Common ownership refers to holding the assets of an organization, enterprise or community indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members or groups of members as common property.
Forms of common ownership exist in every economic system. Common ownership of the means of production is a central goal of socialist political movements as it is seen as a necessary democratic mechanism for the creation and continued function of a communist society. Advocates make a distinction between collective ownership and common property as the former refers to property owned jointly by agreement of a set of colleagues, such as producer cooperatives, whereas the latter refers to assets that are completely open for access, such as a public park freely available to everyone.
Christian societies
The first church in Jerusalem shared all their money and possessions (Acts of the Apostles 2 and 4).
Inspired by the Early Christians, many Christians have since tried to follow their example of community of goods and common ownership. Common ownership is practiced by some Christian groups such as the Hutterites (for about 500 years), the Bruderhof (for some 100 years) and others. In those cases, property is generally owned by a charity set up for the
purpose of maintaining the members of the religious groups.
Common
ownership is practiced by large numbers of voluntary associations and
non-profit organizations as well as implicitly by all public bodies.
While cooperatives generally align with collectivist, socialist
economics, retailers' cooperatives in particular exhibit elements of common ownership, while their retailer members may be individually owned.
Mutual aid
is a form of common ownership that is practiced on small scales within
capitalist economies, particularly among marginalized communities, and during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
From 1918 until 1995, the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange was cited in Clause IV of its constitution as a goal of the British Labour Party and was quoted on the back of its membership cards. The clause read:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full
fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof
that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means
of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable
system of popular administration and control of each industry or
service.
Antitrust economics
In antitrust economics, common ownership describes a situation in which large investors own shares in several firms that compete within the same industry.
As a result of this overlapping ownership, these firms may have reduced
incentives to compete against each other because they internalize the
profit-reducing effect that their competitive actions have on each
other.
The theory was first developed by Julio Rotemberg in 1984. Several empirical contributions document the growing importance of common ownership and provide evidence to support the theory.
Because of concern about these anticompetitive effects, common
ownership has "stimulated a major rethinking of antitrust enforcement". The United States Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the OECD have all acknowledged concerns about the effects of common ownership on lessening product market competition.
Contract theory
Neoclassical economic theory analyzes common ownership using contract theory. According to the incomplete contracting approach pioneered by Oliver Hart and his co-authors, ownership matters because the owner of an asset has residual control rights. This means that the owner can decide what to do with the asset in every
contingency not covered by a contract. In particular, an owner has
stronger incentives to make relationship-specific investments than a
non-owner, so ownership can ameliorate the so-called hold-up problem.
As a result, ownership is a scarce resource (i.e. there are limits to
how much they can invest) that should not be wasted. In particular, a
central result of the property rights approach says that joint ownership
is suboptimal.
If we start in a situation with joint ownership (where each party has
veto power over the use of the asset) and move to a situation in which
there is a single owner, the investment incentives of the new owner are
improved while the investment incentives of the other parties remain the
same. However, in the basic incomplete contracting framework the
suboptimal aspect of joint ownership holds only if the investments are
in human capital while joint ownership can be optimal if the investments are in physical capital. Recently, several authors have shown that joint ownership can actually be optimal even if investments are in human capital. In particular, joint ownership can be optimal if the parties are asymmetrically informed, if there is a long-term relationship between the parties, or if the parties have know-how that they may disclose.
Job security is the probability that an individual will keep their job;
a job with a high level of security is such that a person with the job
would have a small chance of losing it. Many factors threaten job
security: globalization, outsourcing, downsizing, recession, and new
technology, to name a few.
Basic economic theory holds that during periods of economic expansion
businesses experience increased demand, which in turn necessitates
investment in more capital or labor. When businesses are experiencing
growth, job confidence and security typically increase. The opposite
often holds true during a recession: businesses experience reduced demand and look to downsize their workforces in the short term.
Governments and individuals are both motivated to achieve higher
levels of job security. Governments attempt to do this by passing laws
(such as the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964)
which make it illegal to fire employees for certain reasons.
Individuals can influence their degree of job security by increasing
their skills through education and experience, or by moving to a more
favorable location. The official unemployment rate and employee confidence indexes are good indicators of job security in particular fields. These statistics are closely watched by economists, government officials, and banks.
Unions also strongly influence job security. Jobs that
traditionally have a strong union presence such as many government jobs
and jobs in education, healthcare and law enforcement are considered very secure while many non-unionized private sector jobs are generally believed to offer lower job security, although this varies by industry and country.
In the United States
While
all economies are impacted by market forces (which change the supply
and demand of labor) the United States is particularly susceptible to
these forces due to a long history of fiscal conservatism and minimal government intervention.
Minimal government intervention has helped the United States create an at-will employment
system that applies across many industries. Consequently, with limited
exceptions, an employee's job security closely follows an employer's
demand for their skills. For example, in the aftermath of the dot com boom
of 1997–2000, employees in the technology industry experienced a
massive drop in job security and confidence. More recently, in 2009 many
manufacturing workers experienced a similar drop in job security and
confidence.
Closely following market forces also means that employment in the
United States rebounds when industries adjust to new economic realities.
For example, employee confidence and job security in both manufacturing
and technology have rebounded substantially.
