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Intro
1. Equal Satisfaction Essentials
The Law of Equal Satisfaction • Preference Satisfaction Defined • Equality Courts
2. The Workplace
Agencies and Co-ops • Management of a Co-operative • Expert Tasks • Celebrities
3. Equality Inspection
Equality Prosecutors • Equality Inspectors • Random Inspection • Satisfaction Points
4. Governing The State
Equal Satisfaction Zone and States • Jury Rule Overview • Lawmaking • Temporary Laws • Orders
5. Controlling Individual Behaviour
Crime • Encouragement Points
6. The Transision To Equal Satisfaction From Our Current Society
A World Agreement to Adopt Equal Satisfaction • Transition Within a Country • A Trial Community • Equals – An Organisation to Promote Equal Satisfaction
7. Answers To Likely Questions And Criticisms
(This section has its own menu which lists the 10 questions)
Intro
Welcome to the Equal Satisfaction intro and description page! Equal Satisfaction is a new Political and Economic system. The basic concept of it is very simple – it is a society in which no person is allowed to have a greater amount of their preferences satisfied than another, unless the other person under no coercion wishes to have less. (A more precise name for the system would be “Preference Satisfaction Egalitarianism”, but “Equal Satisfaction” is slightly less cumbersome).
“Equality Courts” exist to allow worse-off people in preference terms to get equal with the better-off. The result is a radically egalitarian society. The system therefore has common ground with Communism and Anarchism, though isn’t exactly the same as either. The system it most closely resembles, as far as I’m aware, is Participatory Economics (external link) which was my major inspiration in coming up with this.
On this page I discuss many other details of the Equal Satisfaction society, but the summary I have just given, written in more detail in the first section below, represents the essence of the system. Sections 2 to 5 discuss other, more optional, features of an Equal Satisfaction society. I don’t expect the reader to necessarily be interested in all the details that I’ve given, but they’re there if you want them!
In Section 6 I discuss possible ways to make the transition from our present world to one organized according to Equal Satisfaction. Finally, in Section 7 I try to answer likely questions and criticisms of my system, including Question 1 which tries to explain why it might be better than our current society.
Feel free to read the whole page in order, or surf around the sections that seem most important to you. Except where stated all links lead you to places within this page. Happy reading.
1. Equal Satisfaction Essentials
The Law of Equal Satisfaction
This law is the central feature of the Equal Satisfaction system. It forbids any person from having a greater amount of preference satisfaction than another, unless the other person under no coercion wishes to have less (which I don’t think will happen very often). This right to equality extends to all humans, including children.
Preference Satisfaction Defined
Preference Satisfaction is what happens when a person gets what they emotionally want or desire. For example a person would normally prefer to live in a luxurious house and to marry someone they find attractive and congenial. These major events in a person’s life carry a greater amount of preference satisfaction than smaller events, such as successfully catching a train or obtaining a nice piece of clothing. People might also derive a small about of preference satisfaction from an ethical goal, like thinking that the amazon rainforest will be still around in a hundred years.
Preference Satisfaction is not the same as pleasure or happiness as we may have a gut desire for something that will turn out not to give us pleasure. Nor does it refer to things that we think we should want, for rational or moral reasons, if this isn’t accompanied by an emotional need.
Equality Courts
Equality Courts provide the foundation of enforcement of Equal Satisfaction. Here any person may claim an equal share of preference satisfaction from any other (even if they have never met or even interacted indirectly e.g. provided goods or services to one-another). So if one person believes that a certain other person is living a more satisfactory lifestyle preference-wise than they are, then they may take the other person to the Equality Courts. If the jury finds that the balance of evidence favours this claim then the court will order the better off person to hand over the amount of things to him or her that will make the two people even. Things handed over to the worse-off person might include goods, regular services, pleasant duties (or the better-off person will have to take on unpleasant duties). Usually this transference will be facilitated by other Equal Satisfaction institutions (which are explained below) such as Equality Inspectors, and the people’s workplaces. If the people aren’t directly involved with such institutions the court will work out some other way of making the transference.
(Worried that the measurement of preference satisfaction may be impossible? see Question 5, below)
There will be an upper limit to the size of transfers that can be made. For example if a person is terminally ill and can, for some reason, only experience normal levels of preference satisfaction from knowing that there will be a statue of him/herself put on Mars within the next year, then it would be too impractical to arrange this and the person would have to just live with an inferior satisfaction level.
