I think the reason this is a problem is that there is no foundational vector for progress which we can universally agree upon a measurement metric for. So capital allocation becomes the default measure, and money becomes a proxy for value.

So in that sense, what is most easily measurable is more valuable, and something which is easily measured and increases the unit of measurement by the largest factor becomes the most valuable.

Eg. If one unit of money is input and some multiple of that unit is the result, the system with the least amount of work or fastest iteration time (high margin) becomes the place where resources pool.

I'm skeptical whether humans could even define in a meaningful or measurable way how to better allocate resources than individual resource allocation on a common unit of measurement aka "markets."

Beyond that, the entire foundation of economics is flawed. Computer scientists and software engineers should seriously examine the underlying assumptions of economics and revise them to be in line with technical reality.

Money is a technology. Think about the design from first principles. If you are an economist, you probably can't do that, because the design is fixed in your mind and first principles aren't known or considered unchangeable.

We, humans, currently spend the resources on those things through the medium of fiat currency. Remove the necessity for profit, the need to pay a lot of people in that system incredibly more than they require - take a couple of dozen 8-figure mansions, a few 9-figure yachts, several hundred 6-figure cars, gold-plated taps, diamond-encrusted tiaras, etc., etc., and the resources targeted at the problem of producing maps go much further. And there's no reason not to have a competitive element, you don't need profit to create competition.

It's not spending people's retirement, it's spending the same resources we spend now, just not mediated in the same manner and without the waste of 40% spend on advertising (plucked that number out my ass but a few years ago pharma was spending more on advertising than on R&D) and without allowing controlling elements to steal all the output for personal gain.

So, I'd like to spend the equivalent resources we do now, but with saving on profit, over-paying wages, and de-duplication of effort. That gives much more resources applied to the actual task without touching pensions (which of course I'd like to see have the same effect).

The problem, is that moving to such an economic system requires the most greedy, most powerful, to be usurped. Humans are greedy (myself included), that leads us to waste so, so, much of our resources.

Why do you think a system where people choose the collective good (having all their needs met) - "volunteering" - rather than personal financial gain can't produce satellites, or any other good/technology we now produce?

In an ideal world where you drive a solar-powered car with a dozen moving parts built by robots from recycled materials, costs would fall to a fraction of what they are now. With the same automation applied across all industries, prices would fall to the point where the opportunity cost for humans to be in debt/servitude to rent-seeking financial institutions would exceed the benefit of using money in the first place.

This is basically what happened on Star Trek and is likely to happen in coming decades with Tesla, Amazon etc as humans can no longer compete with machine labor. Things will cost less but incomes will be so low that we won't be able to afford them anyway. Personally I would argue that that started happening sometime after the late 1960s and has gotten to the point where the status quo can only be propped up by every-growing absurdities on a global scale.

An oldie but goodie:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Buying Photoshop instead of using GIMP or Abercrombie instead of George consumes little or no more real resources, but by any regular measure of economic growth it's an increase in real output if people switch. Same applies to people buying shiny new Teslas that consume less real resources than the low-end Ford they used to drive. Or indeed, as I hinted I suspect will increasingly be the case in future, people spending sizeable proportions of their income on cures for chronic ailments that take an relatively trivial amount of energy to implement. Economic growth is fundamentally not measured in units of energy.

Thanks for asking, I don't think I've been able to tie it all in under one overarching picture so clearly before.

This idea that a little badness is more efficient than no badness has played out multiple times in the past and one thing we’ve learned repeatedly is that humans are pretty bad at understanding and accounting for the full and true economic costs of a little badness, especially the humans that are making money. More often than not the damage done by badness is externalized and the costs ignored by the people who are profiting from the environment that tolerates the badness.

There are plenty of examples of this from the environment to product safety standards to the stock market. It was argued (fiercely) that the costs of seatbelts in cars was too high a price to pay for something that wasn’t helping every driver - most people, after all, don’t crash. This flawed thinking completely failed to capture the economic costs of car accidents, and today very few people even in the auto industry would disagree or even think of arguing against seatbelts.

We still don’t grasp the economic costs of pollution. We’re just starting to see the economic damage that allowing a little badness has had over the last century, and it’s already many orders of magnitude higher than most people thought several decades ago.

Similary, we’ve not really tallied the economic costs of poor people who’ve been pushed into bankruptcy by financial corruption. The growing inequality driven in part by lack of financial regulation is almost certainly fueling our political unrest, which we of course haven’t measured economically, and might not end well.