In the United States job insecurity is higher for men than women,
with workers aged 30–64 experiencing more insecurity when compared with
other age groups. Divorced or separated workers, and workers with less
than a high school diploma also report higher job insecurity. Overall,
workers in the construction industry have the highest rate of job
insecurity at 55%.
The impact of unemployment and job insecurity on both mental and
physical health is now the subject of a growing body of research. This
will offer insights into why, for example, an increasing number of men
in the United States are not returning to work. In 1960, only 5% of men
ages 30–35 were unemployed whereas roughly 13% were unemployed in 2006. The New York Times attributes a large portion of this to blue collar and professional men refusing to work in jobs that they are overqualified for or do not provide adequate benefits in contrast to their previous jobs.
It could also be attributed to a mismatch between the skills employees
currently have, and the skills employers in traditionally male dominated
industries (such as manufacturing) are looking for.
According to data from 2014 employee confidence reports, 50% of
all current workers 18 and over feel confident in their ability to find a
new job if necessary, and 60% are confident in the future of their
employer. Job insecurity, defined as being worried about becoming
unemployed, is a concern to 25% of U.S. workers.
Due to lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces moved
from office to home. Employees worried about the potential career
consequences of losing productivity and effectiveness while working from
home owing to a lack of work-life balance. According to studies,
workers worried that their jobs might be at risk if they performed
poorly while working from home during the epidemic.
Overseas outsourcing (sometimes called offshoring)
may decrease job security for people in certain occupations such as
telemarketers, computer programmers, medical transcriptionists, and
bookkeeping clerks. Generally, to outsource work to a different country
the job must be quick to learn and the completed work must be
transferable with minimal loss of quality.
In India
In India job security is high as Indian labour law
make firing difficult for permanent employees. Most Indians work till
retirement in the same company apart from workers in some sectors such
as technology. Due to large population, competition is high but so is
the size of the job market.
A self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler in his book on nanotechnology, Engines of Creation (coining the term clanking replicator for such machines) and by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in their review Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines
which provided the first comprehensive analysis of the entire
replicator design space. The future development of such technology is an
integral part of several plans involving the mining of moons and asteroid belts for ore and other materials, the creation of lunar factories, and even the construction of solar power satellites in space. The von Neumann probe is one theoretical example of such a machine. Von Neumann also worked on what he called the universal constructor, a self-replicating machine that would be able to evolve and which he formalized in a cellular automata environment. Notably, Von Neumann's Self-Reproducing Automata scheme
posited that open-ended evolution requires inherited information to be
copied and passed to offspring separately from the self-replicating
machine, an insight that preceded the discovery of the structure of the
DNA molecule by Watson and Crick and how it is separately translated and replicated in the cell.
A self-replicating machine is an artificial self-replicating
system that relies on conventional large-scale technology and
automation. The concept, first proposed by Von Neumann no later than the
1940s, has attracted a range of different approaches involving various
types of technology. Certain idiosyncratic terms are occasionally found
in the literature. For example, the term clanking replicator was once
used by Drexler to distinguish macroscale replicating systems from the microscopic nanorobots or "assemblers" that nanotechnology
may make possible, but the term is informal and is rarely used by
others in popular or technical discussions. Replicators have also been
called "von Neumann machines" after John von Neumann, who first
rigorously studied the idea. However, the term "von Neumann machine" is
less specific and also refers to a completely unrelated computer architecture that von Neumann proposed and so its use is discouraged where accuracy is important. Von Neumann used the term universal constructor to describe such self-replicating machines.
Historians of machine tools, even before the numerical control
era, sometimes figuratively said that machine tools were a unique class
of machines because they have the ability to "reproduce themselves"
by copying all of their parts. Implicit in these discussions is that a
human would direct the cutting processes (later planning and programming
the machines), and would then assemble the parts. The same is true for RepRaps,
which are another class of machines sometimes mentioned in reference to
such non-autonomous "self-replication". In contrast, machines that are truly autonomously self-replicating (like biological machines) are the main subject discussed here.
History
The
general concept of artificial machines capable of producing copies of
themselves dates back at least several hundred years. An early reference
is an anecdote regarding the philosopher René Descartes, who suggested to Queen Christina of Sweden
that the human body could be regarded as a machine; she responded by
pointing to a clock and ordering "see to it that it reproduces
offspring." Several other variations on this anecdotal response also exist. Samuel Butler proposed in his 1872 novel Erewhon that machines were already capable of reproducing themselves but it was man who made them do so, and added that "machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after their own kind". In George Eliot's 1879 book Impressions of Theophrastus Such,
a series of essays that she wrote in the character of a fictional
scholar named Theophrastus, the essay "Shadows of the Coming Race"
speculated about self-replicating machines, with Theophrastus asking
"how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not
in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and
reproduction".
In 1802 William Paley formulated the first known teleological argument depicting machines producing other machines, suggesting that the question of who originally made a watch was rendered moot if it were demonstrated that the watch was able to manufacture a copy of itself. Scientific study of self-reproducing machines was anticipated by John Bernal as early as 1929 and by mathematicians such as Stephen Kleene who began developing recursion theory in the 1930s.
Much of this latter work was motivated by interest in information
processing and algorithms rather than physical implementation of such a
system, however. In the course of the 1950s, suggestions of several
increasingly simple mechanical systems capable of self-reproduction were
made — notably by Lionel Penrose.