Groups may make equality claims against other groups, and the procedure will be the same as with individuals but with average levels of satisfaction per person of the two groups being considered. The groups don’t have to be of the same size. An individual or group may also bring a claim on behalf of another individual or group (against a third individual or group).
It is not intended that Equality Courts will be resorted to any more often than courts are in our current society. Equality Inspectors and Equality Prosecutors (links to below) will help society maintain equality on a day-to-day basis most of the time, but the courts are always there to guarantee each person’s right to equality.
(If you are concerned that this system represents State control gone too far feel free to read Question 3, below, or if you are concerned that it destroys incentives to work then see Question 4).
This section has summarised the Equal Satisfaction system. In the next few sections I flesh out how society might look. I’m happy for the term “Preference Egalitarian” to apply to someone who agrees with what I have just written, but who disagrees with all the specific recommendations that now follow. (If you are more keen to see a justification for this system rather than more details of it then take a look at Question 1).
2. The Workplace
Agencies and Co-ops
The Equal Satisfaction society will have two sectors – a State sector and a Co-operative sector, the latter being its equivalent of the private sector in our current Mixed Economy. The state won’t be one big huge single entity but will consist of many separate, but Co-operating “Agencies”. In the Co-operative sector we have – as the name suggests – Cooperatives, which are Equal Satisfaction’s equivalent of Private Companies. Agencies and Cooperatives have in common that their internal structures are radically non-hierarchical.
A Co-operative is like a private company but the workers share ownership of the workplace and materials and make all the major decisions by direct democracy. While some consumers under Equal Satisfaction will have their Preference Satisfaction (link to previous section) rationed using Satisfaction Points (link to next section) which are like money, no Co-operatives or Agencies will deal with money at all, so there’s no “turnover” or “bottom line”. Agencies differ from Co-operatives in that their buildings and materials will be owned collectively by the citizens of the State (link to below). Also the law of that state will mention all agencies individually by name, giving them particular powers and restrictions that don’t apply to Co-ops. Agencies will tend to perform state-type tasks such as policing and town planning. Co-ops will do more private sector-type things, like producing goods.
A particular type of Agency might be one for a town, village or rural area. This Agency would have all the residents of the area as members and own all the common areas. As the population of such a place would be too small for Jury Rule (link to below) to be effective, it might be governed in the way that a Co-op might be (see next section) with a rotating day-to-day management and larger decisions being taken by referendum.
Management of a Co-operative
Co-operatives will mostly be left to manage themselves, as companies are in the free market. Internally they can structure themselves in whatever way they wish, as long as they don’t violate the Equal Satisfaction Law, or obviously any other law.
Each member/worker in the Co-op will have an Equality Inspector (link to next section) or be looking after their own levels of preference satisfaction, making sure they don’t get too high. Each Co-op will probably adopt rough equality of preference satisfaction between its workers (although potentially a worker might decide to forego some satisfaction in his or her life outside of work hours, in order to have more at work).
One structure a Co-op might adopt is the following. Big strategic decisions are decided online and all members are allowed a vote. Day-to-day management decisions are taken by a management team. Let’s say for a firm of 50 people there is a day-to-day management team of 5 people. The Co-op has a rule that the management team must average 1 year’s management experience each. Any member of the Co-op has the right to serve on the team, replacing a random member if no-one volunteers to leave, as long as the 1 year experience rule that I just mentioned is not broken by them doing so, otherwise they must remain on a waiting list. Anyone who has served on the management team must stay off it for the following few years.
Expert Tasks
In order to maintain a modern society many expert tasks need to be performed, which put the safety of the public at stake. Dramatic examples being running a power station and Air-traffic control. These tasks might require qualifications or licenses to be performed, as they do in our current society.
It is a challenge to arrange workplaces to allow such people to do their work without letting them have high amounts of preference satisfaction. The relevant Co-ops and Agencies can find their own ways to do this, some of which might be the following. Expert tasks can be part-time, with experts spending the remainder of their time on particularly unsatisfying tasks. “Second opinions” can be sought from other experts nullifying much of the power that can be derived from expert roles. Experts can also be forced to suffer inferior houses/cars etc. Other, more extreme measures might be to reduce experts’ lawmaking powers or forcing them to keep their expert work secret, all to deny them a preferable life overall.
