A world without money

Scroll to see replies

Bismarck

Why? There are an infinite amount of good theories to debate...

Maybe, but are you telling me you never get involved in debates with friends where they say create an unlikely situation by starting with 'image this' or 'imagine that'.

Maybe it shoulda went into the philosphy forum - where they might be more open to debate about the unknown.

Reply 81

Bismarck

Captain Crash

Or a world where resources and goods are allocated and moved as they are needed (i.e. no private property) - Obviously this wouldn't work in the current social situation ('inherently greedy' and all that...) but given a certain change in social conditioning then 'inherent greed' wouldn't be inherent and such a system could work.....

Except there are no price signals, and the amount of things that are really needed are few and far in between. How do you decide to produce Coke and not Pepsi? How do you decide to produce soda and not juice? How do you decide how many houses to build, where, and what design? Efficiency is destroyed without private property, even in a world of angels.

Reply 82

Consie

I spent ages trying to articulate the effective nature of rationing resources money and private property has, but started gaming instead. Good one for articulating it so well *high five*.

Reply 83

Captain Crash

Bismarck

Swarm Theory seems a plausible alternative.

Also if you look at things like healthcare, private property actually decreases the efficiency (contrast American Privately owned healthcare with the NHS)

Reply 84

DrunkHamster

Captain Crash

Also if you look at things like healthcare, private property actually decreases the efficiency (contrast American Privately owned healthcare with the NHS)

Lol. More efficient? What do you mean by efficient? Is that Pareto efficient or Kaldor-Hicks? Either way I'd love to see evidence, it's quite an assertion...

Reply 85

Captain Crash

DrunkHamster

Lol. More efficient? What do you mean by efficient? Is that Pareto efficient or Kaldor-Hicks? Either way I'd love to see evidence, it's quite an assertion...

In terms of how much you pay for a certain level of healthcare. I don't have the source on the internet - it's in Sociology as applied to Medicine (i've read similar reports elsewhere, i'll try to find a Url). For the level of healthcare we enjoy in this country it costs around twice as much for the same level if you live in the US. It's often cited as the perfect example of why the NHS shouldn't be privatised.

EDIT:
A quick google brings up
http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/05/us_versus_uk.html
http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

Reply 86

Bismarck

Captain Crash

Swarm Theory seems a plausible alternative.

Also if you look at things like healthcare, private property actually decreases the efficiency (contrast American Privately owned healthcare with the NHS)

It's easy to keep something cheap when you pay your doctors and nurses virtually nothing, forcing you to import foreign ones, and killing the morale of the ones who do stay, which in turn leads to awful service.

Reply 87

DrunkHamster

Precisely. It's easy to say that the US is paying too much for their healthcare, but the fact is that the consumers in the states are subsidising the rest of the world in pretty much the vast majority of pharmaceutical research. Not to mention, like Bismark said, the NHS pays its staff (i.e. the actual people giving out health care and not the armies of administrators) virtually nothing.

And I would disagree with you that the NHS does provide as good a service. It's another thread entirely, but I've seen figures that suggest, on a conservative estimate, we have 15 000 avoidable deaths every year which would stop if we went to something with even a mild amount of competition, like the Swedish system.

Reply 88

Bismarck

Has anyone here actually used the NHS for a fairly serious problem? I only hear horror stories from those who do. I mean, even without insurance, I could go to a good doctor within a few hours, who will send me to a specialist by the end of the week, and have them diagnose my problem and prescribe medications or schedule a surgery on the spot. And everything short of the surgery would cost a few hundred bucks combined, which is far less than the 10% everyone in Britain pays from their income tax. With insurance, I'd get this top notch service virtually for free.

Reply 89

Consie

I dislocated my shoulder/unbalanced my entire back/tore ligaments in my shoulder area playing rugby and got it sorted by them pretty sharpish. I still haven’t had an operation, but that’s because I’ve missed 4 appointments, the actual appointments were pretty quick relative to my injury date. This is why they should introduce charges for missing apointments to avoid goons like me prolonging my being on their system. My first appointment was also with a specialist. That's been my only real experience of them, and they seemed pretty competent. My granddad died primarily due to NHS incompetence however (thought a cafeta hole was a stomach ulcer on the xray, opened him up only to realise it was just the cafeta hole, he got pneumonia on the operating table and died :|), and I almost died before being born because the NHS nurse didn’t realise my umbilical cord was around my neck :s-smilie:

. But hey ho. Thats more likely down so isolated incidents of specific individuals acting like goons rather than the NHS being institutionally incompetant I think.

Reply 90

Dirac Delta Function

Captain Crash

Swarm Theory seems a plausible alternative.

Also if you look at things like healthcare, private property actually decreases the efficiency (contrast American Privately owned healthcare with the NHS)

thanks for the link, but swarms aren't a plausable alternative to money at all, they don't even serve the same purpose. Swarms are heuristics for attacking combinatorial optimisation problems (one of quite a few). The only thing that gives them advantage over deterministic algorithmic approaches is that they have been empirically shown to give reasonable results in a reasonable amount of time, where optimal algorithms or brute force search would give optimal results but take inordinately large amounts of time to compute. Besides which, like other heurisitcs, they don't always find the optimal solution, they usually only find the "locally optimal", meaning that as you vary the parameters of the problem and graph the quality of the solution, and you get a "bumpy terrain" like graph, the swarm techniques will likely find a local low point in the terrain (locally good solution) but not a globally low point (the best solution).

What you are proposing then, is using heuristics for resource allocation as an alternative to free markets in which money is the medium through which information is signalled.