Von Neumann's kinematic model
A detailed conceptual proposal for a self-replicating machine was first put forward by mathematician John von Neumann in lectures delivered in 1948 and 1949, when he proposed a kinematic model of self-reproducing automata as a thought experiment. Von Neumann's concept of a physical self-replicating machine was dealt
with only abstractly, with the hypothetical machine using a "sea" or
stockroom of spare parts as its source of raw materials. The machine had
a program stored on a memory tape that directed it to retrieve parts
from this "sea" using a manipulator, assemble them into a duplicate of
itself, and then copy the contents of its memory tape into the empty
duplicate's. The machine was envisioned as consisting of as few as eight
different types of components; four logic elements that send and
receive stimuli and four mechanical elements used to provide a
structural skeleton and mobility. While qualitatively sound, von Neumann
was evidently dissatisfied with this model of a self-replicating
machine due to the difficulty of analyzing it with mathematical rigor.
He went on to instead develop an even more abstract model
self-replicator based on cellular automata. His original kinematic concept remained obscure until it was popularized in a 1955 issue of Scientific American.
Von Neumann's goal for his self-reproducing automata theory, as specified in his lectures at the University of Illinois in 1949, was to design a machine whose complexity could grow automatically akin to biological organisms under natural selection. He asked what is the threshold of complexity that must be crossed for machines to be able to evolve.
His answer was to design an abstract machine which, when run, would
replicate itself. Notably, his design implies that open-ended evolution
requires inherited information to be copied and passed to offspring
separately from the self-replicating machine, an insight that preceded
the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick and how it is separately translated and replicated in the cell.
Moore's artificial living plants
In 1956 mathematician Edward F. Moore proposed the first known suggestion for a practical real-world self-replicating machine, also published in Scientific American.
Moore's "artificial living plants" were proposed as machines able to
use air, water and soil as sources of raw materials and to draw its
energy from sunlight via a solar battery or a steam engine.
He chose the seashore as an initial habitat for such machines, giving
them easy access to the chemicals in seawater, and suggested that later
generations of the machine could be designed to float freely on the
ocean's surface as self-replicating factory barges or to be placed in
barren desert terrain that was otherwise useless for industrial
purposes. The self-replicators would be "harvested" for their component
parts, to be used by humanity in other non-replicating machines.
Dyson's replicating systems
The
next major development of the concept of self-replicating machines was a
series of thought experiments proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in his 1970 Vanuxem Lecture. He proposed three large-scale applications of machine replicators. First was to send a self-replicating system to Saturn's moon Enceladus, which in addition to producing copies of itself would also be programmed to manufacture and launch solar sail-propelled cargo spacecraft. These spacecraft would carry blocks of Enceladean ice to Mars, where they would be used to terraform the planet.
His second proposal was a solar-powered factory system designed for a
terrestrial desert environment, and his third was an "industrial
development kit" based on this replicator that could be sold to
developing countries to provide them with as much industrial capacity as
desired. When Dyson revised and reprinted his lecture in 1979 he added
proposals for a modified version of Moore's seagoing artificial living
plants that was designed to distill and store fresh water for human use and the "Astrochicken."
Advanced Automation for Space Missions
An artist's conception of a "self-growing" robotic lunar factory
In 1980, inspired by a 1979 "New Directions Workshop" held at Wood's Hole, NASA conducted a joint summer study with ASEE entitled Advanced Automation for Space Missions to produce a detailed proposal for self-replicating factories to develop lunar resources without requiring additional launches or human workers on-site. The study was conducted at Santa Clara University and ran from June 23 to August 29, with the final report published in 1982. The proposed system would have been capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and the design could be modified to build self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy.
The reference design included small computer-controlled electric
carts running on rails inside the factory, mobile "paving machines" that
used large parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight on lunar regolith to melt and sinter it into a hard surface suitable for building on, and robotic front-end loaders for strip mining. Raw lunar regolith would be refined by a variety of techniques, primarily hydrofluoric acidleaching.
Large transports with a variety of manipulator arms and tools were
proposed as the constructors that would put together new factories from
parts and assemblies produced by its parent.
Power would be provided by a "canopy" of solar cells supported on pillars. The other machinery would be placed under the canopy.
A "castingrobot" would use sculpting tools and templates to make plastermolds.
Plaster was selected because the molds are easy to make, can make
precise parts with good surface finishes, and the plaster can be easily
recycled afterward using an oven to bake the water back out. The robot
would then cast most of the parts either from nonconductive molten rock (basalt) or purified metals. A carbon dioxide laser cutting and welding system was also included.
A more speculative, more complex microchip fabricator was
specified to produce the computer and electronic systems, but the
designers also said that it might prove practical to ship the chips from
Earth as if they were "vitamins."
A 2004 study supported by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts took this idea further. Some experts are beginning to consider self-replicating machines for asteroid mining.
Much of the design study was concerned with a simple, flexible
chemical system for processing the ores, and the differences between the
ratio of elements needed by the replicator, and the ratios available in
lunar regolith. The element that most limited the growth rate was chlorine, needed to process regolith for aluminium. Chlorine is very rare in lunar regolith.
Lackner-Wendt Auxon replicators
In
1995, inspired by Dyson's 1970 suggestion of seeding uninhabited
deserts on Earth with self-replicating machines for industrial
development, Klaus Lackner and Christopher Wendt developed a more detailed outline for such a system.