Celebrities
While Experts might just about be tolerated by Equal Satisfaction, Celebrities would be a step too far. Clearly their lives are way preferable over that of the average person. So fame under Equal Satisfaction would be effectively banned. People would still be able to write, perform, do sport and all the other things that people get famous for in our current society. But their audience number would have to be capped in, say, the thousands. They might also contribute anonymously to art, sport, writing etc. This is much more cumbersome in some fields than others. But cartoons, masked wrestling and wikipedia are some examples of anonymous creations, showing that we don’t need famous people to give us entertainment or education.
3. Equality Inspection
Equality Prosecutors
All adults living under Equal Satisfaction have the option of subjecting themselves to Equality Inspections. They may, however, only be inspected in ways to which they have consented, and may choose not to be inspected at all.
Those that choose to have no inspections will have their names given to Equality Prosecutors. Equality Prosecution is a State Agency. The Prosecutors bring Equality Cases against individuals they believe may be living with higher than average level of preference satisfaction. The Prosecutors may contact the person in question but the citizen may decline to speak to them and they have no power to visit the citizen or investigate his or her life.
Equality Inspectors
The Equality Inspectorate is a huge state Agency that may employ around 10% of the workforce, mostly on a very part-time basis. There are also independent Inspection Co-ops that people may choose from. Any citizen is allowed to inspect inspectors at any time.
The benefit to a person of allowing him or herself to be inspected is that if he or she find themselves in an Equality Court their inspector will testify that they don’t have the high levels of satisfaction that are being claimed. As the courts make their decisions on balance of evidence rather than reasonable doubt the accused need to have solid independent sources such as this to back up what they’re saying. The inspection regimes that people may choose from fall into two general plans – Random Inspection and the Satisfaction Points system.
Random Inspection
When a person agrees to random inspection this means that inspectors may knock on their door and ask to inspect their home at any time. They might then make a thorough search of a random part their home, looking for both openly displayed possessions and ones they might be hiding, as these things may contribute to preference satisfaction.
In addition to these home inspections, which might take place twice a year on average, Inspectors will secretly observe their client at random times when they go about their business, a bit like a private detective might do. At random, on average once every month, the person being inspected will be asked to provide a reasonably detailed account of what he or she has been doing over the last three days. About once every 12 times (again at random) that they provide such an account a secret observation will have taken place over that three-day period. If their account doesn’t match the inspection, their inspection regime will be intensified.
The inspected person may also give the Inspectors the power to interview them, their friends and colleagues. Any private information gained by the Inspectors will be treated as confidential or the inspector will lose their license. Also, inspectors will be required by law to destroy such information within a few years.
Those who choose to be randomly inspected do not need to use money in shops or when they travel. Anyone who leaves a shop without paying in an Equal Satisfaction society will, once in a while, be asked to show identification to prove they are on one of these Random Inspection schemes.
Satisfaction Points
For those who don’t want random inspections, Inspectors also offer the “Satisfaction Points” system. Every product in the economy is given a tag with a unique identity code. People living on a Satisfaction Points system are issued with a portable device which can read the tags and display the “price” in Satisfaction Points. Every client has a different set of prices, created by his or her inspection Co-op or Agency, intended to reflect the amount of preference satisfaction a product will offer them. In practice the price given will be based on generalised preferences in many cases, due to the impossibility of knowing each person’s preferences with regard to all products.
Inspectors will grant those using Satisfaction Points a basic income of these points regardless of whether they work or not. They will also get an income of points on top of this in proportion to the amount of work-related dissatisfaction they endure.
Those on Satisfaction Points will also tend to join those on Random Inspection systems in subjecting themselves to interviews of themselves, colleagues and friends, in order to estimate the amount of satisfaction they get from their lives apart from goods and services.
4. Governing the State
The Equal Satisfaction Zone and States
Equal Satisfaction is a system that might apply to groups of people of virtually any size, from a single community of, say five people to the whole of humanity. We might call the area of land governed by Equal Satisfaction the “Equal Satisfaction Zone”. The Equal Satisfaction zone will be a State. I use the term “State” here to mean a region governed by a particular set of laws that individuals are not permitted to opt out of. The Equal Satisfaction Zone may also contain states, and those states might even contain states. If a state is within another state then it must obey the laws of the larger state, but may make any laws of its own that don’t break the larger state’s laws. The laws of each state are created by Jury Rule. Any adult living in a state within a state will be asked to serve for 2 weeks a year on the Ruling Juries of each of the states.
