The Wealth of Networks: I've got to get this book
The Wealth of Networks:
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press
© Copyright 2006, Yochai Benkler. http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-04.htm
Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production
This online version has been created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license - see www.benkler.org - and has been reformatted and designated as recommended reading - with an accompanying Moodle course - for the NGO Committee on Education of CONGO - the Conference Of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - in conjunction with the Committee's commitment to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and related international Decades, agreements, conventions and treaties.
Epigraph
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."
"Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production
Social Production: Feasibility Conditions and Organizational Form
Transaction Costs and Efficiency
The Emergence of Social Production in the Digitally Networked Environment
The Interface of Social Production and Market-Based Businesses
The increasing salience of nonmarket production in general, and peer production in particular, raises three puzzles from an economics perspective.
What is their motivation when they work for or contribute resources to a project for which they are not paid or directly rewarded?
Second, why now, why here?
What, if anything, is special about the digitally networked environment that would lead us to believe that peer production is here to stay as an important economic phenomenon, as opposed to a fad that will pass as the medium matures and patterns of behavior settle toward those more familiar to us from the economy of steel, coal, and temp agencies.
Third, is it efficient to have all these people sharing their computers and donating their time and creative effort?
Moving through the answers to these questions, it becomes clear that the diverse and complex patterns of behavior observed on the Internet, from Viking ship hobbyists to the developers of the GNU/Linux operating system, are perfectly consistent with much of our contemporary understanding of human economic behavior.
We need to assume no fundamental change in the nature of humanity; we need not declare the end of economics as we know it.
We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production.
That is, behaviors and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere in their own patterns.
What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and mutual recognition.
They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organizing productive behavior at the very core of the information economy.
And it is this increasing role as a modality of information production that ripples through the rest this book.
It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations - through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action - that creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community.
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