They proposed a colony of cooperating mobile robots 10–30 cm in size
running on a grid of electrified ceramic tracks around stationary
manufacturing equipment and fields of solar cells. Their proposal didn't
include a complete analysis of the system's material requirements, but
described a novel method for extracting the ten most common chemical
elements found in raw desert topsoil (Na, Fe, Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, Al, C, O2 and H2) using a high-temperature carbothermic process. This proposal was popularized in Discover magazine, featuring solar-powered desalination equipment used to irrigate the desert in which the system was based. They named their machines "Auxons", from the Greek word auxein which means "to grow".
Recent work
NIAC studies on self-replicating systems
In the spirit of the 1980 "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" study, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts began several studies of self-replicating system design in 2002 and 2003. Four phase I grants were awarded:
Paul Todd (Space Hardware Optimization Technology Inc.), "Robotic Lunar Ecopoiesis"
Tihamer Toth-Fejel (General Dynamics), "Modeling Kinematic Cellular Automata: An Approach to Self-Replication" The study concluded that complexity of the development was equal to
that of a Pentium 4, and promoted a design based on cellular automata.
Bootstrapping self-replicating factories in space
In 2012, NASA researchers Metzger,
Muscatello, Mueller, and Mantovani argued for a so-called
"bootstrapping approach" to start self-replicating factories in space. They developed this concept on the basis of In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU)
technologies that NASA has been developing to "live off the land" on
the Moon or Mars. Their modeling showed that in just 20 to 40 years this
industry could become self-sufficient then grow to large size, enabling
greater exploration in space as well as providing benefits back to
Earth. In 2014, Thomas Kalil of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
published on the White House blog an interview with Metzger on
bootstrapping solar system civilization through self-replicating space
industry.
Kalil requested the public submit ideas for how "the Administration,
the private sector, philanthropists, the research community, and
storytellers can further these goals." Kalil connected this concept to
what former NASA Chief technologist Mason Peck
has dubbed "Massless Exploration", the ability to make everything in
space so that you do not need to launch it from Earth. Peck has said,
"...all the mass we need to explore the solar system is already in
space. It's just in the wrong shape."
In 2016, Metzger argued that fully self-replicating industry can be
started over several decades by astronauts at a lunar outpost for a
total cost (outpost plus starting the industry) of about a third of the
space budgets of the International Space Station
partner nations, and that this industry would solve Earth's energy and
environmental problems in addition to providing massless exploration.
New York University artificial DNA tile motifs
In 2011, a team of scientists at New York University
created a structure called 'BTX' (bent triple helix) based around three
double helix molecules, each made from a short strand of DNA. Treating
each group of three double-helices as a code letter, they can (in
principle) build up self-replicating structures that encode large
quantities of information.
Self-replication of magnetic polymers
In 2001, Jarle Breivik at University of Oslo
created a system of magnetic building blocks, which in response to
temperature fluctuations, spontaneously form self-replicating polymers.
Self-replication of neural circuits
In 1968, Zellig Harris wrote that "the metalanguage is in the language," suggesting that self-replication is part of language. In 1977 Niklaus Wirth formalized this proposition by publishing a self-replicating deterministic context-free grammar. Adding to it probabilities, Bertrand du Castel published in 2015 a self-replicating stochastic grammar and presented a mapping of that grammar to neural networks, thereby presenting a model for a self-replicating neural circuit.
Harvard Wyss Institute
November 29, 2021 a team at Harvard Wyss Institute built the first living robots that can reproduce.
The idea of an automated spacecraft capable of constructing copies of
itself was first proposed in scientific literature in 1974 by Michael A. Arbib, but the concept had appeared earlier in science fiction such as the 1967 novel Berserker by Fred Saberhagen or the 1950 novellette trilogy The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. The first quantitative engineering analysis of a self-replicating spacecraft was published in 1980 by Robert Freitas, in which the non-replicating Project Daedalus
design was modified to include all subsystems necessary for
self-replication. The design's strategy was to use the probe to deliver a
"seed" factory with a mass of about 443 tons to a distant site, have
the seed factory replicate many copies of itself there to increase its
total manufacturing capacity, and then use the resulting automated
industrial complex to construct more probes with a single seed factory
on board each.
Prospects for implementation
As
the use of industrial automation has expanded over time, some factories
have begun to approach a semblance of self-sufficiency that is
suggestive of self-replicating machines. However, such factories are unlikely to achieve "full closure"
until the cost and flexibility of automated machinery comes close to
that of human labour and the manufacture of spare parts and other
components locally becomes more economical than transporting them from
elsewhere. As Samuel Butler has pointed out in Erewhon,
replication of partially closed universal machine tool factories is
already possible. Since safety is a primary goal of all legislative
consideration of regulation of such development, future development
efforts may be limited to systems which lack either control, matter, or
energy closure. Fully capable machine replicators are most useful for
developing resources in dangerous environments which are not easily
reached by existing transportation systems (such as outer space).
An artificial replicator can be considered to be a form of artificial life. Depending on its design, it might be subject to evolution over an extended period of time. However, with robust error correction, and the possibility of external intervention, the common science fiction scenario of robotic life run amok will remain extremely unlikely for the foreseeable future.
