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Posts Tagged ‘Fred’

In Detail: Contribution & Consumption

28 Oct

I just had an unbelievably bad idea for an Inside the Actor’s Studio-style interview show. “Today on In Detail, we’ll be talking to the Gross National Product. So, GNP, what made you decide that you wanted to be an economic metric?”

Sorry about that, too much tea and not enough sleep. I promise that is not what this series is about. Instead, it’s a chance to go through some of the underlying elements of technosocialism that have been touched on in other essays but not explained fully. Today we’re going to be covering the ideas of Contribution and Consumption, the role they play in a technosocialist society, and how they differ from a currency-based model.

When people ask me what I’m working on, my usual answer is “a post-currency social and economic model.” This generally surprises those who assumed that it was my diary, or possibly fan-fiction poetry, and they tend to assume that I’m joking. But even for those prepared to accept the statement at face value, it tends to be a confusing one. Currency is deeply engrained in our culture as the only possible way an economy can flow, and the only alternative people can think of is the barter system, which is a pre-currency rather than a post-currency system. So let’s start our discussion with a brief overview of the history and role of currency in our current economic system.

Currency has evolved a number of times in different parts of the world, but it tends to start at one of two roots: grain or shiny things. As surplus agriculture developed and towns as we know them began to form, graneries were built to protect grain stores from moisture, mice, and other threats. Rather than trying to track whose wheat was whose, these granaries issued representative tokens. If you dropped off five pounds of wheat, you got tokens entitling you to pick five pounds of wheat back up. Because grains were central to the food supply, the tokens could often traded to the emerging non-farming artisan class in exchange for goods more easily than farmers could carry around grain for barter, and so they became a currency. The idea of a currency backed by wheat or rice might seem quaint to today’s modern American, but it actually makes quite a lot of sense. It just strikes us as odd because our currency evolved from a system based on shiny things.

The key to a shiny-things currency was rarity and beauty. A particular metal or type of shell had to be available in an area but fairly rare or labor intensive to collect. It would become highly prized as a decoration and sign of status, and something which everyone in the community would want, the same way they would all want grain in a grain-based economy. The universal desire for the shiny thing would make it universally barterable, and from there it would become a currency. In the case of metals, the minting of coins was started to provide guarentees of the purity and quantity of the metal being traded, and from there cultures often switched to coins and paper money backed by the metal rather than made of the metal itself.

So what is currency, really? Why would I as a merchant accept a piece of shiny metal (or these days, a series of electronic digits which represent a promise of a piece of paper which is no longer connected even to the shiny metal) in exchange for tangible, useful goods? My favorite explanation of this actually comes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. One of the main characters has been placed in charge of the Royal Mint and is wondering just what makes a dollar coin worth a dollar. “It was the city, he realized. The city said, in exchange for that dollar we will give you all these things. The value wasn’t in the coin, or even in the gold that backed it. It was in the potential of the city itself.” When I sell you a hat for $20, what I am really getting from you is the right to request $20 worth of goods and services from other members of society.

What technosocialism attempts to do is erase this last illusion of individual-to-individual exchange, and instead focus on the exchange between the individual and society. Because if I’ve made a hat worth $20, I don’t actually care whether I’ve gotten $20 from the person now wearing the hat. It might have been a gift for someone else. All I care about is being able to now $20 worth of food from the grocery store, or $20 worth of electricity from the electric company. In our current system, that means that the hat needs to go to someone who currently has $20 they’re willing to part with, which is why drops in employment tend to spiral into larger recessions. Because technosocialism disconnects the two, it provides a more stable demand and thus a more stable economy.

So let’s start at the beginning. Just what are Contribution and Consumption? Basically, Contribution is a measure of the benefit you have given to society. Goods you have produced, services you have performed, etc.. Consumption is a measure of what you have taken from society, either in the form of physical goods or in the labor of others. What makes this model different from a currency-based model is that there are times when Contribution can occur without Consumption, and vice-versa. When someone reads a book, the author of that book has aided in the education or entertainment of that citizen, an inarguable Contribution to society. But the person reading the book isn’t taking anything away from society. There’s no limit on the number of people who can read the book, and it doesn’t take the author any longer to write if one more person reads it. No consumption takes place.

