How would decentralization be structured?
Decentralization occurs in these ways:
Profit is the payer's investment.
Subgroups may split the property.

>>>(e) Does your work address issues of foreign policy, international relations, regional integration, military policy and spending, war and peace, i.e. the international context of the new system? If so, how?

>>>(f) At different political levels, what polity and what political conditions are implicit or explicit in getting to success?

>>>(g) There is an ongoing critique of representative government and exploration of direct, "strong," and deliberative democracy. Does any of this figure in your framework? If so, how?

>>>(h) Milton Friedman, among others, believed that only a crisis produced real change. Another old expression is that "good government is just the same old government in a helluva fright." Do you examine crisis-driven political change and crisis preparedness?

>>>(i) How central is government in the future you envision, both in getting there and staying there?

>>>(j) In the system you write about, what are the appropriate levels of government expenditure or government as a share of the economy and how are these levels achieved?
That is decided between the individuals of each group.

>>>(k) Do you envision social movements as important in driving political change and action? If so, can you elaborate on how this happens?
A social movement can make real and lasting change through a carefully crafted constitution applied to real property ownership.

>>>Real-World Examples, Experiments and Models
>>>(a) Are there specific real-world examples or experiments you can point to that embody your model or system or exemplify important elements of your approach?

No.

>>>(b) Are there other models that you see yourself aligned with or close to yours?

The GNU GPL and the Free Software movement.
Open Source Ecology.
Open Source Circular Economy.