A number of patents have been granted for self-replicating machine concepts. U.S. patent 5,659,477 "Self reproducing fundamental fabricating machines (F-Units)" Inventor: Collins; Charles M. (Burke, Va.) (August 1997), U.S. patent 5,764,518
" Self reproducing fundamental fabricating machine system" Inventor:
Collins; Charles M. (Burke, Va.)(June 1998); and Collins' PCT patent WO
96/20453:
"Method and system for self-replicating manufacturing stations"
Inventors: Merkle; Ralph C. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Parker; Eric G. (Wylie,
Tex.), Skidmore; George D. (Plano, Tex.) (January 2003).
In 1995, Nick Szabo proposed a challenge to build a macroscale replicator from Lego robot kits and similar basic parts.
Szabo wrote that this approach was easier than previous proposals for
macroscale replicators, but successfully predicted that even this method
would not lead to a macroscale replicator within ten years.
In 2004, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle
published the first comprehensive review of the field of
self-replication (from which much of the material in this article is
derived, with permission of the authors), in their book Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, which includes 3000+ literature references. This book included a new molecular assembler design, a primer on the mathematics of replication, and the first comprehensive analysis of the entire replicator design space.
One of the major characteristics of the commons-based peer production is its non-profit scope. Often—but not always—commons-based projects are designed without a need
for financial compensation for contributors. For example, sharing of STL (file format) design files for objects freely on the internet enables anyone with a 3-D printer to digitally replicate the object, saving the prosumer significant money.
Synonymous terms for this process include consumer co-production and collaborative media production.
Overview
The history of commons-based peer production communities (by the P2Pvalue project)
Yochai Benkler used this term as early as 2001. Benkler first introduced the term in his 2002 paper in the Yale Law Journal (published as a pre-print in 2001) "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm", whose title refers to the Linux mascot and to Ronald Coase, who originated the transaction costs theory of the firm
that provides the methodological template for the paper's analysis of
peer production. The paper defines the concept as "decentralized
information gathering and exchange" and credits Eben Moglen as the scholar who first identified it without naming it.
In his book The Wealth of Networks (2006), Yochai Benkler
significantly expands on his definition of commons-based peer
production. According to Benkler, what distinguishes commons-based
production is that it doesn't rely upon or propagate proprietary
knowledge: "The inputs and outputs of the process are shared, freely or
conditionally, in an institutional form that leaves them equally
available for all to use as they choose at their individual discretion."
To ensure that the knowledge generated is available for free use,
commons-based projects are often shared under an open license.
Not all commons-based production necessarily qualifies as
commons-based peer production. According to Benkler, peer production is
defined not only by the openness of its outputs, but also by a
decentralized, participant-driven working method of working.
Peer production enterprises have two primary advantages over traditional hierarchical approaches to production:
Information gain:
Peer production allows individuals to self-assign tasks that suit their
own skills, expertise, and interests. Contributors can generate dynamic content that reflects the individual skills and the "variability of human creativity."
Great variability of human and information resources leads to
substantial increasing returns to scale to the number of people, and
resources and projects that may be accomplished without need for a
contract or other factor permitting the proper use of the resource for a
project.
In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams suggest an incentive
mechanism behind common-based peer production. "People participate in
peer production communities," they write, "for a wide range of intrinsic
and self-interested reasons....basically, people who participate in
peer production communities love it. They feel passionate about their
particular area of expertise and revel in creating something new or
better."
Aaron Krowne offers another definition:
Commons-based peer production refers to any coordinated,
(chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project
components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a
unified intellectual work. CBPP covers many different types of
intellectual output, from software to libraries of quantitative data to human-readable documents (manuals, books, encyclopedias, reviews, blogs, periodicals, and more).
Principles
First, the potential goals of peer production must be modular. In other words, objectives must be divisible into components, or modules, each of which can be independently produced.
That allows participants to work asynchronously, without having to wait
for each other's contributions or coordinate with each other in person.
Second, the granularity
of the modules is essential. Granularity refers to the degree to which
objects are broken down into smaller pieces (module size).
Different levels of granularity will allow people with different levels
of motivation to work together by contributing small or large grained
modules, consistent with their level of interest in the project and
their motivation.
Third, a successful peer-production enterprise must have low-cost integration—the
mechanism by which the modules are integrated into a whole end product.
Thus, integration must include both quality controls over the modules
and a mechanism for integrating the contributions into the finished
product at relatively low cost.
Participation
Participation
in commons-based peer production is often voluntary and not necessarily
associated with getting profit out of it. Thus, the motivation behind
this phenomenon goes far beyond traditional capitalistic theories, which picture individuals as self-interested and rational agents, such portrayal is also called homo economicus.
However, it can be explained through alternative theories as behavioral economics. Famous psychologist Dan Ariely in his work Predictably Irrational
explains that social norms shape people's decisions as much as market
norms. Therefore, individuals tend to be willing to create value because
of their social constructs, knowing that they won't be paid for that.
He draws an example of a thanksgiving dinner: offering to pay would
likely offend the family member who prepared the dinner as they were
motivated by the pleasure of treating family members.
Similarly, commons-based projects, as claimed by Yochai Benkler, are the results of individuals acting "out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting".
He goes on describing the wide range of reasons as pleasure, socially
and psychologically rewarding experiences, to the economic calculation
of possible monetary rewards (not necessarily from the project itself).
