Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement Global, gave a lecture in Berlin,
Germany on November 12th, 2013 about the economoic calculation in an NL/RBE.
The lecture was streamed live on the internet but wasn't released as a video until
December 3, 2013.
While watching the video I have been making notes included with time stamps to
serve as a table of contents for the video lecture. This can be used by anyone who
wants to skim the notes in order to find out where in the video that specific topic
was discussed, rather than needing to rewatch the whole video or remember
where certain things were covered.
Here is the video followed by the notes.
2:00 Part 1: Why Change?
Part 2: Post-Scarcity
Part 4: Economic Organization and Calculation
9:09 "[The] excess use of the earth's resources or 'overshoot' is possible
because resources can be harvested faster than they can be
replaced...the cumulative overshoot from the mid-1980's to 2002
restulted in an 'ecologocal debt' that would require 2.5 earths to pay.
In a business-as-usual scenario, our demands on planet earth could
mount to the productivity of 27 planets by 2050"
(Fig. 4)
-Marine Ecology Progress Series, Vol. 434:p261, 2011
9:30 And there's no shortage of other corroborating studies. To one degree
or another we are indeed greatly overshooting the annual production
capacity of the earth. Coupled with pollution & collateral distraction
caused by industrial and consumer patterns. Again this kind of research
has been published for many decades, now, & why is it, that with all
this mounting data, we can't seem to curb life support depletion &
our overshooting consumption trends?
10:10 Is it because there are too many people on the planet? Is it because
we're just utterly incompetent and have no conscious control over
our actions? NO...
15:00 Morality as opposed to what works or doesn't.
17:30 Class Warfare
18:30 Inequality is a mathematical result of market competition.
19:10 Stuctural Classism
21:00 "The market generates desperation as its method of coersion"
21:30 'Free' market contradiction.
Only the rich perhpas the super rich who have no need to worry about
basic survival due to their wealth could possibly be said to engage of
'voluntary free trade'.
22:30 Socio-economic inequality is a form of poison that effects peoples'
psychological health in profound ways.
22:50 Structural violence.
24:00 Health related to inequality.
26:45 More examples of Structural Violence
1.5 million children die yearly from diarrheal diseases that are utterly
preventable
27:50 Physical violence linked to poverty
28:37 Aristotle quote, "poverty is the parent of revoluion and crime."
28:40 Gandhi "poverty is the worst form of violence."
29:00 Preventable (poverty)
29:12 Solving social inequality is not just a nice thing to do; it is a public health
imperative just like making sure our water isn't polluted so we don't get
diseases.
29:25 It's a form of blowback.
29:55 People feel that society doesn't care about them.
30:20 The New Civil Rights Movement
31:01 PART II: POST SCARCITY
An Abundance focused Worldview
31:15 A Natural Law/Resource Based Economy is not a Utopia.
31:20 The Zeitgeist Movement seeks a high-relative-sustainable abundance,
relieving the most relevant forms of scarcity.
31:45 –Relative/Sustainable abundance.
–focus on most relevant forms of scarcity.
32:10 The market cannot differentiate between needs and wants and this gets to
the roots of our value system disorder which continues to distort our
culture.
33:35 Matt Berkowitz interview with famous Austrian economist.
34:29 A 'Post-Scarcity' or "abundance" worldview, with an active recognition
of the natural limits of consumption on the planet. Seeking equilibrium.
34:50 technology makes it currently possible to have abundance for all the
worlds people without need to compete.
35:15 "Ephemeralization" term from Buckminster Fuller. More with less.
Energy/Resource Use inverse to efficiency/Power.
35:45 Moore's Law.
36:30 High Standard of living? What is meant?
36:45 If we as a society wish to keep the value of constant materialism, growth
and consumption promoting the virtue of having infinite wants then we
might as well just kill ourselves right now...As that is going to be the end
result if we continue to push past the limits of the physical world with
respect to our resource exploitation and the loss of bio-diversity.
37:35 4 categories to cover in post-scarcity.
•food abundance–
•water abundance–
•Energy A–
•Material A–
⬊ very conservative assesment for: using statistics that have been
put into industrial use, not theoretical.
38:00 Food According to UN, one out of every 8 on earth suffer from chronic
under nourishment.
38:20 Current world agriculture production of calories info (2,720 kilo calories
per person)
38:45 According to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers:
30 - 50% (or 1.2 - 2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reach a
human stomach. Figure does not reflect that large amounts of land, energy,
fertilizers and water have also been lost in the production of food stuffs
which simply end up as waste.
39:30 Vertical Farming
40:05 Vertical Farm in Singapore-example. $3 per month electric
40:35 Students at Columbia University determined that to feed 50,000 people,
a 30 story farm...
⬋
40:53 30 Story farm on 6.4 acres = feed 50,000 people
78 farms, using 0.1% Los Angeles
land Area = feed 3.9 million
41:15 Apply this to earth population of 7.2 billion. Need about 144, 000 verti-
cal farms to feed the whole world. 921,000 acres of land – given that
about 38% of earth's land is currently being used for traditional agri-
culture, we find that we only need about .006% of the earth's existing
agricultural requirements. If the current agricultural acreage was used to
put 30 story vertical farms side by side, then the food production would
be enough to feed 34,440,000,000,000 (34 trillion people).