Jury Rule Overview
Under Equal Satisfaction, the system I recommend for governing states is one I call, as I just mentioned, “Jury Rule”. This means that the government consists not of elected representatives, but of a large number of juries of ordinary citizens, always chosen randomly rather than elected. They perform all the tasks of government, such as proposing and passing (or rejecting) new laws and handling the day-to-day governing of the state.
All citizens have the right to sit on such a Ruling Jury for two weeks a year, and it hoped that the vast majority will take this opportunity to do so. Sick people will have their jury time saved up until they get better. Those without mobility will be able to vote from home and participate in discussions to the degree that this is possible. The Law of Equal Satisfaction (link to 1st section, above) means that all will be compensated for their Ruling Jury-related efforts in satisfaction terms. If not enough people participate in the process then Encouragement Points (link to next section) might be used to get more people to take part.
There are several types of Ruling Jury, which each have a different task to do. The tasks are the following – 1) Proposing new laws, 2) Approving/rejecting proposed laws, 3) Deciding how quickly certain laws need to be approved/rejected and 4) Making emergency decisions. All Ruling Juries sit for the whole year but operate in 2 week cycles – each 2 weeks the jurors are replaced by fresh group of random people, who are given a new assignment, of the same type as the previous jurors. For example, a jury for approving/rejecting new laws will sit for 2 weeks, during which it will have a particular proposed law before it to approve or reject. When it has voted at the end of the fortnight, those jurors will go back to their normal life for the rest of the year and a fresh jury will take their place and consider another law for the next 2 weeks. And so on for the whole year.
Ruling Juries govern through making/changing/destroying laws and giving orders. The words “Laws” and “Orders” have specific meanings within this system. “Laws”, as in our current society, are rules that stay on the law books until changed. “Orders” also appear on the law books but expire after one week. There is also an intermediate type of law, called a “Temporary Law”, which disappears from the law books after six months. The aim of Temporary Laws and Orders is to produce quick decisions such as in times of war, natural disasters, shortages, crises etc. that currently fall to an elected executive such as a President or Prime Minister.
For the Jury Rule system to work comfortably, it needs to have large enough numbers of jurors to statistically represent the wider public. I reckon this requires a state with more than 300,000 adults. For larger states, each citizen should still be allowed to sit for 2 weeks a year in order to have the ongoing experience of ruling, though such large numbers of people are not statistically required for the system to work.
Lawmaking
(Permanent) Laws are created as follows. 1000 random citizens are divided into 10 Law Proposal Jury Colleges of 100 people (all these numbers in this and the following two sections are for a state of around 300,000 adults. For larger states scale these numbers up). The 10 Jury Colleges are geographically spread around the state and each will, over the course of 2 weeks, produce 10 proposed laws that they would like to see adopted by the state. The process within each college goes as follows. Jurors make up their own juries of about 5 people, but can move between these juries as they wish during their 2 weeks there. Jurors may call people from outside the college to advise them and look at any proposals made by previous colleges or any other appropriate information that can be acquired for them. Each proposal requires 5 jurors to submit it and each juror may only take part in such a submission twice in his or her time at the college. At the end of the two weeks each juror is individually presented with a list of all the laws proposed from his/her jury college that fortnight and must reject half of them. All but the 10 proposals that have been rejected by the least number of jurors in the college are at this point rejected. So 10 proposals from each of the 10 colleges in the state go forward to the next stage.
In the following 2 weeks another group of 1000 jurors, this time divided into 5 person juries geographically scattered throughout the state, whittle these 100 proposals down to 1. Each of these 200 “Whittling Juries” compares one proposal against 3 similar ones, all from the 100 proposed. Two proposals are considered to be similar if a statistical analysis of the voting at the end of the proposal stage shows that the same people tended to vote for them. On the last day of the 2 weeks on a Whittling Jury each of the jurors puts the 4 proposals that they have been considering in preference order. All but the most popular 10 proposals according to this vote are rejected. One of the 10 is then chosen at random to go to the final stage.