Those of you familar with economics in a more traditional currency-based approach are probably yelling something about inflation right now. There are two reasons not to. Firstly, because essays can’t hear you and yelling at them will make people think that you are insane. Secondly, because inflation is something that happens to currency, and this is not a currency-based system. It’s easy to slip into a familiar mindset and imagine a Contribution account where you earn Contribution credits and then spend them. But that’s not the case. Consumption and Contribution scores exist completely indepentently, and what matters in terms of buying power is the ratio between the two. A person’s Contribution or Consumption score is not a balance that goes up or down, but a lifetime tally of everything that person has consumed from or contributed to society.

So how are Contribution and Consumption values for a given item or service determined? Through a free market. This is the part where people tend to get really confused, if they weren’t already. If you’ve eliminated currency, and you’ve eliminated the idea of the individual-to-individual exchange, how can you have a free market? In some ways, more easily. We’ve already looked in an earlier essay at the idea of a single market being able to deal more directly with supply and demand, so now let’s look in a bit more detail at the mechanisms behind that. Fred, our individual craftsman of yesterchapter, has made a number of hats. Bill is one of a number of citizens who would like to have a hat. They both enter this information into the Market. Fred takes pictures of each hat, enters in the sizing information for each, is given the information that the materials and labor involved in the hat set the starting value of the hat at 20cnt, and officially marks them as available.

Now it’s Bill’s turn. He goes into the Market and opens the Clothing>Accessories>Hats section. He further refines his search by requiring the tags “flat cap” and “wool”, sets the color to grey, and enters his head size. Now, depending on how unusual that combination of factors is, he may or may not get any results. If he doesn’t, he has the option of expanding his search to the regional or national system, or submitting a Request into the Market describing the hat he’s looking for. In this case, however, he has several hats to choose from, including one of Fred’s. Each hat is listed with pictures, information about sizing and materials, and reviews of products made by the same artisan/manufacturor. Each also lists the Consumption value of the hat, which is based on the current market value of the various supplies used to make the hat, as well as for the labor required. A surge in demand for wool suits, for example, would also raise the Consumption value of hats made from the same wool cloth. And demand for wool knitting yarn would affect the Consumption Value of both hats and suits, since they use the same base material. This initial Consumption Value may go up if demand for the item in question is particularly high, but more frequently it will go down if the item is left unclaimed for a lengthy period of time.

So, after reviewing all of the hats on offer, Bill decides that he wants the hat made by Fred. He puts in his request for the hat and goes off to do something else. Meanwhile, Steve puts in a request for the same hat. (You can’t trust imaginary guitarists. They sneak up at the last minute.) There’s only one hat, so now the system has to decide who the hat goes to. In general, auctions are a good way to set values, but they give a definite advantage to the richer party. Thus, the auction mechanism at the heart of the Market is not based on straight amounts, it works through the citizens’ ratios. Let’s say that Bill’s residual Contribution from his various factory ventures, added to his direct Contribution, puts his Contribution score at 400,000Cnt and his reasonably large house, nice clothes, etc. puts his Consumption score at 350,000Cns. His C/C ratio is therefore 1.14285 and his Buffer is 50k. Steve, by contrast, lives far more modestly. His work as a laborer and his royalties as a guitarist only add up to a Contribution score of 50,000. On the other hand, he has spent most of his adult life living in baseline apartments and living as cheaply as he can. His Consumption score is only 38,000, making his ratio 1.31579 and his Buffer 12k.

When Bill put in his request for the hat, he was told that the initial Consumption value of the hat, 25Cns, would lower his ratio by .000074. He was then asked how much of his ratio he was willing to bid. He entered 0.00012. When Steve entered his request, he couldn’t see Bill’s request. He was only told that the initial Consumption value of 25Csv would lower his ratio by .00086, and asked how much ratio he was willing to spend. Being a bit of a cheapskate, he leaves it at the minimum bid.

