Kudunomics refers to property rights for the information-based economy, the topic of a talk by Samuel Bowles. He looks at the foraging economy to understand the knowledge economy.
(the Kudu is an antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared, perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family).
Excerpts from the presentation by Samuel Bowles summarized (liveblogged) by Ethan Zuckerman:
1.
“The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.
Bowles suggests that we may gain some insight about the evolution of institutions under these conditions by studying the reverse transition: by studying the transition from the late Plioscene forager economy, where weath was difficult to own, to agrarian and industrial economies, based on ownership. We can study this by “running history backwards” with an agent-based model of the weightless economy. We understand the forager economy fairly well due to ethnographic research, and we might gain insights about the governance of this emergent weightless economy from studying governance dynamics in forager economies.
Bowles offers a model of wealth where the wealth of a person is the sum of network wealth, embodied wealth and material wealth.(…)
The article is well worth reading entirely. I remember Howard Rheingold describing his activity of collecting and organizing & redistributing information, skills and knowledge as the activity of a hunter-gatherer.
That is in fact what many of us do, working in the information and knowledge industries: hunting and gathering information and connections.
If one enters the streams of connections and information such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or Tumblr, one realizes how hard it is to assign a financial value to those activities.
Very often, the marginal cost of digital stuff is almost zero. It does not increase costs if one other person reads this blog for instance, to give an approximative idea of what this means.
So maybe our societies are at least partially moving closer again to those forager economies, rather than remaining firmly in their agricultural or industrial functioning, when it was easier to claim ownership.
Positively considered, this could mean that network wealth and embodied wealth are gaining in importance compared to material wealth. However, it is difficult not to see the negative aspects: the emergence of network/forager/sharing economic systems causes tensions and problems in the market economies, causing disruptive change.
In those processes people lose their jobs for instance, and maybe those who are already in a good position will find it easy to benefit from the new state of things, if they can work out clever alliances with the upcoming creative classes.
Roland Legrand