everything that requires going that extra mile. There's no motivator quite like profit.
Yes, this is the question I would want to have answered first, when speaking about a hypothetical non-capitalist economy. Imagine that there is a situation where...
...what would motivate you to do it for them anyway?
One option is to bite the bullet and say "well, in my utopian society such things would simply never be done". It is an option; and maybe living in such society could still be better on average than what we have now.
Yes, a few people would sometimes die because all surgeons would be playing League of Legends online. But everyone accustomed to living in that society would understand that you cannot blame those surgeons, because they made their free decision they were entitled to; and if you have a different opinion about what surgeons should do, instead of complaining, you should have become a surgeon yourself and do what you believe is right. Maybe the number of people who would die this way would be still smaller than the number of people who today die for other capitalism-caused reasons.
But in our society we have this intuition that if you require other people to go an extra mile for your benefit, you should in return do something else for their benefit. Money, token money, barter, or just something nebulous like status. ("I will remove your appendix if you upvote all my LessWrong comments.")
Other solution is coercion. You have a Taskmaster General, people tell him what they need done, and he assigns those tasks to people who have the necessary skills. If you don't do the assigned task, you get shot. No money necessary, and people are still motivated.
This comes with a lot of problems, for example sometimes you are assigned a task that is truly above your skills, but no one believes you (too many people already tried to excuse themselves by claiming something was too difficult for them, but when a gun was put to their heads, they did it successfully), so you fail, and then you get shot. Also, the Taskmaster General will most likely abuse their powers horribly.
Yet another choice -- beyond trade, coercion, and not having things done -- could be perfect brainwashing. A society where people would be psychologically unable to refuse a request for help. Some people already tried this, but they overestimated their brainwashing skills. But for the sake of experiment, let's suppose that the brainwashing is done successfully. We still have a problem of what happens when there are more requests than people can fulfill. You have to make priorities. How specifically? What if no one will give priority to your pressing needs, because they will always prioritize something else, including completely stupid stuff? Maybe the brainwashing should also include making people unable to requests things they don't seriously need. Or maybe, before you make your request officially, a jury of your peers will evaluate whether your request is reasonable. -- But I feel this direction assumes that the brainwashing itself will act like an intelligent and benevolent entity. Otherwise you could get a society where e.g. most people become religious, and most of the tasks done will be religious rituals. People will request them because they will honestly feel that making God happy is the most important thing, and their brainwashed neighbors will be unable to refuse.
Good points. I don't know, I genuinely don't know yet; this problem is by far the biggest obstacle in the face of a non-capitalist economy (all the rest require more easily conceivable technological and institutional infrastructure). Still racking my brains...
(A more detailed, but still incomplete presentation of this little snippet of an idea was actually the theme for a mega-post I got planned, but it looks like every time I open my mouth about a potentially controversial topic my karma barely manages to break even and I get trolled to hell and back, so ...
Note: I'm terrible at making up titles, and I think that the one I gave may give the wrong impression. If anyone has a suggestion on what I should change it to, it would be much appreciated.
As I've been reading articles on less wrong, it seems to me that there are hints of an underlying belief which states that not only is capitalism a good economic paradigm, it shall remain so. Now, I don't mean to say anything like 'Capitalism is Evil!' I think that capitalism can, and has, done a lot of good for humanity.
However, I don't think that capitalism will be the best economic paradigm going into the future. I used to view capitalism as an inherent part of the society we currently live in, with no real economic competition.
I recently changed my views as a result of a book someone recommended to me 'The zero marginal cost society' by Jeremy Rifkin. In it, the author states that we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution as a result of a new energy/production and communications matrix i.e. renewable energies, 3-D printing and the internet.
The author claims that these three things will eventually bring their respective sectors marginal costs to zero. This is significant because of a 'contradiction at the heart of capitalism' (I'm not sure how to phrase this, so excuse me if I butcher it): competition is at the heart of capitalism, with companies constantly undercutting each other as a result of new technologies. These technological improvement allow a company to produce goods/services at a more attractive price whilst retaining a reasonable profit margin. As a result, we get better and better at producing things, and it lets us produce goods at ever decreasing costs. But what happens when the costs of producing something hit rock bottom? That is, they can go no lower.
3D printing presents a situation like this for a huge amount of industries, as all you really need to do is get some designs, plug in some feedstock and have a power source ready. The internet allows people to share their designs for almost zero cost, and renewable energies are on the rise, presenting the avenue of virtually free power. All that's left is the feedstock, and the cost of this is due to the difficulty of producing it. Once we have better robotics, you won't need anyone to mine/cultivate anything, and the whole thing becomes basically free.
And when you can get your goods, energy and communications for basically free, doesn't that undermine the whole capitalist system? Of course, the arguments presented in the book are much more comprehensive, and it details an alternative economic paradigm called the Commons. I'm just paraphrasing here.
Since my knowledge of economics is woefully inadequate, I was wondering if I've made some ridiculous blunder which everyone knows about on this site. Is there some fundamental reason why Jeremy Rifkin's is a crackpot and I'm a fool for listening to him? Or is it more subtle than that? I ask because I felt the arguments in the book pretty compelling, and I want some opinions from people who are much better suited to critiquing this sort of thing than I.
Here is a link to the download page for the essay titled 'The comedy of the Commons' which provides some of the arguments which convinced me:
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1828/
A lecture about the Commons itself:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf
And a paper (?) about governing the commons:
http://www.kuhlen.name/MATERIALIEN/eDok/governing_the_commons1.pdf
And here is a link to the author's page, along with some links to articles about the book:
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Milestones.cfm
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Press--Articles.cfm
An article displaying some of the sheer potential of 3D printers, and how it has the potential to change society in a major way:
http://singularityhub.com/2012/08/22/3d-printers-may-someday-construct-homes-in-less-than-a-day/
Edit: Drat! I forgot about the stupid questions thread. Should I delete this and repost it there? I mean, I hope to discuss this topic with others, so it seems suitable for the DISCUSSION board, but it may also be very stupid. Advice would be appreciated.