Bidding stays open for 24 hours after the item is listed. In this case, due to the influence of an omnipotent narrator who wants to get on with the story, no one else bids. Two bids need to be identified here. The winning bid is determined by the ratio changes. Steve’s bid of .00086 is clearly higher than Bill’s of .00012. Steve gets the hat, and his Consumption score is increased to 38,025. But Fred’s Contribution earning for the hat hasn’t been determined yet, and it isn’t based on the winning bid, but the highest bid. After all, Bill’s bid was higher in actual Csv terms. By bidding a ratio change of .00012, he was indicated a willingness to have 38.942 Csv added to his consumption score. In a traditional individual-to-individual exchange economy, Fred would have beeen able to get the equivalent of 38.942Csv in currency from Bill. And so the Contribution that he earns for making the hat and putting it into the Market is the highest bid, and his Contribution is increased by 38.942. Let’s look at who is advantaged and disadvantaged in this ratio-as-buying-power model. One the one hand, those working with lower total C/C scores have a definite advantage when it comes to winning an individual item. Their actual Csv charge is lower to make the same ratio bid. On the other hand, this means that even relatively minor purchases can eat up significant amounts of their ratio score. Steve won the hat over Bill because the 25Csv was equivalent to a .00086 ratio change, but conversely that meant that he could not bid less than .00086. Bill will be able to bid on other hats, and is likely to eventually get one at close to 25Csv, which will have a much smaller effect on his ratio than it did on Steve’s.

Another advantage of the lifetime ratio model is that it includes a built-in retirement system. Someone who works to the age of 65 while maintaining a good ratio will probably have quite high scores in both Contribution and Consumption. Even Steve with his moderate lifestyle would likely reach a score of 250,000/190,000 by the time he’s 65. At that point, the “inertia” of a ratio based on such large numbers would mean that he could continue a moderate amount of consumption for many years even without earning additional Contribution before his ratio was seriously affected. There’ll be another essay about seniors and other vulnerable members of society later, but I thought I’d mention it while I’m here.

The last thing I’d like to bring up before ending the essay is that I know this sounds overly complicated and confusing. At face value, it certainly seems harder than the current money-for-goods exchange. But that current model is actually far more complex than is generally believed. The merchant sets his his price based on factors ranging from oil prices to the average income in the area, and citizens’ ability to buy the goods depends on unemployment, real estate prices, and the general availability of credit. It’s at least as complex as the Market I’m proposing, but the complexity is hidden away and only the financially educated few can begin to unravel how it works. Every algorithm of the Technosocialist Market is completely transparent, to be understood and even fine-tuned by the general citizenry as needed. And at the same time, the user interface hides the calculations involved from users who are not interested in them, making the Market as easy to use as any modern e-commerce website.

 
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Open-Sourcing the Post Office

09 Jul

So far in these essays, I’ve talked quite a bit about things are made, and how things are distributed. But how do physical objects get from the point of production to the point of consumption? And while we’re at it, how do people get from point a to point b?

The two are connected more than you might think, because the decentralization of the technosocialist model applies to the postal system as well. Basically, as people go about their business they have the option of bringing packages with them. Let’s try another adventure with imaginary people to see how it would work.

Fred is running some errands. He needs to go to a Depot that specializes in fabric, meet some friends for lunch, and visit a student who he is teaching to juggle. He plans to walk to the Depot, since it’s only half a mile and it’s a nice day outside, but both the restaurant where he is meeting his friends and his student’s house are farther away and he plans to take public transportation. He enters all of this into the system, as well as the dimensions of his knapsack, and is shown that with minor detours to his trip, there are a variety of packages that he can help transport. He begins his journey.

Right in his apartment building, there are two packages to be picked up. He finds them in the outgoing mail box in the lobby and places them in his knapsack. Sensors in his personal computing device register the tags in the packages and confirm to the system that he has picked them up. One of the packages is only going a few streets away, and he drops it off in the incoming mail box of the building it’s addressed for, and sensors in the mailbox acknowledge the delivery. The other stays in his pack for the time being as he continues his trip. Now he picks up another package from a mail transfer point at an intersection. These transfer points are basically boxes that act as temporary storage locations for packages once the direction the current bearer is going and the direction the package needs to go are no longer the same. For example, a package that needs to go northwest of its starting point might be initially picked up by someone simply going north, and left in a mail transfer point once it had gone sufficiently north and now needed to go west. With these two in his pack, he makes his way to the fabric Depot.