I rather think the latter. We’ve just now been able to shine light on 60 years of this bullshit social memes real costs

Cancer rates seem to have gone up. But then one looks closer and it’s diagnosis rates due to improved techniques.

Similar idea: we can measure effort better. Oh look at all the waste

First of all, "proxy for efficiency" is my own terminology and seems quite sensible to me. We talk about productivity in terms of GDP per capita. Implicit in that is the assumption that money is its own value, which it isn't - money is at best a marker of value. But we reward people with the marker, not the value.

Second, your point of money being more efficient than other goods as a unit of value doesn't go anywhere. It does not get at the point Eisenstein presents, which is that the concept of trade exists because of ownership of scarce resources. If nobody owns anything, trade is nonsense.

Third, the Eisenstein thesis doesn't mention interest. Negative interest is mentioned in the form of demurrage in one of his closing chapters, as another way to define money. But his overall thesis is non-economic: that we have set ourselves up, in a variety of ways, to battle against nature and against each other. "Separation of self" is the term he uses, along with a variety of colorful New-Agey terms. I'm focused on the economic points in part because I hold a B.A. in economics myself, and there are some solid points made about economic systems outside our mainstream viewpoint - particularly with respect to prehistoric gift economies.

Your claim that the current wave of technology - by which you presumably mean online communications - was driven by monetizing efficiencies....that one seems a bit faulty. The Internet started as a military/academic project, not as an attempt to build a consumer market. As well, most open source software isn't built with a monetization in mind, but rather is a way for others to reduce their costs. In general the market doesn't build the technology, the market commercializes the technology after it becomes self-evident. The reason we have zillions of web startups is that the web still has so many new concepts to explore that everyone can be a do-gooder and monetize at the same time. The fact that a lot of people aren't monetizing the things they do online(for example, HN being free and user-driven) is the interesting part. That's a huge reversal of so much of history.

Your statement of technology not giving power to individuals seems incredibly wrong. The Industrial Revolution was organization-driven, but our current revolution, whatever you might call it, is acting to take apart organizations. Blogs vs. newspapers. Social media vs. mass media. Central office vs. virtual office.

There are tangible and intangible costs and benefits to every pursuit (interesting example, externalities in economics). Focusing on only tangible benefits (money) does, to me, seem very common - rarely do I see intangibles being considered.

For example, how many times I see profitable companies making money hand over fist, but when you look at their operations internally, they are completely inefficient and chaotic, maybe even damaging. Like, if they did things even 10% more effectively (let's say at a bit of reasonable cost), they would make even more profit. But doing so takes hard work, they are already making so much money, so they have no desire to look further.

If the profit is so good, that ignoring the money "left on the table" doesn't cause enough pain for the subject involved - well, I think that also creates inefficiencies, complacency, etc.

I also think, when profit is "so good" that other efficiencies go by the wayside, the same behaviors you describe continue. I don't find that the other behaviors go away, really.

I once heard a quote that said, if you wanted any data project funded, convince the CFO that it makes money and they'll go for it. Much like the approaches of TCO, ROI, NPV, IRR, etc - prove the profitable case and you'd think people would buy in.

I have found something like this to be somewhat true - except in companies where they are already making so much money, they don't care about doing the right (or "better") thing. The "more money" they could make is imaginary to them, and they are happy with how much they are already raking in. Until it's super, super tangible/convincing.

The question for an economy is, does the flow of money lead to outcomes we want? I'd say if it flows through paths that lead to the growth of businesses that are good to reduce climate change impact that is something we want. On the other hand, if it flows through paths that lead to growth of purely financial constructs, wealth concentration (which also concentrates control, quite the opposite of the mantra of capitalism which is supposed to be freedom to do your own thing), or more unwanted telephone calls, or overpriced medicine, that's something where we would want to redirect some of the flow. For an economy, money is more about the flow, like blood. Where it passes things grow. So we want to look at the paths of the flows. "Cost" is of little use here. Of course, if you have a concrete thing you are looking at and want it to be more efficient cost again makes sense, but in this discussion here we are trying to make different kinds of decisions, where "cost" is less helpful, since we don't even have anything concrete that we want to make more efficient.

DISCLAIMER - These are the thoughts of someone not trained in (apart from a few semesters on the side while studying something technical) or working anything related to economics.