Value Cells and Networks: How to Transform an Economic System

Value Cells and Cell Networks

I’ve been rattling on for a couple of years about the fact that I did not have any idea how the transition to the Post-Financial world could be achieved peacefully.  That alone made it easy to label this set of ideas as pure fantasy.  Herewith, a modest proposal for how the change might done, and how we can start on it now.

The first concept to understand here is the Value Cell.

The cell, of course, is one of the primary building blocks of life.  It’s a simple concept really: a bag that separates the material inside from whatever is on the outside.   It’s also interesting from a systems point of view.

 

Without going into General Systems Theory too deeply, we can conceptualize a System as having three main components: Inputs, Processes, and Outputs.  A System, then, takes inputs and processes them into outputs. The beauty of this approach is that it allows you to view the Processes as Black Boxes. That is, at the top level we can ignore the details of the processing and just look at the inputs and outputs .  Later we can look inside the Process and figure out what systems are inside that.  The Systems approach, allows you to analyze something complex into easier-to-understand layers.

So from that very general context, let’s define a Value Cell (VCell) as something that outputs Value.  A Value could consist of goods or services, anything from pies to lawn service to brain surgery.  Now, out in the larger world, interesting things start happening when we consider interactions with other cells.  The output from one cell may then serve as the input to another one.  Then the value that the second one outputs may be the input to a third.  After that, perhaps the outputs of the first and third cells might be the inputs to a fourth, which might be used by two other cells as inputs, etc, etc. 

Let’s imagine a restaurant as a cell.  The inputs are raw foodstuffs and the outputs are meals.  Customers come in and pay for the meals and leave.  They’ve exchanged one value (money) for another value (meals).  Now notice something over there at the table by the kitchen door.  Employees are eating, too, but they don’t pay money for their food.  Instead they exchange one value (labor) for another value(meals).  So the processes inside a cell may be (and usually are) different from how the cell interacts with the outside. 

Now let’s stretch the idea a little.  Let’s imagine a hospital.  Again, “customers” exchange value (money) for value (health services) and employees get these services for free.  Because this hospital has no preventive care services, they enter into a partnership with a clinic that outputs preventive care.  As part of the agreement, the hospital workers get free preventive care and the preventive care workers get free hospital services.  The hospital makes a similar deal with a physical therapy service, and now each of the three services gets free treatment from the other two. Now we have a Value Cell Network (VCN).

The services don’t even have to be closely related.  For instance, an auto repair shop enters into an agreement with a cleaning service:  the shop gets free cleaning, the cleaning service people get free auto care.  Such a network could expand indefinitely.  That’s a Post-Financial Economy (PFE).

Because of our habitual Malthusian attitude that there isn’t enough to go around, the tendency, even in a PFE, is to try to make sure that we’re always getting a “profitable deal” with these network agreements.  Likely as not, such an agreement will fall apart or never get made in the first place due to perceived inequities.   If instead we adopt a Fullerian view that the problem isn’t scarcity, it’s distribution (and nobody is saying that that’s going to be easy), then we can relax a little bit.

 

Let’s take a look at another example. In this case, it’s a VCell called the Piano Rehabilitation Hospital (PRH) that’s already beginning operations.  The premise of the VCell is to take in ailing pianos, nurse them back to health and either return them to their owners or, if the piano is acquired by the PRH, distribute (output) them at the end.  Here again  there are two forms of distribution.  Inside the VCell or VCN, they are distributed to the workers; outside the VCell or VCN they are sold for cash.  As yet, the VCell has no network connections.  Now let’s say Annie wants to have a piano for herself and her kids to play.  She comes to the PRH, looks over the selection and finds one she likes.  “How much is that piano there”, she asks.

                “It’s $850 cash”, says the helpful salesperson, “Or you can trade labor for it.”

                “How much labor?” asks Annie.

                “We don’t measure it in hours,” says the salesperson, “Let me explain by showing you around.”

The salesperson takes Annie on a tour of the place. At first glance, walking through the shop, it looks like a regular repair shop, but since it’s Monday morning, there’s a meeting going on, and no one is working on the pianos at the moment.  The salesperson opens a door to a brightly-lit room where all the workers are sitting around a conference table.  One worker is standing at a whiteboard explaining some numbers.

The salesperson introduces Annie, and the workers  greet her warmly and show her to a seat. The woman at the whiteboard, Judy, continues her presentation.

                “Last week we finished six pianos and sold two.  We took in $1800 for those two.  We have three bills that need to be paid totaling $475, so that leaves $1325 for distribution.  Also, I’m going to propose that Walter here has worked here long enough to earn his piano.  What do you all think?”

The workers discuss Walter’s contributions during the time he has been there and agree that it seems enough for him to have earned the piano they have set aside for him.  You see, Walter is on a different compensation plan from all the rest of the workers.  He’s not on profit-sharing, he’s been accumulating value towards a piano.  Nobody quantifies this, no hours worked valued against the piano.  The decision is made by his co-workers that he’s contributed enough.

                Judy asks, “How about it, Walter, will you be staying with us after the piano’s delivered?”

                “Yes,” replies Walter, “I’ve really enjoyed working here, so I’d like to stay.”

                “Great!” says Judy.  “If everyone agrees, we’ll convert Walter’s plan to profit-sharing.”

There is applause for Walter, and the meeting breaks up.  Judy walks Annie into the office.

                “Does everyone working here start out working for a piano?” asks Annie as they are sitting down.

                “No.  That’s just one option.  Jake is a saxophone player and doesn’t even want a piano, but he likes the work and the compensation plan and the company, so he’s been here for five years now.”