After doing his shopping, he alerts the system that he is looking for a ride from the Depot to the restaurant. Rather than having a set of fixed bus routes that run whether or not there are passengers who need them, the system collects real-time information from people wishing to travel and dynamically routes busses in the most efficient manner. Depending on the number of other people traveling that day, he may have a short wait, and he may be asked to walk a few blocks so that the bus can pick him up while remaining on a more direct route. Eventually the bus comes, and he is taken to the restaurant. After lunch he drops off both of his packages at a downtown mail transfer station and picks up several more that are going to the neighborhood where his student lives. He is unfamiliar with this part of downtown, but the system lets him know that he is only a couple of blocks away from a light rail station and that the light rail will take him to within blocks of his student’s house. He makes his way to the light rail station, picks up several more packages going to his student’s neighborhood from the large mail transfer station there, and gets on the train. After a brief ride he gets off the train at the right stop, drops of several of his packages at the nearby mail transfer station, picks up an additional local one, and makes his way to his student’s house, dropping off the packages still in his possession at their destinations on the way. After giving his juggling lesson, he tells the system to find him a bus home, and because it’s getting close to dinner time and he’s a bit tired, he opts not to carry any more packages.

Now let’s look at Fred’s Contribution and Consumption during his travels. Not counting whatever he obtained at the Depot and his meal at the restaurant, he has not been charged any Consumption credit. Getting from point A to point B is something that all citizens have to do from time to time, and by using the dynamicaly-routed public transportation Fred has automatically done that as efficiently as possible. Now how about Contribution for all of that mail carrying he was doing? Contribution credit for carrying mail is determined by a similar supply and demand calculation to those that pop up everywhere else in technosocialism. The total number of package-miles needed is compared to the number of citizens willing to carry those packages and for how far, and the Contribution value of each package-mile is determined appropriately. Fred is then rewarded, not on a per-package basis, but based on the distance that he carries each package.

So there is the basic outline of the postal and public transit systems. But there are a few other issues that I’d like to address while I’m on the subject. First, the security of the mail. Most people will have concerns about having anyone who happens to be passing through handling their mail. The key is the interaction between the tags in the packages, the system as a whole, and individuals’ personal computer units. The only people who can open a mail transfer station or an outgoing mailbox are those who have been assigned to pick up a package from that mailbox or who are the addressee of a package inside. Once a package is removed from the mailbox, the personal computer of the person removing it recognizes the tracking tag on the package and registers the transfer of possession. If a package is removed without the remover officially taking possession within a set time limit, the package is flagged and alarms will sound whenever the tracking tags on the package come within range of a reciever. Depending on technology levels and the level of detail in item tracking, this would make it very difficult for items stolen in this way to be of use to those living in the borders of such a society. I will be addressing the details of a technosocialist law enforcement system in a later essay.

Secondly, there is the matter of professional mail handlers. Depending on how much citizens in a given area move around and how much mail is being sent, relying on the efforts of those who were traveling anyway may not be enough to ensure delivery of all of the local mail. In this case, demand for the transportation of mail would probably raise the Contribution value of that transportation to the point that people would consider devoting themselves to it full time. In this case, the system should not have too much trouble designing efficient routes for the collection and distribution of all local mail based on the mail to be distributed that day. One interesting aspect of the rewarding of such work is that on the sunny spring days when everyone thinks that they would like to be a mailman, the Contribution value of carrying the mail would probably be much lower, and it would rise on days with bad weather. Someone with a good set of rain gear and a waterproof satchel could probably maintain quite a nice C/C ratio by carrying the mail three or four times a month on stormy days.

Thirdly, there is the matter of letters. You’ll have noticed that I’ve been using ‘mail’ and ‘packages’ more or less interchangably in this description of the system, and that’s intentional. The primary purpose of the mail system under technosocialism is the moving of physical objects. Bills and advertisements, two of the primary staples of the current postal system, would not exist in a technosocialist economy, and in a society so thouroughly permeated with technology it would be a matter of course that all informational and personal correspondence would take place electronically.

