little big cookie shake

[keturn]

I've been spending a lot of my attention on alternative currencies lately, driven by an interest in the Portland Timebank community and partners. I've been in some discussions lately about different directions the timebank might develop in, and some of these conversations have succeeded in challenging enough of my assumptions about economies that

Comments

differences in efficiency

[keturn]

Huh! That's essentially the opposite of the concern I hear most frequently, which is "I want to charge more for my brain-surgery skill", not "what if scabs undercut my market."

I don't know. I'm not even sure if it's a problem yet. Although it is, now that I think about it, a slightly different expression of a relative-efficiencies problem I was thinking of earlier:

Say you and I both mow lawns. But you're lots better at mowing lawns than I am -- you can mow three lawns in the time it takes me to do one. So, you get all the lawn mowing business. Until peak mowing season hits and you run out of capacity for more jobs, at which point I pick up your overflow business.

So you're mowing lawns, and I'm mowing lawns, we're both doing good honest work and getting paid for it. Yeah, I'm getting paid more per-lawn than you, but there's still a limit to how many hours are in a day, so we're making about the same wages per day and together we're meeting the world's lawn-mowing needs.

Except the people who are paying me are spending more for the same service; consequently, it's like their money is worth less, just because they happened to not be lucky enough to get one of your lawn-mowing slots. What the hell? That sucks.

We could balance this out with a lawn-mowing co-op, where you and I get paid out of the co-op's joint account and the co-op charges some sort of average rate... that's about as far along as I've thought on that line.

Re: differences in efficiency

[freyley]

Comparative Advantage says you and Lindsey can make the world a better place by doing what you're each better at. So instead of mowing lawns, you sit babies -- you can sit 3 babies in the same hour, while Lindsey can only really keep track of one baby at a time. And then, where before only one baby and one lawn could be satmowed, 3 can be.

This is one of the ways that price is supposed to be a signal in the marketplace. Low price says that you can do it efficiently, and that means more of it can be done for everyone.

Re: differences in efficiency

[keturn]

Well, sure, until we get more lawns than Lindsey can mow by herself...