On the other hand, the need for collaboration and interaction
lies at the very core of human nature and turns out to be a very
essential feature for one's survival. Enhanced with digital
technologies, allowing easier and faster collaboration which was not as
noticeable before, it resulted in a new social, cultural and economic trend named collaborative society.
This theory outlines further reasons for individuals to participate in
peer production such as collaboration with strangers, building or
integrating into a community or contributing to a general good.
Examples
Additional examples of commons-based peer production communities (by the P2Pvalue project)One day living with commons-based peer production communities (by the P2Pvalue project)
Examples of projects using commons-based peer production include:
Customization/Specialization: With free and open-source software small groups have the capability to customize a large project according to specific needs. With the rise of low-cost 3-D printing, and other digital manufacturing techniques this is now also becoming true of open source hardware.
Longevity: Once code is released under a copyleftfree software license it is almost impossible to make it unavailable to the public.
Cross-fertilization: Experts in a field can work on more than one project with no legal hassles.
Technology Revisions: A core technology gives rise to new implementations of existing projects.
Technology Clustering: Groups of products tend to cluster around a core set of technology and integrate with one another.
Interrelated concepts to Commons-based peer production are the
processes of peer governance and peer property. To begin with, peer
governance is a new mode of governance and bottom-up mode of participative decision-making that is being experimented in peer projects, such as Wikipedia and FLOSS; thus peer governance is the way that peer production, the process in which common value is produced, is managed.
Peer Property indicates the innovative nature of legal forms such as
the General Public License, the Creative Commons, etc. Whereas
traditional forms of property are exclusionary ("if it is mine, it is
not yours"), peer property forms are inclusionary. It is from all of us,
i.e. also for you, provided you respect the basic rules laid out in the
license, such as the openness of the source code for example.
The ease of entering and leaving an organization is a feature of adhocracies.
The principle of commons-based peer production is similar to collective invention, a model of open innovation in economics coined by Robert Allen.
Some
believe that the commons-based peer production (CBPP) vision, while
powerful and groundbreaking, needs to be strengthened at its root
because of some allegedly wrong assumptions concerning free and open-source software (FOSS).
The CBPP literature regularly and explicitly quotes FOSS products
as examples of artifacts "emerging" by virtue of mere cooperation, with
no need for supervising leadership (without "market signals or
managerial commands", in Benkler's words).
It can be argued, however, that in the development of any less
than trivial piece of software, irrespective of whether it be FOSS or
proprietary, a subset of the (many) participants always play—explicitly
and deliberately—the role of leading system and subsystem designers,
determining architecture and functionality, while most of the people
work “underneath” them in a logical, functional sense.
From a micro-level, Bauwens and Pantazis are of the view that
CBPP models should be considered a prototype, since it cannot reproduce
itself fully outside of the limits that capitalism has imposed on it as a
result of the interdependence of CBPP with capitalist competition. The
innovative activities of CBPP occur within capitalist competitive
contexts, and capitalist firms can gain competitive advantage over firms
that rely on personal research without proprietary knowledge, because
the former is able to utilize and access the knowledge commons,
especially in digital commons where participants in CBPP struggle to
earn direct livelihood for themselves. CBPP is then at the risk of being
subordinated.
Alternative to capitalism
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) represents an alternative form of production from traditional capitalism.
Nevertheless, to this day CBPP is still a prototype of a new way of
producing, it cannot be called a complete form of production by itself.
CBPP is embedded in the capitalist system and even though the processes
and forms of production differ it is still mutually dependent to
capital. If CBPP triumphs in its implementation the market and state
will not disappear, but their relationship with the means of production
will be modified.
A socio-economic shift pursued by CBPP will not be straightforward or
lead to a utopia, it could help solve some current issues. As any
economic transition, new problems will emerge and the transition will be
complicated. But, moving towards a CBPP production model will be ideal,
a step forward for society.
CBPP is still a prototype of what a new way of production and society
would look like, and can't separate itself completely from capitalism:
commoners should find innovative ways to become more autonomous from
capitalism.
In a society led by commons the market would continue to exist as in
capitalism, but would shift from being mainly extractive to being
predominantly generative.
Both scenarios, the extractive as well as the generative, can
include elements which are based on peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamics, or social peer-to-peer processes.
Therefore, one should not only discuss peer production as an opposing
alternative to current forms of market organization, but also needs to
discuss how both manifest in the organizations of today’s economy. Four
scenarios can be described along the lines of profit maximization
and commons on one side, and centralized and decentralized control over
digital production infrastructure, such as for example networking
technologies: netarchical capitalism, distributed capitalism, global
commons, and localized commons. Each of them uses P2P elements to a
different extent and thus leads to different outcomes:
Netarchical capitalism: In this version of capitalism, P2P
elements are mainly found in digital platforms, through which
individuals can interact with each other. These platforms are controlled
by the platform owners, which capture the value of the P2P exchanges.
Distributed capitalism: As compared to the first type, platforms are
not centrally controlled in this form of capitalism, and individual
autonomy and large-scale participation play an important role. However,
it is still a form a capitalism, meaning it is mainly extractive, and
profit maximization is the main motive.
Global commons: This scenario is generative as it aims to add social
and environmental value. It uses the digital commons to organize and
deploy initiatives globally.