 
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Pickiness and Consumption

05 Jul

Let’s do a quick refresher on the current cast of imaginary people who have participated in our examples so far: we have Fred, the individual craftsman, Bill, the entrepreneur who invented the ear swab machine, George, the mechanical engineer who helped him build it, and Steve, the guitarist who works at the plant. They are all very different people, but they’re all humans and that means they all have one thing in common: they all eat food. This essay isn’t actually going to be about food. It’s going to be about choices, Consumption, and how they interact. But food is a very handy way of illustrating this.

We’ll start with Fred. Fred is a simple guy with simple tastes. He prefers to keep his Consumption score as low as possible because he likes to work on projects as they seem interesting at the time without facing too much pressure to increase his Contribution score. So when Fred orders his food for the week, he just orders 21 servings of “Food”. The system determines the food that is currently in the least demand relative to its supply, in this case a sort of hardtack nutritional biscuit, and after confirming that these are acceptable to Fred, sends him 21 servings of it. Fred is charged no Consumption credit for this food, because food is part of each citizen’s Material Rights.

Steve has similar concerns about keeping his Consumption score low, but he also prefers more variety in his diet, so he orders 21 servings of “Food”, but requests that it be distributed among at least 15 different types. The system determines the 15 foods currently in the least demand, confirms them with Steve, and sends him some of each. Steve is charged Consumption credit for the differences in determined Consumption Value between the lowest-demand food and the other 14, but this charge is very small because none of the foods are in particularly high demand.

Bill, meanwhile, does not worry much about keeping his Consumption low. Between the residual Contribution he is earning from the ear swab factory and his other projects, he doesn’t have much trouble maintaining a good C/C ratio, and besides that he is a real foodie. He plans out a full menu for the week, ordering servings of “Food>Bread>Challah”, “Food>Meat>Beef>Steak”, etc.. The system determines the suppliers in each category in the least demand, and sends its list to Bill.  Bill makes a few changes and submits his final order. As with Steve, he is charged Consumption credit for the difference between each item and the lowest-demand food, in this case a much more considerable amount.

Last but not least, we have George. George has a typical engineer’s Aspergian temperment, and he is extremely picky about his food. In fact, he prefers to have exactly the same thing for every meal, and he orders 21 servings of “Food>Bread>Crackers>Hardtack>Brand:Bluebird’s Nutritional Biscuits>Flavor:Original”. In other words, he gets as specific as he possibly could and narrows the field to a single possible product. The system has no choices to make, and so simply confirms with him the Consumption credit that he will be charged for that week, and sends it to him. He is charged Consumption credit for the difference between what he ordered and the least-demand food, which in this case is nothing. He happened to be ordering the same thing that Fred got by default. Yes, it’s a weird coincidence, but it’s my imaginary scenario and I can do what I want. Anyway, I include it as an example to highlight the fact that it’s not the degree of specificity that raises the Consumption value of a food item. In most cases, being more specific will result in a higher Consumption value, simply because the system automatically picks the cheapest option when it can. But people are not automatically penalized for expressing preferences if those preferences do not lead to consumption of a product that is in higher demand.

 
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Technosocialism and the Arts

27 Jun

Let’s look back at our friend Steve, who was doing shift work while trying to make it as a guitarist. What does that mean? How do artists support themselves in a society with no currency? How is Contribution measured when it is nearly impossible to calculate supply and demand for something like music? To put it simply, their reward is determined by the number of people who enjoy their work. When an artist makes a recording, it is it is made freely available to the public. Citizens can then indicate whether or not they like the song as they listen to it, and Contribution credit is awarded appropriately.

