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Working at a Facilitation Board
Working at a
facilitation board isn't much different than working anywhere else in the
economy. Work is partly conceptual and partly executionary, and work
complexes are balanced by the usual approach of combining diverse tasks. IFB
work may be more desirable and more empowering than average work complexes in
the economy as a whole, but, if so, greater than average desirability would
be compensated for just as it would in any other workplace, by assignments to
less desirable tasks elsewhere. Greater than average empowerment, which seems
likely, might require rotating people in and out of lFBs after some time
period. Likewise, since working at an lFB is particularly likely to enhance
people's understanding of the interlocking complexities of economic
possibilities, it makes sense to rotate this work, of course taking the
efficiency implications of experience into account as well.
Qualitative Information
In chapters 1
and 2 we emphasized the importance to producers and consumers of
understanding the qualitative, human implications for others of their choices.
Consumers, we argued, need to be able to assess the implications of their
requests for workers. Producers need to know why consumers want what they are
working on, not only so they can feel good about their contributions, but
also to assess how hard they want to work.
We argued
that in addition to quantitative estimates of social costs and benefits,
average incomes, and average benefit/cost ratios, producers and consumers
also need access to qualitative, descriptive information. In this section we
discuss handling this information, a task that might seem daunting.
Consumer and
producer councils can easily write up qualitative summaries of work they do
and motives for their consumption requests. There is no sense overdoing it.
There is no point in everyone saying, "I want milk because it is
nourishing." Producers would provide a general description of the
quality of work involved in their workplace as well as the desirable and
undesirable traits their particular kind of work tends to generate. Consumers
would concentrate on explanations of unusual requests. But people trying to
assess their own choices in light of other people's qualitative descriptions
would want access to summary information at the level of producer and
consumer federations. So the tasks are:
1. To develop
a data-bank system allowing easy access to all this information.
2. To
aggregate the information from lower units into federation level summaries.
Can we imagine an effective way to do this? First, individuals would need "keys"
to extract qualitative information. I would go to a console, and say,
"Let me see what goes into producing such and such good," or
"What is work like in such and such an industry?" or "What is
generating the high consumer demand for refrigerators?" or "Why
does a particular neighborhood want so many more than the national
average?" We could also ask, "What are the strengths and weaknesses
of such and such a product?"
If we think
of all the money spent yearly in the U.S. on advertising-most of which is
misinformation-we can see that the information system we need may not be such
a burden on time and resources after all. Indeed, it may require
significantly less than the total resources and energies currently allotted
to less comprehensive and less truthful, though more repetitive and wasteful
advertising.
Though the
information-handling capabilities of such a system would have to be quite
powerful, only the system's scale distinguishes it from data-bases already
used in offices all over the country. The problem of storing and accessing
descriptive information is nothing new for programmers, nor is establishing a
rote system for updating or otherwise refining such a database, giving it a
simple query system, or having it provide averages. Moreover, even for a
large country, the system we need would not require much more memory and
handling than current systems for large credit-card companies.
For the most
part, IFBs would oversee the qualitative data-base system. Summarizing large
numbers of individual reports would be demanding, but like other tasks it
could be organized to minimize the likelihood that lFBs would bias the
information councils use.
The Logic of Participatory
Planning
Any economy must
have a method for allocating goods and resources. Different ways of
accomplishing this will naturally have different implications for who does
what, who gets what, and what will be produced, consumed, and invested.
Someone
committed to the view that civilization is best served by pitting people
against one another will opt for allocation via competitive markets. Someone
who thinks complicated decisions are best made by experts who should be
materially rewarded for their expertise will opt for central planning. In
either case, according to most economists these are the only feasible
allocation procedures. We claim this "impossibility theorem" is
little more than self-serving prejudice and to prove it we have tried to
spell out how consumers and producers could participate equitably in planning
and in coordinating their joint endeavors - without central planning and
without markets.
Are people
capable of taking control over their own lives, caring for one another, and
acting to enhance their own situations and the situations of their fellow
citizens? Can we have an allocation system that promotes solidarity by
providing information necessary for people to empathize with one another and
by creating a context in which people have not only the means to consider one
another's circumstances but also the incentive to do so? Can we have an
allocation system that promotes variety at the same time that it creates
balanced complexes and egalitarian consumption opportunities tied to effort?
Can we have an allocation system that promotes collective self-management by
permitting every worker and consumer to propose and revise her/his
activities? Can we develop an allocation system that promotes equity rather
than class division and hierarchy?
We think
other economists deny that all this is possible because to admit that people
can conduct their economic affairs in these ways undermines rationalizations
for all forms of existing privileges whereas historically it has been the job
of economists to rationalize these privileges as inevitable.
Economic
activity can be made equitable by ensuring that desirable and undesirable
tasks am shared equally. Fulfilling and rote work can be mixed to create
equitable work complexes. Consumption bundles can be balanced to ensure roughly
equal access to consumption opportunities. Decision making authority can be
assigned more or less in proportion as decisions affect people.
Ironically,
deep prejudices based on years of experience in oppressive circumstances make
seeing all this as a real possibility the most difficult step in the journey
to a better economy. Those who hesitate to undertake the tasks of designing
such an economy do so not because the tasks are so difficult, but because
doing so challenges ingrained prejudices and undermines elite interests.
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