                “How does the compensation plan work?”

                “It’s pretty simple, actually.  After the outside expenses are taken care of, the profits from any sales are distributed evenly to the workers.”

                “Evenly? So I could come in for 10 minutes one day, turn a couple of screws, and qualify for profit sharing when the week’s done?”

                “Not exactly.  If you don’t spend much time here, the workers won’t vote you in for the week.  It’s cumulative, though.  If you could only work a couple hours a week, you would get voted a share every month or so.  But most of the benefit to working here is going to be the VCN.  Right now we’re finishing up exchange deals with the hospital, a hardware store, and our cleaning service.”

                To be continued….

I hope from this you can see the possibility for enterprises that can bridge between the FW and the PFE, then adapt smoothly to the new way of doing things.

The Post-Financial World: The Next Step in the Evolution of Consciousness

Let's assume for a moment that the idea of a finite ecosystem has finally sunk all the way in. Right now the majority of humanity acknowledges the idea that all of life is an interconnected web, but we put that on a shelf with the rest of our ideas that we don't fully process, that we don't envision how it would apply to us.

Interconnection means that we're not really separate from "others" as our eyes would have us believe. In fact, there are no "others" in any independent sense. Separateness is an illusion, a fiction that we've adopted because it's useful at a stage in the evolution of self-awareness. Knowledge of our interconnectedness points beyond "Us versus Them" to a place where we realize that there is no "Them". There is only "Us". You can find plenty of evidence for that if you approach the facts with an open mind.

1. Your body is a colony of cells, billions of specialized little entities acting in concert in the common enterprise you call "you."

2. Likewise, this thing called our self (small "s") is a colony of ideas (mostly non-original), emotions and behaviors (mostly learned along our life-story's timeline). It appears in the space of pure awareness that we think (because of the evidence of our very limited senses) is a "person" living inside this bag of flesh and bone. The word "person', by the way, comes from the Greek word (transliterated) "personna" which literally means a "mask". It originally meant a theatrical mask with sort of built-in megaphone that the sound ("sonna") came through ("per"). We are not this "personna", this thing that sound (and a lot of other stuff) comes through. We are the pure awareness that's watching this whole performance of the "self". More properly, we are this pure awareness that everything arises in.

3. Again, our history of sensory experiences convinces us that this awareness is inside our heads. The Ghost in the Machine. Very Existential. But how do we know when somebody is staring at us from behind our backs? How do we finish each others sentences when we are in intimate relationships? The world is full of little clues pointing to boundlessness if we are simply willing to suspend our previous notions and really look at what's actually going on.

Now, if we're really not as separate as we appear, how does it make any sense to act as though we were? It takes a lot of energy to hang on to separateness. Here's another clue: we'd much rather relax with our "friends" than defend ourselves against our fears, which we externalize as "other people" who are "strangers." We don't want anything bad to happen to our "friends", the people we have stuff "in common" with. We're not so sure about those "strangers", though! And the "stranger" they are, the more defended we feel, that is until we find out that the "strangers" are really no different from "us" in any fundamental way. We all want to be happy. We all want to feel safe. We all want our kids to be happy and safe. That's just for starters.

Fear and anger (which usually seems to be a defense against fears that we don't want to acknowledge) are the primary causes of feeling separate. When we don't feel so separate, we relax. Hmmm. What could that mean?

So what if we all "got it"? What if we all started treating everybody else as though they were, if not ourselves, at least our family? Probably in the course of this evolutionary change, everybody is not going to wake up one morning with this realization firmly lodged in awareness. I'm guessing it will take some time, but that a tipping point will be reached where consciousness of interconnectedness will outweigh the illusion of separateness. What do you suppose will happen then? My guess is that we'll start taking care of each other as though we were all family members, then as though we were all each other's children. Not that hard to imagine, is it? It's just the logical conclusion of ecology, of the obvious interconnectedness of all life. In fact, it has to extend to what we perceive now as "non-living matter", which supports the seemingly fragile web of life. Mistreat the non-living matter until it stops supporting life, and life disappears. Be grateful for the rocks holding up your house. If they weren't there, you wouldn't be either.

Another thing that the illusion of separateness and the subsequent fear produces is the idea that there Isn't Enough. That idea was formalized by the pioneering economist, Adam Smith (1723? - 1790). Better information convinced another pioneer, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), that the problem wasn't scarcity, it was distribution. A really good introduction to his ideas and the facts that he backs them up with is a little book called "Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth". Ought to be required reading for everybody.

So if there really is enough, and we start to understand that we need to take care of our world (every body and every thing), wouldn't our first impulse be to try to solve the distribution problems and make sure that everybody gets taken care of? Does that seem so illogical? Right now we're so conditioned by our belief in scarcity that we fear that by helping others, there won't be enough for "ourselves". If there's enough for everybody, wouldn't that fear atrophy away?

Let's take another look at money in this context. We know that it's a convenient way to trade goods and services, but in previous posts, we've made the case that with a scarcity mindset, it's also a convenient way to hoard. Hoarding is a response to perceived scarcity. But if everybody has enough and everybody is taking care of each other, hoarding doesn't make sense. Neither does piling up lots of money. If you translate vast wealth into vast amounts of stuff, you may not have a scarcity problem, but you definitely have a storage problem. Now suppose what you're hoarding is perishable. You either have to defend your wealth, maybe by refrigerating it (which chips away at your wealth), or you watch it perish. The better part of wisdom in a post-financial world would be to acquire only what you actually need and can take care of. We said before that ownership may come to mean not what you've paid for but what you can accept responsibility for.