https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aK9RkMb3fB8
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk about today is my conception of the economy and how I think the easiest way and the best way to think about this is as participation. Now as always these are my definitions. If you like my definitions, use them. If you don’t like my definitions, throw them away. Or better yet, modify them for your own use. So this is pretty much the most useful way I’ve found to think about what an economy is so that I can understand how it functions and why it functions the way that it does. For me the utilitarian view doesn’t work. Like that version isn’t quite fit. You can sort of say, oh the economy is used to exchange value and things like that or the economy as money. I think that’s a deep mistake. I think most of the economy is non-monetary. And the reason why this is important is because we need to be able to track why people are doing what they’re doing. So an easy example that sort of occurs is daycare. So daycare is a very expensive thing, sort of ridiculously expensive. Generally there’s no reason for daycare. This is something we used to be taking care of by family members and being in larger groups in communities. We’re no longer in larger groups in communities. We moved away from our families. Now we need daycare. Hugely expensive. Mostly because we value children very highly for obvious reasons. So we can get this for free from bunches of people in our family, in our immediate friend group, in exchange of you watch my kid, I’ll watch your kid. Those are non-monetary transactions but they’re actually highly valuable if you map them back to money. Now you can make arguments but oh well the reason we have to map them back to money the way they do is that it’s really not that valuable but you know it’s somebody else’s kid so you want to take care. That’s a lot of nonsense. It’s definitely nothing to do with that. The value in an economy is determined by factors like time, energy, and effort. And you can convey those with money maybe sometimes but they’re not the same thing. And that’s super important that they’re not the same thing. So money is a way of doing efficient bartering. Bartering is a way of trading goods for goods. And so the problem with goods for goods training is that goods are not always available. It’s hard to determine the value of a good. Good values change pretty quickly because there’s always the value to the person you’re trading with and the value to yourself. So value isn’t one thing between the two of you. Value is the two numbers and there’s a negotiation for the trade. That’s what trade is. Trade is not oh I have this it’s of the set value you’ll give me this set value for it. That actually doesn’t happen all that often in an economy. Trades are made to determine value. That’s what a trade is. The act of trading determines value. And so that’s kind of important to know. And the reason why these things are important is because we need to know what’s going on in the economy. You know especially if it’s a feature of participation and therefore as an element of cooperation. Like how do we participate? Why would we want to participate? What are we bringing to the economy that’s valuable enough to participate? And you know for that matter what the hell is participation? What does it mean? What if I don’t want to do it? So I think these are important sort of questions to get out of the way. You don’t have to participate in an economy. Any economy. It can be done. Maybe painful. Maybe uncomfortable. But it is your choice. You can go live in the woods and hunt your own food. People do it. It may not be the greatest thing. People do it. You’d probably be by yourself. Not the best situation in the world. I would argue that if you even have one other person you’re going to have an economy going between the two of you. So you’re not getting around economy anytime soon most likely. The reason to participate is efficiency. Economies make a bunch of things possible that aren’t possible without them. You can make arguments for more or less efficient economies and a lot of people do. But it’s easier to understand these things first before you go thinking oh yeah there’s a better way to do this economy thing. It’s easier from most perspectives to think of this as a base level thing. What is an economy? Then the mechanics of it are easier to see if you’re not wrapping it up with capitalism. Because capitalism is not an economy. It’s not an economic system at all. The easiest way to think about participation is when you’re doing something with someone else or maybe even with nature. You’re involved in a process that’s unfolding over time. You’re participating in that. That means that there’s an outcome that is greater than you by yourself. Which is not to say you can’t participate in things by yourself but the things you participate in with not just you are greater than the things you can participate in by yourself. This is kind of an important concept and that’ll get developed in later videos for sure. But what the participation is giving you is more than you can get alone. You can see how this can stack up. You can participate with six people and get a bunch more work done than if you participate with only one person. It’s not always the case. I’m not trying to draw a linear relationship. But participation allows you and enables you to become greater than you are alone. If you don’t want to participate, like I said, you don’t have to. You can bow out. You