Name: Postcapitalism
ISBN: 9780374235543

Postcapitalism

"Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes--economic cycles that veer from boom to bust--from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason's Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new. At the heart of this change is information technology, a revolution that is driven by capitalism but, with its tendency to push the value of much of what we make toward zero, has the potential to destroy an economy based on markets, wages, and private ownership. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Vast numbers of people are changing how they behave and live, in ways contrary to the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism. And as the terrain changes, new paths open. In this bold and prophetic book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable economy. Although the dangers ahead are profound, he argues that there is cause for hope.

What Hacker News says

CommunitivityJul 2023

Another year closer to a Shadowrun future, minus the magic, where the most powerful corporations run everything, are more powerful than most nation states, and where your only allowed role in life is a consumer/corpse-servant for life (unless you want to risk the harsh penalties of being illegal and running the shadows).

I think we will get to a PostCapitalist future. The decisions we make in the next 7 years will likely determine whether the probable future is dystopian like Shadowrun, or utopian like Paul Mason (see his book "Postcapitalism: a Guide to Our Future").

Personally, I prefer Mason's, with his goals of:

- Rapidly reduce carbon emissions to stay below 2 °C warming by 2050 (edit: We've lost this battle, see the current 6-sigma sea ice event and recent AMOC reports - maybe we can hold it to 3 °C).

- Stabilise and socialise the global finance system.

- Prioritise information-rich technologies to deliver material prosperity and solve social challenges such as ill health and welfare dependency.

- Gear technology towards minimising necessary work, until work becomes voluntary and economic management can focus on energy and resources rather than capital and labour.

That will not be if we do not bring to heel the FAANG companies now, and prevent things like Apple's Private Access Token, Google's WEI, etc. from taking root (yanking them out of the ground where already present).

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chrisherdDec 2016

Originals - Adam Grant: Concise and clear, originals change the world but they aren’t the people we think they are.

When breath becomes air - Paul Kalanithi: Haunting, beautiful, moving and perfect. Life is surprising and we can’t legislate for the things that are thrust upon us.

Shoe dog - Phil Knight: How a gang of misfits can changed the world. Favourite entreprenurial journey I've ever consumed.

Sapiens - Yuval Harari: Wow, nothing else to say.

The Future of the Proffesions - Richard & Daniel Susskind: This is a tough read, it was a slog, but it was worth it. The world is changing before our eyes. Professions will die, not just entry level labour intensive jobs.

Contagious - Jonah Berger: If you own a business you want things to go viral, Jonah enlightens you to the possibilities of how.

Platform Scale - Sangeet Paul Choudary: Excellent and rigorously supported. An infusion of practicality and academia. A look behind the curtain of the collaborative economy.

The Third Wave - Steve Case: The low hanging fruits have been picked, now what? The internet of things is coming, but what does that mean.

The Sharing Economy - Arun Sundararajan: I’m a believer in the sharing/collaborative economy but i’m worried, the way people are being treated is deplorable. A projection of whats to come.

Grit - Angela Duckworth: Why do some people succeed and others don’t? Why did the child prodigy fail? Why do some people drop out of school and others thrive? Favourite book of the year.

Black Box Thinking - Matthew Syed: Cognitive dissonance, why do we think the way we do. Why can’t we change our minds even when we are wrong?

Clay Water Brick - Jessica Jackley: Want to learn what it takes to change the world?

Behind the Cloud - Marc Benioff: Marc Benioff is a genius.

Postcapitalism - Paul Mason: Does capitalism work? This seems even more pertinent following recent political upheaval. First Brexit now Trump, this gravitas of what this book conveyed wasn’t really certain until those moments occurred. The world is changing, brought forth by massive economic migration and the erosion of borders. Can we stay the same or must we evolve to survive?

Zero to One - Peter Thiel: Classic.

Presence - Amy Cuddy: I was going to omit this from the list on account of the fact some of the science of the book being flawed. I couldn’t, I loved it. It spoke to me about my own issues facing impostor syndrome.

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh: Tony is my mentor, he just doesn’t know it, yet.

Peers Inc. - Robin Chase: Could zipcar have been uber if the technology existed? It doesn’t matter, but reading this I felt like I was learning about a secret nobody knew about. Chase was ahead of her time, probably too far, but the book is gold.

Things a Little Bird Told me - Biz Stone: Sometimes billion dollar ideas are about luck arising from failure.

Business For Punks - James Watt: Do things your way or fail trying to please other people. Business for punks is brash, unapologetic and sure of itself. It doesn’t make any excuses, instead it forces it down your throat. In the same way Brewdog is a business like no other so is this book. It’s irreverent and certain. It’s the best business book i read this year, without queston.

OrphanX - Gregg Hurwitz: out Bourning Bourne, out Bonding Bond and out Reachering Reacher.

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joshdotsmithNov 2016

If you're reading the above comment and nodding your head or even feel the argument is wanting, I highly encourage you to read Postcapitalism by Paul Mason. There's even a chapter entitled "Was Marx Right?" Well worth the read.

https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Maso...

