Hi Phillip,
I will intersperse my answers below:
You are pointing out, which is true, that people are generally less interested in the products they supply than in the income they receive by producing them, selling them and therefore receiving money, so that they can acquire the things they really want, such as food, clothes, house, car, medical care, going to the theater, etc.
Market Economy:
MONEY: This is the factor that induces people to create a Supply of the goods and services you mention. The issue is that whereas everybody is more or less allowed to provide goods and services, the Monetary System is a monopoly that even stands above governments. Only about 2% of the money “produced” or created is actually coined by governments (physical money), the rest by commercial banks (digital) by means of what is known as Fractional Reserve Banking. Besides the actual monetary system’s inner workings, the key issue here is that only a handful are allowed to “produce” money, and as it is nearly the only way to trade goods and services. it becomes the “bottle neck” of any economy. Worse. only about 2% of the monetary transfers deal with productive economy, the majority being FOREX, which means, currencies being traded to earn money from … yes, trading money.
Still, we should be able to differentiate money, as a human discovery (or innovation), from the official monetary system, which makes money a absolute need for everyone wanting to engage in economic exchanges.
If you look at Amazon, this is a company that comes as close as I can think of at this time to what I think you are suggesting.
indeed, and to a degree, you are right. Many of the books are printed “on demand” and where not physically available before the order was made. However, most of the other goods do not fall into this category. There are people and companies that produce those goods (creating a supply) before the demand is there.
However, in a proper “Real Economy” production happens “after” the need has been presented. So production is there to fulfill real needs. In our current Market Economy, there’s a lot of waste and inefficiency in the supply side of production, because a lot of the goods and even services exist in excess of demand. Yes, this drives prices down, but also up when there is scarcity, which is another symptom of an inefficient system.
Now, of course the majority of production in the economy is not end products, but labor – capital (in the economic sense of machinery and buildings used for production) is second. So… if you want to be a kind of Mega-Amazon, you start putting the people who are skilled in producing “x” product in a position of making as much of it as the market demands – no more, no less – and of course at the same level of quality (and price) as customers want. This is what we call “vertical integration”… ;-). Utopia or dystopia? You pick. But it is just smart use of big data on a gigantic scale.
I have given conferences on the subject of Real Economy vs. Market Economy, and have some material in ppt and some writings that I could share with you, if you are interested. An integrated system of economy is dependant on the “limited resources” and the ecological sustainability of its practices. One of the problems of our current Monetary Market Economy is that the factor “monetary system” is based on something called the 'growth imperative" that goes against the “natural growth” of our ecology. In fact, in natural growth, systems tend to evolve towards efficiency and balance, rather than inefficiency and imbalance. So what we would need to do, among other things, is to learn via Biomimicry how it is that natural systems as complex as our planet manage to stay in balance, not only via homeostasis, but by means of something less known but just as important called homeorhesis.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeorhesis#:~:text=Homeorhesis%2C%20derived%20from%20the%20Greek,state%2C%20which%20is%20termed%20homeostasis. )
I believe that “inventing” a world through the lens of SF can be very helpful to envision solutions to current and future problems before they actually arise.
All the best,
Leonardo
I think I am following you. You are pointing out, which is true, that people are generally less interested in the products they supply than in the income they receive by producing them, selling them and therefore receiving money, so that they can acquire the things they really want, such as food, clothes, house, car, medical care, going to the theater, etc.