If the swarm simulation is set up by the government, it would have major problems: what are the parameters, who decides the parameters? how do they measure success? how will you run a simulation with enough parameters to optimise the productivity of an entire country's economic system (there isn't enough computing power in the world)? what happens if the model is wrong? when and how does it change?
-> a swarm is useful for simple, well defined combinatorial problems, not national economies. Productivity is improved by innovation and entprenearship which can't be predicted, let alone factored into a mechanical model by a few people, no matter how smart they are.

It's nothing more than all the classical problems of centralised, authoritiarian control over the market wrapped up in some nice new technology.

Sorry for the essay, and if I've completely missed your point.

Reply 91

Captain Crash

Bismarck

Has anyone here actually used the NHS for a fairly serious problem? I only hear horror stories from those who do. I mean, even without insurance, I could go to a good doctor within a few hours, send me to a specialist by the end of the week, and have them diagnose my problem and prescribe medications or schedule a surgery on the spot. And everything short of the surgery would cost a few hundred bucks combined, which is far less than the 10% everyone in Britain pays from their income tax. With insurance, I'd get this top notch service virtually for free.

Yet that few hundred bucks (minus surgery) is a one-off cost. What if you have another problem a couple o months later.Also the insurance costs more than 10% of income tax and people with chronic health problems are refused insurance.

DrunkHamster

None of the top 6 pharmaceutical companies are American.....

DrunkHamster

And I would disagree with you that the NHS does provide as good a service. It's another thread entirely, but I've seen figures that suggest, on a conservative estimate, we have 15 000 avoidable deaths every year which would stop if we went to something with even a mild amount of competition, like the Swedish system.

But the swedish is still very much on the socialised end of the spectrum. But like you said that's another thread entirely

Dirac Delta Function
You're perfectly right in that it isn't a substitute for money but my point was that swarm theory could be used for resource allocation without the need for private property (and therefore money). Obviously on such a scale there would be implementation issues lke you've pointed out - hell, i wouldn't know where to begin. But it is being developed and used on a small scale already and in theory it could work for entire societies.

Reply 92

DrunkHamster

Captain Crash

None of the top 6 pharmaceutical companies are American.....

Err Pfizer, the biggest one...? But so what, Americans pay more for drugs in general than anyone else.

But the swedish is still very much on the socialised end of the spectrum. But like you said that's another thread entirely

Still socialised in the sense that the government pays for a lot of healthcare, but the fact that there's a voucher system which introduces even a bit of competition means that there are 15 000 less deaths. Yet that is apparently unthinkable here...

Reply 93

Consie

but the fact that there's a voucher system which introduces even a bit of competition means that there are 15 000 less deaths.

Can you explain how this figure was decided on?

Reply 94

Clubber Lang

Bismarck

Has anyone here actually used the NHS for a fairly serious problem?

Yes, I have had a couple of surgeries done that would have cost a couple grand if I did them private. I have heard of bad experiences but it does a fairly good job overall.

I'd rather pay the taxes for it to be there than not..I think the A&E could benefit by refusing to see to numpties, but thats a whole different argument.

Reply 95

Bismarck

Captain Crash

Doctor's and nurses (compared to the average salary) aren't paid virtually nothing in this country. The big thing that's killing morale here is the loss of autonomy of the medical profession and a bigger emphasis on restricting treatment for cost reasons and fighting for budgets

How utterly irrelevant. You can't compare it to other professions; you have to compare to the salaries of these people in similar countries. Should a doctor be happy to get paid more than a plumber, after spending God knows how many years getting an education and working in a high-stress environment?

Private insurance, which covers most Americans, doesn't cost any income tax for the simple fact that it's private. It's paid for by the employer. What you're referring to is Medicare and Medicaid, which are government programs that help the elderly and the poor.

None of the top 6 pharmaceutical companies are American.....

Once again, how utterly irrelevant. Where are the drugs developed? And would they be developed if they couldn't be sold for a large profit to the American market?

Reply 96

City bound

Neither fully socialised nor fully privatised medicine produces an optimal solution. Rather, it produces a system that is 'differently good'; examples of private (generally insurance based) systems provide more better long-term and 'chronic' care whilst NHS-style systems provide better 'emergency room' style care.

Not to mention the USA's position as drug subsidiser to the world making comparisons difficult and socialised medicine for the rest of the world fiscally feasible. The NHS flag wavers better get some 'honk if you love American private healthcare' banners printed or they're going to see their system collapse.

EDIT: *Slightly tangential* Some people need to take Econ101 again. 'The burden of taxation is everywhere and always shared by consumer and producer'.

Reply 97

Captain Crash

DrunkHamster

Err Pfizer, the biggest one...?

My mistake - i thought it was german but nevertheless.....

Bismarck

How utterly irrelevant. You can't compare it to other professions; you have to compare to the salaries of these people in similar countries. Should a doctor be happy to get paid more than a plumber, after spending God knows how many years getting an education and working in a high-stress environment?

Ok, compared to most European countries, UK doctors get paid reasonably well. The only country in the world that pays doctors ridiculously large amounts is the US. And personally, as a medical student, I don't care how much I get paid in the grand scheme of things. I didn't go into medicine for the money and most of my collegues didn't.

Bismarck

Yet over 30% of the US population are uninsured. Also private insurance as part of salaries has two problems: (a) it reduces potential said salary to compensate and (b) it pushes up prices of medical resources in the US beyond that of those who do not have said insurance.

Reply 98

Bismarck

Captain Crash

You might, most do. There's a reason for the shortage of nurses and doctors you know. People might not go in it solely for the money, but it would be foolish to think that money isn't a factor for most of them.