Local commons: Similar to the global commons, the local commons are
also a generative scenario. However, they use global digital commons to
organize activities locally, for example by using global designs to at
the same time as local supply chains for manufacturing.
The economic policy stance currently dominant around the world
uses unemployment as a policy tool to control inflation. When inflation
rises, the government pursues contractionary fiscal or monetary policy, with the aim of creating a buffer stock of unemployed people, reducing wage demands, and ultimately inflation. When inflationary expectations subside, expansionary policy aims to produce the opposite effect.
By contrast, in a job guarantee program, a buffer stock of employed people (employed in the job guarantee program) is typically intended to provide the same protection against inflation without the social costs of unemployment, hence potentially fulfilling the dual mandate of full employment and price stability.
Overview
A job guarantee is based on a buffer stock principle whereby the public sector
offers a fixed wage job to anyone willing and able to work thereby
establishing and maintaining a buffer stock of employed workers.
This buffer stock expands when private sector activity declines, and
declines when private sector activity expands, much like today's
unemployed buffer stocks.
A job guarantee thus fulfills an absorption function to minimize
the real costs associated with the flux of the private sector. When
private sector employment
declines, public sector employment will automatically react and
increase its payrolls. So in a recession, the increase in public
employment will increase net government spending, and stimulate aggregate demand
and the economy. Conversely, in a boom, the decline of public sector
employment and spending caused by workers leaving their job guarantee
jobs for higher paid private sector employment will lessen stimulation,
so the job guarantee functions as an automatic stabilizer
controlling inflation. The nation always remains fully employed, with a
changing mix between private and public sector employment. Since the
job guarantee wage is open to everyone, it will functionally become the
national minimum wage.
Under a job guarantee, people of working age who are not in
full-time education and have less than 35 hours per week of paid
employment would be entitled to the balance of 35 hours paid employment,
undertaking work of public benefit at the minimum wage, though
specifics may change depending on the model. The aim is to replace
unemployment and underemployment
with paid employment (up to the hours desired by workers), so that
those who are at any point in time surplus to the requirements of the
private sector (and mainstream public sector) can earn a wage rather
than be underemployed or suffer poverty and social exclusion.
A range of income support
arrangements, including a generic work-tested benefit payment, could
also be available to unemployed people, depending on their
circumstances, as an initial subsistence income while arrangements are
made to employ them.
A fixed job guarantee wage provides an in-built inflation control mechanism. Mitchell (1998) called the ratio of job guarantee employment to total employment the buffer employment ratio (BER).
The BER conditions the overall rate of wage demands. When the BER is
high, real wage demands will be correspondingly lower. If inflation
exceeds the government's announced target, tighter fiscal and monetary
policy would be triggered to increase the BER, which entails workers
transferring from the inflating sector to the fixed price job guarantee
sector.
Ultimately this attenuates the inflation spiral. So instead of a buffer
stock of unemployed being used to discipline the distributional
struggle, a job guarantee policy achieves this via compositional shifts
in employment.
Replacing the currently widely-used measure the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), the BER that results in stable inflation is called the non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio (NAIBER).
It is a full employment steady state job guarantee level, which is
dependent on a range of factors including the path of the economy. There
is an issue about the validity of an unchanging nominal anchor in an
inflationary environment.
A job guarantee wage would be adjusted in line with productivity growth
to avoid changing real relativities. Its viability as a nominal anchor
relies on the fiscal authorities reining in any private wage-price
pressures.
No relative wage effects
Mitchell
and Muysken believe that a job guarantee introduces no relative wage
effects and the rising demand does not necessarily invoke inflationary
pressures because it is, by definition, satisfying the net savings
desire of the private sector. Additionally, in today's demand constrained economies, firms are likely to increase capacity utilisation to meet the higher sales volumes. Given that the demand impulse is less than required in the NAIRU economy, if there were any demand-pull inflation it would be lower under a job guarantee.
There are no new problems faced by employers who wish to hire labour to
meet the higher sales levels. Any initial rise in demand will stimulate
private sector employment growth while reducing job guarantee
employment and spending. However, these demand pressures are unlikely to
lead to accelerating inflation while the job guarantee pool contains
workers employable by the private sector.
Wage bargaining
While a job guarantee policy frees wage bargaining from the general threat of unemployment, several factors offset this:
In professional occupational markets, any unemployment will
generate downwards pressure on wages. However, eventually the stock of
unemployed professionals will be exhausted, whereupon upward wage-price
pressures can be expected to develop. With a strong and responsive
tertiary education sector, skill bottlenecks can be avoided more readily
than with an unemployed buffer stock;
Private firms would still be required to train new workers in
job-specific skills in the same way they would in a non-Job Guarantee
economy. However, job guarantee workers are far more likely to have
retained higher levels of skill than those who are forced to succumb to
lengthy spells of unemployment. This changes the bargaining environment
rather significantly because firms now have reduced hiring costs.
Previously, the same firms would have lowered their hiring standards and
provided on-the-job training and vestibule training in tight labour
markets. A job guarantee policy thus reduces the "hysteretic inertia"
embodied in the long-term unemployed and allows for a smoother private
sector expansion;
With high long-term unemployment, the excess supply of labour poses a
very weak threat to wage bargaining, compared to a job guarantee
environment.
List of job guarantee programs
A billboard informing the public of the presence of Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) workers employed at the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area. The EPWP is an attempt by government to alleviate South Africa's unemployment crisis.
