Altruistic Economics - A Possible Solution!!
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hello all,
today I would like to introduce to you a person who has come up with a new idea on how to get rid of present economic system based on money and give an alternative choice which has to do more with human relation.
His name is Robin Upton. He is a british person doing his research in my country Bangladesh. But I came to acknowledge this idea when he came to malaysia on a short visit and my friend introduced him to me and we had some tea and also discussed a lot about his new system. I think it?s really a great idea if people can realize the good side of it rather than becoming materialized by our present day system.
As FM members are also doing research to find an alternative economic system to create balance in the society So I guess it would be great to share ideas and come up with a solution.
His website is http//www.altruists.org
I have also invited him to write and share his ideas here....So I hope you all can throw questions about this system in his thread.)
Thanks
Shamsul Arefin -
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peace shamsul,
good post, basically its advocating some what of a democratic/liberterian socialism or anarcho-communism as opposed to totalitarian communism, I believe this alternative theory is very close to "quranic economics" as well, its called parecon for participatory economics http//www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm all i know is we must replace the very evil systems of capitalism and its extreme cousin neoliberalism, i believe we should go to the quran/reading rather than looking at these theories but its interesting how some of these economic theories get so close to the system of the quran/reading
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Thanks all for your support. I also found it really interesting. Through out the discussion Robin also used the term "Gift economy" which is to create better relationship between humans. We all know the present day economy is pushing us to our own demise. I hope if we can work together, than we can come up with a solution.
He is trying to develop an online bittorent type software which will be used to maintain the transaction/trade is someway without any centralized control. Its something like bittorent where everyone share the file while the files are not required to be stored in central server. Well this is the ruff Idea I got from him. May be I will let him explain for you all..
peace
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Don't want to sound pessimistic but from what I learned, altruistic systems can be easily disrupted by selfish cheats. Does this system offer protection from that?
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peace Andya,
Don't want to sound pessimistic but from what I learned, altruistic systems can be easily disrupted by selfish cheats. Does this system offer protection from that?
What you are probably talking about is that a vanguard movement, like the Bolshevik party in Russia. often disrupts the more radical elements of a revolution in order to take power for themselves, many working class unions that attempted to take power for the workers in Russia were suppressed once the Bolsheviks came into power, they formed a totalitarian communist state where the party was in control and obviously rewarded itself most graciously, so as long as a country continues to be run by a party of elites than there can be no altruistic system in place, original marxist theory describes communism as "classless and stateless", much like how the quran/reading is disrupted by Sunnis
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) Hi there. Thanks for your welcome,
It is inevitable that people will try to rip it off. Questions 8 and 10 of www.altruists.org/AE4 address this point briefly, but understanding the system design properly is needed to understand this in more detail. Protection against the selfish has been central to the design of the system since its conception. Althoug implicit in most of the presentations, and made explicit in one or two, I may write a presentation explicitly on resisiting attack - since it is a primary concern of people when they hear of the 'Gift Economy'.
Basically, the decentralised structure should mean that any abuse is local and small scale, and is most problematic to the immediate friends of the cheat(s) - providing them with a motivation to reassess their trust accordingly, thus healing the network in an organic way. Unlike an ordinary system the fact that the network is invitation only means that there are limited options for abusing it -- for exactly the same reason that ripping off your friends more than once is not an option. Note how different this is from centralised money, where the combination of anonymity (see www.altruists.org/40 and centralised power (see www.altruists.org/416) means that a very few people (central bankers) have an enormous unaccountable power.
As Shamsul noted, work is ongoing on this to implement the idea in software. Any more specific questions are very welcome.
Regards,Robin Upton