During the fortnight immediately following this, another thousand jurors, again divided into 200 juries of 5 people at separate geographical locations in the state, decide whether to approve the proposal. During this fortnight they may again call people from outside to advise them. At the end of the fortnight they may secretly and individually vote for or against the proposal. The majority of votes cast decides if the proposal is put into law or rejected.
Temporary Laws
The process for proposing and passing Temporary Laws (which expire after 6 months) is similar to that of Laws but with the following differences. Firstly, Temporary Law Juries sit 7 days a week (though not in the evening or night). Their proposal college has a quarter of its jurors replaced every half-week, rather than the whole lot replaced all at once every 2 weeks. Also, instead of one proposal being selected to go to the next stage each fortnight, jurors may lend support to any active proposals and the most supported proposal from all the colleges each 2 days is put forward. There is also no whittling-down stage.
These proposals are then put before “fast-tracking juries” who decide how many days the approval juries should be given to pass or reject the proposal. There are 100 of these juries in the state, and each consists of 5 jurors. They may give the approval juries 2 days or 2 weeks to approve or reject the proposal, or any number of days in between. The fast tracking juries make this decision for each proposal in one day. At the end of the day each juror may secretly vote for a length of time of his or her choice. The median period of time that they vote for, rounded to the nearest day is the period decided. 200 Approval Juries of 5 people then sit for the agreed period of time and pass or reject the law on a majority vote much like the Approval Juries for permanent laws (above).
Orders
Emergency proposals may be put forward by anyone at any time. They are screened by a panel of legal experts. These panels are scattered throughout the land. The emergency services will also immediately visit the person in question. If the emergency proposal refers, in the view of these experts, to a situation that is beyond the legal remit of the emergency services, they will pass on the proposal to the emergency order jury.
The emergency order jury is a jury of 1000 people who are based in a well protected location in the countryside. They are sitting at all times and work in 8 hour shifts. They vote by pressing buttons. When more than half of them have pressed a button to say that they are ready to vote they have 5 minutes to vote for or against the proposal. A majority of votes cast decides it.
5. Controlling Individual Behaviour
Crime
Some acts would, as in our current society, be against the law. The police and courts would act in a similar fashion to our current society in these matters, albeit with non-hierarchical internal organisation. Unlike in our society, however the accused are found guilty on balance of evidence rather than reasonable doubt. Guilty people are not really punished as such. They do not lose the right to equality of preference satisfaction. They will just have restrictions put on their lives, which will be highly dependent on what they have been found guilty of.
A violent person might be kept in a secure place, albeit in relative luxury to compensate for the dissatisfaction of the restriction. Any restriction, and the compensation in preference terms that goes with it might be requested by an innocent person, to make sure that no-one commits a crime on purpose, if for example life in a secure luxurious place appeals to them.
Encouragement Points
Behaviour that isn’t bad enough to be banned (and also behaviour that isn’t vital enough to be compulsory) can be dealt with using “Encouragement Points”. These points are awarded to people when they do things that the State, through its Ruling Juries (link to previous section) has decided need to be done more. They are subtracted from people when they do things that the state, through its juries, want people to do less of. If a person’s Encouragement Points account is negative for more than a month they are forced to do something that earns them points, to get back up above zero.
A person’s Encouragement Point situation, however bad or good, is never supposed to affect his or her level of preference satisfaction, so the points aren’t supposed to work as a system of rewards and penalties. They’re just a way for the majority to ensure that society behaves in ways it wants it to, even if individuals have some bad tendencies (as judged by the majority) in some areas.
Encouragement Points would not be transferable between people.
6. The Transition to Equal Satisfaction from Our Current Society
A World Agreement to Adopt Equal Satisfaction
The simplest case for changing to Equal Satisfaction (though not a particularly likely one) would be if a majority of people in every part of the world supported it in simultaneous referenda. Transition to it would still be such a huge change that I would recommend that we take many decades to fully change over. The simplest way to do this would be that anyone aged, let’s say 21 years old or younger will live under Equal Satisfaction. Everyone over that age will live the rest of their lives under our existing systems. After 50 years these people will be 71 so at that point we’d be pretty much living in a Equal Satisfaction world.
