What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
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Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views
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Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
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The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
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Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
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Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
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Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
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The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
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The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
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Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
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Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
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shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
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Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
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Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
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But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
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Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
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The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
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in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
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Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
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We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
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It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
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There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
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Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
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Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
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Open structures - 2 views
www.openstructures.net
tool open source hardware platform community mechanics manufacturing modular standard design standard level IoPA
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Jan 13
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Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being.pdf - 0 views
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subjective well-being is taken to be:2Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that peoplemake of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences
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“subjective well-being is an umbrella term for the different valuationspeople make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds,and the circumstances in which they live”.
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In measuring overall human well-being then, subjective well-being should be placedalongside measures of non-subjective outcomes, such as income, health, knowledge andskills, safety, environmental quality and social connections
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Inparticular, a distinction is commonly made between life evaluations, which involve acognitive evaluation of the respondent’s life as a whole (or aspects of it), and measures ofaffect, which capture the feelings experienced by the respondent at a particular point in time(Diener, 1984; Kahneman et al., 1999
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The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)
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making an evaluation of this sort as involving the individual constructing a “standard” thatthey perceive as appropriate for themselves, and then comparing the circumstances oftheir life to that standard
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Life evaluations are based on how people remember their experiences (Kahneman et al.,1999) and can differ significantly from how they actually experienced things at the time
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It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”
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One of the mostwell documented measures of life evaluation – thePersonal Wellbeing Index– consists of eightquestions, covering satisfactions with eight different aspects of life, which are summedusing equal weights to calculate an overall index (International Wellbeing Group, 2006)
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(job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),
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AffectAffect is the term psychologists use to describe a person’s feelings. Measures of affectcan be thought of as measures of particular feelings or emotional states, and they aretypically measured with reference to a particular point in time.
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Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006
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While an overall evaluation of life can be captured in a single measure, affect has atleast two distinct hedonic dimensions: positive affect and negative affect (Kahneman et al.,1999; Diener et al., 1999
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LightMachinery - Optics, Fluid Jet Polishing, CO2 & Excimer Lasers - 0 views
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behaves like a very low loss non-polarizing beam splitter cube with the added benefit that the reflectivity of the beam splitter can be adjusted from 1% to 90% for any wavelength. As the UBS is rotated, the transmitted and reflected beams remain at 90 degrees. A simple marvel of optical engineering.
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The Universal Beam Splitter. The UBS mounts in any standard 1" diameter mirror mount and behaves like a very low loss non-polarizing beam splitter cube with the added benefit that the reflectivity of the beam splitter can be adjusted from 1% to 90% for any wavelength. As the UBS is rotated, the transmitted and reflected beams remain at 90 degrees. A simple marvel of optical engineering.
IEC 61010-1-2010 online - 0 views
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Show actuator | Standard piezo actuator products - NAC2710 - 0 views
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Show actuator | Standard piezo actuator products - NAC2013-Hxx - 0 views
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Welcome to Zap Lasers - USA - 1 views
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Zap laser was acquired by Discus, and Discus was acquired by Philips...wow ! http://dentistrytoday.com/industry-news/3079-discus-dental-acquires-zap-lasers http://www.newscenter.philips.com/main/standard/news/press/2010/20101011_discus_holdings.wpd that's may explain why the Zap website is closed now...
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POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views
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how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
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concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
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personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
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As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.
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America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.
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For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
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as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.
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the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
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the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
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major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.
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A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
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Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
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many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored
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what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?
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Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation
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economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
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Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
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Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
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believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.
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innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”
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costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas
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Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.
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we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”
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A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
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there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
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This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”
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The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”
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Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
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Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.
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The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”
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The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform
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tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
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small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.
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Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
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“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
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“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite
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Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views
code.google.com/...guide_writing_scripts.html
google script apps Programming javascript tool tools infrastructure
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11
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Use the Script Editor to write and run scripts, to set triggers, and to perform other actions such as sharing scripts.
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use the onOpen event handler in more than one script associated with a particular Spreadsheet, all scripts begin to execute when you open the Spreadsheet and the order in which the scripts are executed is indeterminate.
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A script cannot currently call or create another script and cannot call functions in another script.
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You can trigger Apps Script events from links that are embedded in a Google Site. For information about how to do this, see Using Apps Scrip in Your Ssite.
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You also designate whether only you can invoke the service or whether all members of your domain can invoke the service.
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API includes objects that you use to accomplish tasks such as sending email, creating calendar entries
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Custom functions and formulas in the spreadsheet execute any time the entire Spreadsheet is evaluated or when the data changes in the function or formula's cell.
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The debugger does not work with custom functions, onEdit functions, event triggers, or scripts running as a service.
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use the debugger to find errors in scripts that are syntactically correct but still do not function correctly.
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Functions ending in an underscore (_), for example, internalStuff_(), are treated differently from other functions. You do not see these function in the Run field in the Script Editor and they do not appear in the Script Manager in the Spreadsheet. You can use the underscore to indicate that users should not attempt to run the function and the function is available only to other functions.
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The Dead Are Wealthier Than the Living: Capital in the 21st Century - Pacific Standard:... - 0 views
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you needed at least 20 to 30 times the income of the average person, and the most lucrative professions paid only half that
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Consequently, “society” (i.e., the rich) consisted almost entirely of rentiers living off inherited wealth
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But it’s income that mostly interests us, not wealth, because income is the currency of the modern economy. Gone are the days when the only way to acquire an upper-class income was to marry into a family fortune.
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“a very large share, perhaps a majority, of corporate profit hinges on rules and regulations that could in principle be altered.”
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The clearest such pattern is that r really was, at most points in history, greater than g, if only because g was seldom much to write home about, especially back when economies were primarily agricultural. (Inflation, I learned from reading this book, didn’t really exist before the 20th century.)
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really, the 0.01 percent, a cohort Piketty dubs “supermanagers”—to receive much of its remuneration in the form of stock options and other capital holdings.
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Typically, r is four to five times g, but the ratio gets larger as capital accumulates across generations
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Baker also suggests that the tendency for large amounts of capital to realize a higher return isn’t solely attributable to the superior financial instruments they have access to; it may also have something to do with rampant insider trading, which could be policed more closely.
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just in case we get too caught up in determining incomes, disrupting private capital and inheritance needs to be on the agenda. Private goods tend to eventually become public goods (paid a royalty for paper lately?) but the rate at which private goods become public needs to increase (patent reform, inheritance tax etc)
OpenSensorData.net - 1 views
rOpenSci - open source tools for open science - 1 views
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What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views
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Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
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Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
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the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
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Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
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The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
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The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
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Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
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Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
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The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
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Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
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In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
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Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
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One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
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He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero
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As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
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Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
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Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
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Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
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In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
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There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?