|
|
Alpaca Economy
So it would seem the Incan empire is the only known example of a successful, complex society created without markets. Which, to me, means we're missing something. Living in the mountains isolated from Western ideas does not grant immunity to TNSTAAFL. If progressive experience teaches us anything, it teaches that everything has a price, and hiding that price courts disaster. Something else is going on here.
Isolated village communities of no more than 100 individuals each, separated by manmade barriers when geographical ones were lacking. Israeli kibbutzim experiments have more or less confirmed both the pros and cons of market-free communal economies.
Pros: People are motivated by their virtues instead of led by their vices, resulting in a more cohesive community that doesn't disintegrate into infighting under external pressure.
Cons: It doesn't scale up. Beyond a population of 100 or so individuals, the bureaucratic overhead needed to keep people from destroying the community by breaking the rules for their own personal gain becomes larger than the number of individuals living in the community. Beyond 500, cascading failures are inevitable due to the unreliable nature of human communication, let alone moral weaknesses inherent to biological competition.
It worked for the Incans, but I prefer a civilization that keeps its calendars on microchips rather than multiple ton blocks of stone.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on August 3, 2012 05:14 PMHmf. I thought they had bigger cities in their empire. Guess I need to brush up on my Mayan history. Someday.
Posted by: Scott on August 4, 2012 12:48 PM