Transition Within a Country
If the majority of people in one country want to make the transition to Equal Satisfaction then I think that 12 years would be enough time to complete the changeover, as inequalities within a country are usually far smaller than those across the globe. A scheme might be started where everybody has to subject themselves to Equal Satisfaction on a part-time basis. So, to begin with, people just have to decide how they want to be monitored, then have to specify, say, a six-hour period each week in which they are living in Equal Satisfaction with others. Each year, the number of hours required will be increased until after 12 years all are living their whole week in Equal Satisfaction with all others.
A Trial Community
Before an entire population comes to support Equal Satisfaction it might be that a government decides to try out Equal Satisfaction in, say, a newly built town. This might also happen with just the support of private individuals and the mere tolerance of the Government. In this case, those who move to the town should, I think, be required to live by Equal Satisfaction right away.
Equals – An Organization to Promote Equal Satisfaction
Before we reach the point where we have the commitment on the part of individuals and Government to start up a community or workplace in which people live and work by Equal Satisfaction full-time, we might create a scheme in which people can devote a few hours in their lives, here and there, to participating in activities that adhere to Preference Egalitarian rules. There is a link back to the Equals website at the top of this page where you can find out more.
7. Answers To Likely Questions And Criticisms
• Question 1 – What are the advantages of Equal Satisfaction over our current system?
• Question 2 – Isn’t this Utopian stuff, of no practical relevance?
• Question 3 – Doesn’t all this forced equality amount to state control gone too far?
• Question 4 – In a society where an equal share of things that satisfy us are guaranteed, why would anyone work?
• Question 5 – How are the Equality Courts going to be able to measure such a nebulous quantity as Preference Satisfaction?
• Question 6 – What is there to keep the societal level of preference satisfaction at a sensible point?
• Question 7 – Without market forces or a centrally planned economy why would the right things get produced and go to the right people?
• Question 8 – What’s stopping the Inspectorate, the Equality Courts and the Jury Rule Processes from becoming corrupt?
• Question 9 – Won’t the black market take over?
• Question 10 – Under this system people can vandalise their own homes and immediately get a new one given to them by the state. Isn’t this a problem?
Question 1 – What are the advantages of Equal Satisfaction over our current system?
Any totally radical system such as Equal Satisfaction would inevitably carry huge pros and cons, and from our point of view now, a huge amount of unknowns. Putting those aside for the moment this system potentially has great advantages over the current one.
If the system goes well it will leave basically everyone with a satisfactory life. Each individual will know that he or she will have his or her needs met for the rest of their life, as will all their friends and loved ones. Only major health or personal mishaps can possibly rob them of this. There is evidence in the book the Spirit Level that health and social problems are worse in more unequal societies (though, admittedly the book only has moderately egalitarian societies to look at). Hierarchy and a competitive ethos seem to put a burden of stress on all of us. Citizens of a Equal Satisfaction society, by contrast, will never meet a better off person to feel envious of or a boss to feel intimidated by, nor a person who is involuntarily poor or homeless to feel worried for or guilty about. No-one will be born on the “wrong side of the tracks”, go to a “bad” school, or worry about screwing up their exams and going to a bad university or ending up on the “scrap heap”. Society will not have the rich-poor or powerful-powerless divides. There will be no government telling people what to do, nor owners or managers. Kids will be able to do activities at school that they choose, assisted by the adults that they prefer. Adults will be able to judge for themselves which work tasks are useful or useless for them to perform and make their own plans rather than being ordered to do this and that by those who society deems to know better. No-one will have to fear unemployment or having the livelihood of themselves and their families taken away at any moment if they or their partner makes a mistake at work or fails to “pull their weight” in the eyes of the management. Ethnic and gender divides won’t be deepened by wealth and power differences. All will be born to claim an equal share in the preferable things that society offers and equal freedom from deprivation. Unlike our current society, Equal Satisfaction will do its damnedest to give a dignified life to everyone.
Even more important than this, perhaps, society’s decisions won’t be made by the powerful people but by people who are truly representative of the people as a whole. We will have truly democratic society rather than the partly democratic, partly elitist society that we currently live in. This means that humanity’s future won’t be left up to the most competitive people, selected by the cutthroat systems of politics or business – people who are largely concerned with their own special interests e.g. sell the next barrel of oil or stay in power for the next 4 years. Decisions being in the hands of the wider public, with their individual preference satisfaction pooled, means that they will be made with as great a focus on the wider consequences as possible.
Question 2 – Isn’t this all Utopian stuff, of no practical relevance?