Let’s say that Steve eventually records a song that gains a moderate amount of popularity. Bill, George, and Fred all listen to it. Bill doesn’t like it. Apparently he isn’t a fan of fingerpicking guitar. So he indicates that he doesn’t like it, and there is no impact on Steve’s Contribution score from Bill’s having listened to it. George and Fred, on the other hand, both like it. George adds it to a playlist he has put together specifically for fingerpicking guitar. He doesn’t often listen to music, but he does like to listen to guitar while he’s cooking, so out of two hundred song-plays that George hears in a given month, Steve’s song comes up four times. Fred, on the other hand, listens to music constantly while he’s working. He adds Steve’s song to his main “random mix” playlist, and over the same month he hears it forty times out of the 3600 song-plays he hears. So which of them causes Steve to receive more Contribution credit? George. While Fred listened to the song more in absolute terms, George gave it a greater percentage of his “musical attention” for lack of a better term. Since quantifying someone’s enjoyment of any art is more or less impossible, we have to use their behavior as a more easily quantified metric.

So to restate all of this in a drier way with no imaginary people, each citizen’s attention and enjoyment is worth a certain amount of Contribution credit. The ways they choose to spend their time determines how that credit is distributed. There is one other key point: citizens are never charged Consumption credit for non-physical consumption of art. After all, when a book, movie, or piece of music is enjoyed electronically, no societal resources are being consumed except for bandwidth. Infinitely reproducable works of art like these can only improve the societal conversation and people should never be discouraged from participating.

Now how about physical pieces of art? They are actually much easier to calculate Contribution for. Any citizen can add a section to their Profile displaying their artwork. Other people who admire it can subscribe as fans of their artwork. When the artist puts a new piece of work into the Depot system, subscribers will automatically be notified and will have the opportunity to view the work and submit requests. From there, the standard Depot distribution system applies. When it comes to physical art, citizens are charged a Consumption value because they are recieving a physical object which then becomes unavailable to the rest of society.

One place where it gets a bit tricky is reproductions of physical art, eg. posters printed with the image of a painting. While Contribution credit for the artist can be determined the same way that it would be for music or books, Consumption credit for the purchaser becomes more complicated. Generally the best way to handle this will be basing the Consumption charge on the total supply and demand for poster printing regardless of the poster being printed.

There’s a reason that Adam Smith made the division of labor the first major topic he covered in The Wealth of Nations. Given a fixed labor force, division of labor and the production line dramatically increases the material wealth that can be created. Later on in his book, Smith also warns strenuously against the social impact of dividing labor too specificly, because workers acting as nothing but automatic machines rapidly lose pride in and satisfaction from their work, and over time may lose the finer intellectual senses that make us human. So it’s important not to see it as an unmitigated good. But it certainly does have a place in society and it’s important that it be possible under technosocialism. But how to allocate Contribution credit, and how to distribute the goods that are produced? It’s time for another adventure with imaginary people.

Meet Bill, George, and Steve. Bill is an entrepreneur with a great new idea for making cotton ear swabs out of scrap cotton and paper. George is a mechanical engineer. Steve is an amateur guitarist who wants to find a way to improve his Contribution score part time without having it interfere with his music. Bill registers his idea and gets in touch with George through the Skills Needed/Available (SNA) system. Together, they design a largely mechanized facility that takes either raw cotton or scrap cotton fabric, as well as paper that has been sorted for recycling, and with the aid of a small number of workers, turns them into cotton ear swabs. Once the system has determined there is sufficient demand for ear swabs and a randomly selected panel of engineers has confirmed that the design for the facility is sound, the various tasks required to build it are entered into the SNA system. At this point George goes on to other projects, his work as a designer finished, but Bill stays on to supervise the construction and the opening of the facility. While he’s waiting, he creates a profile for the facility in the Manufacturing section of the SNA system. This profile includes primarily the number of people required for the plant to operate, the materials required to occupy a full compliment of workers for a shift, and the quantity of ear swabs that will be produced in that time. He also designs the training program and qualification test for workers to pass before they’re able to work independently in the facility. These training programs and tests can be edited later by workers, but it’s important to have a solid base to start from.

