Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity and want.
Each way carries with it
different ways of gaining social status.
The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command hierarchies, allocation of
scarce goods is done by one central authority and backed up by force. Command
hierarchies scale very poorly [Mal]; they become increasingly brutal and
inefficient as they get larger. For this reason, command hierarchies above the
size of an extended family are almost always parasites on a larger economy of a
different type. In command hierarchies, social status is primarily determined by
access to coercive power.
Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sophisticated
adaptation to scarcity that,
unlike the command model, scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done
in a decentralized way
through trade and voluntary cooperation (and in fact, the dominating effect of
competitive desire is to
produce cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social status is
primarily determined by having
control of things (not necessarily material things) to use or trade.
Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above, and how they
interact with each other.
Government, the military, and organized crime (for example) are command
hierarchies parasitic on the
broader exchange economy we call ‘the free market’. There’s a third model,
however, that is radically
different from either and not generally recognized except by anthropologists;
the gift culture.
Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in
populations that do not have
significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods.We can observe gift
cultures in action among
aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food.We
can also observe them
in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the
very wealthy.
Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange
relationships an almost
pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you
control but by what you give away.
Used source: Homesteading
the Noosphere by Eric Steven Raymond