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dredmorbiusMay 2017

I agree with Kelly that the Internet is the modern outgrowth of the publishing and media industry, though I find his focus and conclusions beyond that point lacking.

For starters, the Internet itself is far more about distribution than duplicating. It's effect is to achieve distribution of information. Computers alone are sufficient to achieve copying, but it was the distribution component which computers alone, or even low-speed or fixed-location Internet failed to achieve. And though the Internet's distribution involves copying of bits, that's not the critical function.

Information theory itself concerns the origination, distribution, receipt, comprehension (or decoding), and possibly redistribution of messages. Those are instantiated through such systems as webservers (or application engines), the Internet, protocols, and ultimately some human or nonhuman interpretation engine.

Kelly is also correct in that the Internet removes costs and frictions. Or alternatively, it shifts the cost points of media, and generally reduces the costs of originating and duplicating information, without increasing individual capacity to comprehend or filter it. This gets to the core of what's been called the attention economy, forseen in the 1970s and earlier by Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler.

I've been looking at quantifications of information absorption capacity of people and suspect that that's generally quite low -- a few tens, possibly hundreds, of messages per day, but not much above that. The consequence of filter overload is a real problem. And the attention we can give any one message is directly inversely proportional to the number of messages received, divided by our time to dedicate to such messages.

Reducing costs gives rise to the Jevons paradox: It's not that the high-barrier-to-entry messages of the high-cost era suddenly become more available, but that a new flood of low-barrier, low-value (or negative-value) messages appear. Spam. Viruses. Junk mail. Phone solicitations. Web advertising. Clickbait.

There's also Woozle's Law of Epistemic Systems: as the audience using any given communications medium increases in number (and especially: in significance), the value of manipulating that audience will increase.

In market economics, low marginal costs become a problem as marginal cost is the mechanism by which markets set prices. For goods with high fixed and low marginal costs, market prices are simply insufficient to reward producers (or creators). This is the subject of recent books by Paul Mason (Postcapitalism) and Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society).

Gresham's Law is another challenge, multiple ways. The popular form is "Bad X drives out good", though the general mechanism is more nuanced: Greshams mechanisms are complexity constraints applied where a "better" (more complex) good is valued identically to a "worse" one, for whatever reasons, within a given domain. The general result is that the worse goods predominate. The capacity to distinguish better from worse itself affects this, which is why a larger market tends to incentivise worse goods. And, if there is an alternative market in which the better goods are more highly rewarded, you'll see a flight of those goods to those markets. This is often exhibited as brain-drain: flight from low-paid professions such as teaching, government work, politics, or academia, to business, trades, or finance, for example.

It can also be exhibited as international flows of capital, coin, or talent.

And this plays out in information markets, where the lack of sufficient reward will see authors and creators either depart for realms in which they are appropriately rewarded, or to other fields. Political and ethnic persecution can have similar effects -- the flight of European Jews to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, or the flight of American blacks to Europe from the 1930s through the 1970s and even beyond, as examples.

Sorting out the implications of changing relative costs and rewards is key, and that's what Kelly, and a great many others, fail to do.

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dredmorbiusJul 2016

Cyclical behavior in business and economics has been noted for a long time, certainly since the Industrial Revolution, and arguably before.

I think it's very dangerous to speak of cycles of predefined lengths, which recur regularly. I think it is useful to look at dynamics, how they occur, how they differ, the specific technological mechanisms driving these, and what the future implications are.

The questions are deep, vast, perplexing, and far from settled. Carlotta Perez's book is mentioned here, I second that. Paul Mason's Postcapitalism argues based on Kondratiev cycles, and has a lot of strong anecdotal data though I question Mason's economic instincts. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth is an excellent look backward at the period 1870-1970, and onward to the present, though I think his view forward is somewhat clouded. It's not that I disagree with his headwinds and projections of harder times ahead, it's that he's missed some far more fundamental drivers and dynamics.

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock also deals in technology cycles and their dynamics. I've only skimmed bits but suspect that would be insightful.

There's a bunch of crud written on the topic as well, but if you're interested in the question, you're not going to be short of content.

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JeddApr 2016

I am about two-thirds of the way through Paul Mason's 'Postcapitalism - A Guide To Our Future'. It's a book recommendation I got from some HN comments on a UBI story a while back.

The happy / neutral / depressing theories (more hypotheses) don't cover all the possibilities, of course.

Weirdly, while the 'depressing' scenario is badly described (is the placement of a computer in front of ever office worker an example of 'innovation'?), the initial premise -- that productivity is / has peaked -- may be accurate, iff we try to measure productivity today the same way we have done for the past hundred years. And that's kind of the problem -- we don't currently have appropriate metrics for productivity in a market increasingly based on information, let alone where information components of products are approaching zero cost.

Anyway, I'll pass-on the hive mind's recommendation of Mason's book - I'm yet to finish it, and even further from being convinced of the soundness of all his arguments, but it's the most interesting book on economics I've read.

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