Eventually the facility is finished and ready to begin production. This is where Steve comes in. Because Steve prefers to avoid long-term commitments that might interfere with club gigs he might get or prevent him from working on a song when he has a good idea, he gets most of his work through the Shift Work section of the SNA system. He maintains a full profile on the SNA, which tracks his qualifications, his experience, and his preferences. He can sort through available jobs manually or allow the SNA system to play matchmaker, and point him towards nearby jobs he is qualified to do that require labor. In this case, he is searching in the evening for shift work the next afternoon, and using the system’s matchmaking feature. The system looks through the facilities requiring labor for that shift, and selects several nearby facilities: a match factory where Steve has worked before and on whose equipment he has already been certified, a bakery that needs a one day temp to help move some heavy boxes, and our new cotton ear swab factory. In this case, because it is closer to his apartment and only needs one person to meet its minimum staffing level for that shift, it recommends the ear swab factory. And Steve, who doesn’t feel like lifting boxes all day and prefers something new to yet another shift at match factory, agrees to give it a try. Before his shift the next day, he takes and passes the online certification course on the ear swab factory’s equipment, which takes him about an hour and for which he gets a small amount of Contribution credit.

So the next day, Steve goes in, and he and five other people use the facility to produce 600 boxes of cotton ear swabs. What happens next? If mass-produced consumable commodities like these were placed in the same system as Fred and his handmade hats, they would swamp it and make it far more difficult to find the more individual items. Ear swabs have two important charactaristics that make them work well for this example: they are consumable and thus needed on a regular basis, and they are all largely the same. While there may be occasional specialist types of ear swab, and there may be occasional differences in materials, for the most part they do not come in different flavors, styles, or sizes. So when Bill is entering the facility’s information into the manufacturing system, he can simply categorize the product as (for example) Consumables> Bath & Body> Hygiene> Ear Swabs> Standard. Meanwhile Fred, our craftsman who turns out to have unusually waxy ears, goes through 60 ear swabs per month. He can go through the Recurring Request system and enter his need for 60 swabs per month. If he has previously liked the ear swabs made through Bill’s process better than others, he can specificly request swabs from that facility, but the specificity of his request may mean that he is charged a higher Consumption value than he might be otherwise if there is a great deal of demand for Bill’s ear swabs specifically and a larger supply of swabs from other manufacturers. The system tracks who in society is in need of ear swabs and ships them out appropriately, using the same priorities for people with high Contribution and low Consumption that we saw in the case of Fred’s handmade goods.

But how is the Contribution value attributed when so many people’s work went into producing those 600 boxes of swabs? Bill had the initial idea and supervising the setting up of the facility, George drew up the plans, Steve and his fellows did the actual manufacturing, and the materials were supplied by even more people who don’t get names because they’re only tangentially in the story and I can’t be bothered. Who gets how much Contribution credit?

Let’s start with the suppliers of the materials because they’re relatively simple. The Contribution value of materials supplied to the facility depends on the demand for that facility’s product at the time the materials are contributed. A supplier with two hundred pounds of recyclable paper can choose to bring that to a toilet paper factory or to our ear swab factory. Which he chooses will depend on whether there is more unmet demand for ear swabs or for toilet paper at that time, since that will dictate how much Contribution value he is given for his paper. But the system also needs to track the supplies in stock at each facility. Once a facility has enough materials to produce continuously for a month, it should stop accepting new contributions of that material.

On to Bill and George. The best model to keep in mind here is the current system of royalties in modern art-based industries such as book publishing and filmmaking. Most authors aren’t paid a salary while they write a book, or (usually) given a lump sum for the rights to a book. Instead, they are paid a royalty, or a certain percentage of the book’s cover price, when the book sells. In the case of the film industry, there may be dozens of actors and writers who recieve residual payments when a movie is shown on television, even if the movie was made twenty years ago. Similarly, both Bill and George are given a small amount of Contribution credit for every box of swabs produced, even though they may not necessarily be actively involved in making swabs a year down the line. This way there is still a strong incentive for innovators to bring new processes and products to society without creating the severe inequities that exist in our modern corporate culture.

Now Steve and his comrades. Their Contribution differs from Bill and George’s in that it is partially related to current demand for ear swabs, but it is also related to the current demand for shift-work manual labor. The portion of it determined by demand for the product they are producing helps them choose between different shift-work opportunities, but if too high a percentage of the population is looking for work as manual laborers, the portion of their Contribution that depends on demand for manual labor may encourage them to train in a specialty such as plumbing that will allow them to earn more.

 
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