Programs for adults
1848 – The first modern direct job creation scheme was implemented by the Parisian government in France through the National Workshops which took place from February to June 1848.
1928–1991 – The Soviet Union guaranteed a job for nearly everyone from about 1928 (as part of the Great Break)
through to its end in 1991. A job guarantee was included in its 1936
constitution, and was given further prominence in the 1977 revision. Later communist states followed this lead.
1935–1943 – In the United States from 1935 to 1943, the Works Progress Administration aimed to ensure all families in the country had one paid job, though there was never a job guarantee. Full employment was achieved by 1942 due to World War II, which led to the ending of the organisation the following year.
1945 – From 1945, the Australian government was committed to full employment through the position established by the White Paper Full Employment in Australia, however this never included a formal job guarantee. The Reserve Bank Act 1959 charges the Reserve Bank of Australia with ensuring full employment, amongst other duties. The Australian government's definition of "full employment" changes with the adoption of the NAIRU
concept in the late 1970s, with the government now aiming to keep a
sufficient proportion of people unemployed to stop
low-unemployment-related inflation.
1946 – The original drafters of the US Employment Act of 1946 intended for it to mandate full employment, however Congress ultimately gave it a broader pro-employment nature.
1948 – The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights'
Article 23 includes "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of
employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection
against unemployment." It is ratified by most non-socialist countries.
1978 – The US Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act
of 1978 authorized the government to create a "reservoir of public
employment" in case private enterprise does not provide sufficient jobs.
These jobs are required to be in the lower ranges of skill and pay so
as to not draw the workforce away from the private sector. However, the
act did not establish such a reservoir (it only authorized it),
and no such program has been implemented, even though the unemployment
rate has generally been above the rate (3%) targeted by the act.
1998–2010 – The United Kingdom's New Deal was similar to Australia's Work for the Dole scheme, though more focused on young people. It was in place from 1998 to 2010.
2001 – The Argentine government introduced the Jefes de Hogar (Heads of Households) program in 2001 to combat the social malaise that followed the financial crisis in that year.
2005 – Similarly, the government of India in 2005 introduced a five-year plan called the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA) to bridge the vast rural–urban income disparities that have
emerged as India's information technology sector has boomed. The program
successfully empowered women and raised rural wages, but also attracted
the ire of landowners who have to pay farm labourers more due to a
higher prevailing wage.
NREGA projects tend to be highly labour-intensive and low skill, like
dam and road construction, and soil conservation, with modest but
positive long-term benefits and mediocre management.
2012 – The South African government introduced the Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP)
in 2012 to overcome the extremely high unemployment and accompanying
poverty in that country. EPWP projects employ workers with government,
contractors, or other non-governmental organisations under the
Ministerial Conditions of Employment for the EPWP or learnership
employment conditions.
2020 – The Public Employment Service (AMS) in Austria in cooperation with University of Oxford economists started a job guarantee pilot in the municipality of Gramatneusiedl (Marienthal). The project's site became famous a century earlier through a landmark study in empirical social research when Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel studied the consequences of mass unemployment on a community in the wake of the Great Depression.
The current job guarantee pilot returned to the site to study the
opposite: what happens when unemployed people are guaranteed a job? The
program offers jobs to every unemployed job seeker who has been without a
paid job for more than a year.
When a job seeker is placed with a private company, the Public
Employment Service pays 100% of the wage for the first three months, and
66% during the subsequent nine months. Though, most of the long-term
jobless were placed in non-profit training companies tasked with
repairing second-hand furniture, renovating housing, public gardening,
and similar jobs. The pilot eliminated long-term unemployment – an
important result, given the programme’s entirely voluntary nature.
Participants’ gained greater financial security, improved their
psycho-social stability and social inclusion. The study drew international attention and informed policy reports by the EU, OECD, UN, and ILO.
2030 – In 2021, a report released by California governor
Gavin Newsom's Future of Work Commission called for a job guarantee
program in California by 2030.
Programs for youth
The European Youth Guarantee is a commitment by European Union
member states to "guarantee that all young people under the age of 25
receive, within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal
education, a good quality work offer to match their skills and
experience; or the chance to continue their studies or undertake an
apprenticeship or professional traineeship." The committed countries
agreed to start implementing this in 2014.
Since 2014, each year more than 3.5 million young people registered in
the program accepted an offer of employment, continued education, a
traineeship or an apprenticeship. Correspondingly, youth unemployment in
the EU has decreased from a peak of 24% in 2013 to 14% in 2019.
Sweden first implemented a similar guarantee in 1984, with fellow
Nordic countries Norway (1993), Denmark (1996) and Finland (1996)
following. Later, some additional European countries also offered this as well, prior to the EU wide adoption.
Germany
and many Nordic countries have long had civil and military conscription
programs for young people, which requires or gives them the option to
do low-paid work for a government body for up to 12 months. This was
also the case in the Netherlands until 1997. It was also the case in France, and that country is reintroducing a similar program from 2021.
Bhutan runs a Guaranteed Employment Program for youth.
Advocacy
The Labour Party under Ed Miliband went into the 2015 UK general election with a promise to implement a limited job guarantee (specifically, part-time jobs with guaranteed training included for long-term unemployed youth) if elected; however, they lost the election.
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