cannot do it. No one’s forcing you to buy stuff from Amazon. No one’s forcing you to do your recycling. These are things that you participate in that are somewhat voluntary. There may be consequences for not participating. But that’s different from saying you don’t have a choice. You always have a choice of which consequences to pick. In any decision, you’re picking consequences. That goes back to trade-offs. We’ll do more on trade-offs too. You might ask yourself, well, what’s the point of participation? It’s really about creation or participation as such as always co-creation. Co-creations where, again, we’re building something bigger than ourselves. We’re building something for more than just us. We’re building something that could outlast us even. Co-creation is probably the most valued thing in an economy, in a participation. It’s probably co-creation that gives us the most pleasure personally and gives groups the most pride as groups. I think that’s important. The reason to understand economies in this way is to be able to get a sense of the considerations we should have to get what we want from the economy, from the trade, from the transaction, from the participation, and understand our role as a participant so that we can better value ourselves. Values are negotiations. Again, they’re negotiated by the trade itself. You can always be obstinate, and sometimes this works, and say, I want this for this. For this participation, this is what I want. This is what consulting is. Consultants say, meh, my time’s worth this many dollars per hour. I’m willing to do this kind of work for this many dollars per hour, and that’s it. Some people are very successful at making that dollar value very high, and other people are lazy, and will just take whatever they can get, or whatever they can get easily without doing the work that they don’t want to do. You’re kind of giving somebody else some of your money in some cases so that you don’t have to do a bunch of work, or take care of a bunch of things, whether it be insurance, or billing, or marketing, whatever it is. These are levels of participation in an economy, and you, to some extent, create your own value structures, and people either decide to cooperate or not. If your value structures are too far outside of theirs, they won’t want to participate with you, you won’t get what you’re looking for. If you can value your stuff differently, then you can cooperate differently. It’s important to know. Economies are dynamic things. There aren’t set rules in them, per se. For most things, most types of participation and cooperation are non-monetary, so that means that you can get things that aren’t money for your time, trouble, and effort. One of the things I used to do is I used to do a lot of work for people with computers, and there were some people that, you know, they would just say, hey, I’ve got a problem, and I would just go help them. Like, it wasn’t a monetary thing. But when I needed things, like I just mentioned little things like, oh, you know, do you know somebody who does X medical service, people that do different lawn care, carpentry, they would have a recommendation. And not only would they have a recommendation, but they’d call that person up and say, hey, this guy’s going to be calling you, take good care of him, he’s a friend of mine. So I’m trading my time and my expertise in helping people with computers for effectively friendship tokens, right? Like care tokens. Take care of this person. He’s a good person, right? And it’s that ethical and moral valuation that’s really high ultimately because it opens the doors to so many more things. One of the things it opens the doors for is, man, if you were friends with certain people, you got stuff at cost, and there’s nothing better than buying things at cost, let me tell you. So you know, it’s very, you know, everyone wins, right? They’re getting value for their time. You’re not getting charged an exorbitant amount. Very gratifying to do business that way for me. And understanding the value in the economy and how to leverage that to get what you want is what I’m hoping this model gives you. It’s economy as participation. People are trying to participate. They’re looking for ways to participate all the time. And so you can view marketing this way. You can say, oh, when people are marketing to me, what are they actually doing? They’re asking me to participate with them. And you know, I can just say no, like marketing isn’t some fist that grabs you and pulls you somewhere. It’s not something that hits you and makes you go somewhere. It’s an invitation to participate, to co-create, right? And maybe it’s an unfair participation or maybe they want too much money or maybe they want too much time. Then don’t participate. You don’t have to. But there are always elements of the economy we have to participate in. And maybe that’s good. Maybe there’s advantages to understanding how this works that we can leverage so that we give more value in and get more value out. And that’s what I’m hoping this model will help you do is mull it over. Think about it. Consider the implications of economy as participation and how that can benefit you to make you a better participator with others. I hope that this is helpful and that these ideas and just jiggling them around a bit in your brain are a pathway to create better navigation in the world, especially through something as changing and complicated as economy. I just want to thank you for your time and attention not only to me but to the material.