I agree that a radical system like this, dreamt up by one person like myself, is very unlikely to come about, and also likely to have drawbacks that I can’t see now. However, as long as we are realistic about this, thinking about possibilities such as this system, at the very least functions as a brainstorming session for ideas that might be adjusted to more realistic scenarios, such as those talked about in Section 6, above. They may also get people thinking about what they value or otherwise, provoking political thought, just as utopian and dystopian novels have done in the past.
Also trying out such systems somewhere would seem to be worth the effort as we can abandon the experiment at relatively little loss after a few years if things don’t work out, but if things work well the system can be rolled out across the world benefitting millions of people. Even ideas that I’m less enthusiastic about, such as the Resource-Based Economy advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement and Venus Project, and the pure Capitalism recommended by the Libertarian Party of the USA, would, I believe, be worth putting into practice in a town or city to see how they fare.
Question 3 – Doesn’t all this forced equality amount to state control gone too far?
I ascribe to a utilitarian ethic, meaning that the wellbeing of all conscious beings over the long-term is what matters to me, so I don’t see overriding the rights of individuals by the state as fundamentally immoral. For example I support the existence of taxes in our current system as the overall benefits outweigh, for me, the imposition on individuals. Equal Satisfaction takes redistributive taxation to the max, taking things off the better-off until their lives are not preferable to those of the worst-off. If you think that our current taxes are too much of an interference by the state then I agree that you probably won’t like Equal Satisfaction.
I agree that it is unfortunate that Equal Satisfaction needs an inspection system as described above in Section 3 . But I believe that the imposition of being occasionally inspected is a price worth paying for the overall benefit of humanity. Likewise with the restrictions on becoming famous, and more importantly, reading the works of popular writers, broadcasters etc.
Question 4 – In a society where an equal share of things that satisfy us are guaranteed, why would anyone work?
I don’t believe that guaranteed equal preference satisfaction will ensure universal idleness. If a person does little work and consumes a lot they will fall foul of the Inspectors or Equality Courts (links to above) and have to reduce their share of satisfaction by either increasing their work (as work is generally assumed to be a source of dissatisfaction) or reducing their consumption (as consumption is generally assumed to be satisfying).
If this argument is accepted, Equal Satisfaction can still face the criticism that citizens have no incentive to endure productive dissatisfaction. For example, someone might satisfy the inspectors or equality courts by lying on a bed of nails on a daily basis!
Under these circumstances I believe that the moral motive would kick in many cases and people would do what they feel is socially useful work. Given a choice between digging holes and filling them in again and digging holes that fulfill some purpose, I think that most people would prefer the second option. I can’t imagine, on the other hand that society would be as materially productive as our present system is. Maybe, at a total guess, Equal Satisfaction might produce half the amount of goods as our present mixed economy, which in my view is productive enough.
Equal Satisfaction, however, does have a “Plan B” in the form of Encouragement Points (link to above). If a certain activity isn’t being done, for example if no-one seems to want to work in public transport, then Encouragement Points can be attached to this activity, to prevent civilisation from grinding to a halt.
Question 5 – How are the Equality Courts going to be able to measure such a nebulous quantity as Preference Satisfaction?
Suppose a tax expert accuses a 6th grade schoolteacher (leaving aside for a moment the question of whether these specific roles would exist in the society that I am imagining) of having more Preference Satisfaction than he or she does. How can the jury tell who has the greater amount?
While I am under no illusion that such a measurement can be made with complete precision, I believe that sufficient accuracy can be achieved to keep people’s levels of satisfaction roughly equal by the threat of the Equality Courts (link to above) Jurors will be able to draw on a body of expertise on these matters, and call up such experts in court. Social scientists will develop their knowledge of the measurement of Preference Satisfaction and find statistical links between activities such as teaching and tax-collecting and people’s own accounts of their preferences and levels of satisfaction.
An additional difficulty comes when the jury has to, having decided that the accusing person or group is indeed worse-off with regard to the quantity in question, transfer to this person or group the amount of satisfaction that renders them equal. This is, I admit, an extra challenge, although not necessarily more difficult than some of the issues that courts deal with nowadays, such as trying to quantify psychological damage or a non-working spouse’s contribution to their partner’s job.
Question 6 – What is there to keep the societal level of of preference satisfaction at a sensible point?