42:25 We only need to harness about 0.02% of this theoretical capacity to feed
9 billion (2050 population)
42:40 Makes any argument moot.
42:45 Water: According to World Health Organization, about 2.6 billion people
half of the developing world- lack proper santitation and about 1.1 billion
have no access to any clean drinking water.
43:05 2025 predictions of water scarcity
Cause? Waste and pollution.
43:30 Purification: Water Purification stats for World.
46:55 Water Purification for Africa example.
48:35 Energy:
49:22 Geothermal Abundance Comparison.
49:25 2006 MIT report on Geothermal
49:40 Total energy consumption of all countries on planet is about 0.55 ZJ per
year.
51:10 2013 Ethiopian geothermal plant used for statistical extrapolations. Facts
and figures.
52:25 Wind Farms
Breaking it down...
54:30 Solar Fields
55:40 4.1% of the world's deserts would suffice to power the world with solar.
55:45 Water based power. 5 dominant types.
56:00 Stats – Global potential using existing methods.
57:00 Energy Recap –Systems thinking.
57:56 Localization/Reuse schemes
59:20 Peizo-electric
59:45 using Piezo-electric for highways.
1:00:20 Material Abundance
1:00:50 Inefficiency is the driver of profit
1:02:09 Access not Property
1:03:05 'Property' is not empirical, it is a protecionist contrivance.
1:03:45 Designed In Recycling – zero waste
1:04:20 Nanotech Recycling
1:05:20 Conformation of good design to the most (a) conducive & (b) abundant
materials known.
1:05:35 Efficiency = Conducive, abundant.
1:06:00 Home construction, current inefficiency. 40% wasted materials.
1:07:00 Design Conduciveness for Labor Automation
3 distinctions. Human Assembly = handmade
Mechanization = Humans assist the machine.
Automation = No human action.
1:09:00 "Everything (products) is the same? No.
1:09:45 Section conclusion with quote by Buckminster Fuller.
1:11:00 Part 3- Economic Organization and Calculation.
1:12:05 Definition of an economic model.
1:12:30 "Rarely if ever, is anything said about public or ecological health (in traditional
or market based economic modeling). Why? Because the market is 'life blind'
and decoupled from the science of life support and sustainability- It is simply
a proxy system."
1:12:45 Sustainability and efficiency protocols.
Arriving at decisions via Natural Sciences.
1:13:35 Structural system goals.
What are the structural system goals of capitalism?
Capitalism's structural goal is growth and maintaining rates of consumption
high enough to keep people employed at a given time; employment requires
a culture of of real or perceived inefficiency and that essentially means the preservation of scarcity in one form or another.
1:14:15 An NL/RBE's goal.
1:14:28 System Overview. The myth that the system is 'centrally planned'. No.
1:14:50 This model is a collaborative design system (CDS), Not centrally planned.
It is based entirely upon public interaction facilitated by programmed,
Open Sourced systems that enable a constant, dynamic feedback flow that
can literally allow the input of the public on any given industrial matter,
whether personal or social.
1:15:15 Common Question, "Well, who programs this system?"
Sustainability and efficiency factors are not a factor of opinion.
1:16:00 Open Source.
1:16:20 What about private ownership of the means of production?
1:17:00 Means of production in capitalism must be owned by the capitalist...
The need for price. The Price Mechanism.
1:18:20 Is there another way? Without price system?
1:18:45 Completely eliminate exchange and create a direct link between the consumer
and the means of production itself. The consumer becomes part of the means
of production and the industrial complex, if you will becomes nothing more
than a tool that is accessed by the public to generate goods.
1:22:15 Structure and process.
(1) Collaborative Design Interface and Industrial Schematic.
(2) Resource Management, feedback and value.
(3) General principals and the Macro-Calculation.
1:22:33 The Collaborative Design Interface is basically the new market. Open-source
and open-access comes in the form of a website.
1:24:25 Computer aided design/engineering.
1:24:40 Learning curve will decrease over time.
1:25:45 Digital Physics for virtual testing.
1:27:00 Designs are put through efficiency filters (5).
1:28:45 Military efficiency and standardization.
1:29:45 Strategic design conducive for Labor Automation.
1:30:30 Industrial Complex Layout.
1:30:55 Production, actual manufacturing would evolve as automated factories which
are able to produce increasingly more with less materials, inputs and less machines-
ephemeralization.
1:31:50 Distribution- distribution libraries.
1:32:30 On demand production becomes more efficient.
1:32:50 Distribution Library is a direct feedback link between production, distribution
and demand.
1:33:30 All goods have been pre-optimized for recycling.
Zero waste economy.
1:35:08 Value measures. Scarcity and Labor Complexity.
1:35:35 Scarcity assessment scale (1 to 100).
Example given with wood.
Example given with metal.
1:37:10 Value calculations are done by machine due to complexity.
1:37:25 Labor complexity means estimating the complexity of a given production.
1:38:50 Macro-Calculation
4 functions relating to stages of design, production, distribution and recycling.
1:39:35 Linear block schematic.
1:39:45 Process 1: Design schematic.
1:40:55 Process 2: Production Efficiency.
1:42:35 Process 3: Distribution Efficiency.
1:43:15 Process 4: Recycling Efficiency.
1:44:00 Concluding statement.
1:45:05 End Lecture
Questions and Answers.
Artist's Rendition.