It’s true that Equal Satisfaction’s institutions concern themselves with keeping people equal with one another in satisfaction terms, and not with choosing or stabilizing the satisfaction level that the whole of society is on. This level is therefore free-floating and might conceivably be unstable over time, experiencing turbulence or even outright collapse at some point.
This kind of instability can only exist, however, if there is some kind of feedback effect or vicious circle that the Equal Satisfaction system is prone to. In our current free market there seems to be such an effect, when, for example, reduced consumption causes firms to go bust, causing reduced wages, causing further reductions in consumption, and so on, round and round until the economy goes into a deep recession.
Under Equal Satisfaction, as with any economic system, the amount and quality of goods and services being produced are going to be a major determinant of people’s level of preference satisfaction. As long as people have the basics – food, shelter etc. – they can have a reasonably satisfactory time. The more luxuries they have on top of that, the more satisfactory life will be for them, all else equal.
Under Equal Satisfaction, as I just explained in my answer to Question 4, each person is free to be as unproductive or productive as he or she chooses to be. Some people may do things that contribute greatly to the total amount of satisfaction being attained, by, for example, spending a lot of time growing food, composing music, curing diseases, combatting crime etc. Others may contribute less, or nothing. There might be fashions in activities, for example the public might do a lot of artistic projects one year and it might shift towards doing more practical ones the next, resulting in a movement in the overall pleasure level of the society either up or down, depending on which type of activity turns out to be more productive in satisfaction terms. Apart from this I can’t see a strong feedback effect like we have in free market recessions, creating a self-feeding momentum away from productive activities.
As explained in my answer to Question 3, Encouragement Points (link to above) can be resorted to to steer people towards productive activities and therefore play a part in regulating the satisfaction level of the society.
Satisfaction may also fall below its potential level due to Equality Inspectors (link to above) either being too strict or not strict enough. If the Inspectors are too strict, the shops will be full of goods that people are afraid to take home for fear of being slammed by the inspectors for excessively satisfying their preferences. Conversely, if they aren’t strict enough, the shops will empty of goods too quickly resulting in queues forming outside shops at opening time. Either situation life will make life needlessly unsatisfactory. The Inspection system therefore needs to be kept at the right level of strictness, to avoid these two extremes.
Question 7 – Without market forces or a centrally planned economy why would the right things get produced and go to the right people?
As explained above in Question 4, Equal Satisfaction allows people to be as unproductive as they wish to be, and if they produce things, they may deviate from meeting people’s needs as far as they like. I believe, however, that a sufficient number of people will prefer to be productive in ways that meet people’s needs, and that the huge diversity of individuals who produce things (individually and collectively) will lead to provision of goods and services that correspond to people’s diverse requirements. If not, as said above, there is always the “Plan B” of using Encouragement Points (link to above) to push people into satisfying people’s needs more closely.
So when it comes to people producing “the right things” my contention is that we don’t need to organise centrally or use markets, as the anarchic approach just described will suffice.
As for getting each of the goods and services to end up in the hands of someone who wants it, I admit that the free market does an elegant job of this. Capitalist shopkeepers’ efforts to maximise profits result in them setting prices whereby the goods leave the shelves at about the rate at which they are being produced. They are bought by those prepared to pay the highest prices, which ignoring differences in income between customers, are the people who most want the products in question.
Under Equal Satisfaction it’s a different story. Some consumers (maybe around half) are on Satisfaction Points (link to above) where each product carries a price which is an estimate of the product’s contribution to the consumer’s preference satisfaction. Whether a consumer is on Satisfaction Points or not, the logic of Equal Satisfaction is that each consumer is rationed in terms of preference satisfaction, and therefore, all else equal, in terms of the amount of preference satisfaction they can gain from their consumption habits. As far as our economic analysis is concerned, then, we can imagine that everyone is on Satisfaction Points.
Shopkeepers therefore have no control over their prices, in terms of Satisfaction Points, as each consumer faces a different price for each product, which is set by their Inspectors. If Equal Satisfaction works perfectly, each consumer has no greater reason in terms of self-interest (viewed as maximizing one’s preference satisfaction) to “buy” something he or she loves than something they hate (or anything in-between). Consumers should therefore be indifferent between all products on the shelves! One might choose one thing that’s worth 10 Satisfaction Points or 10 things worth 1. The hope is then that people will choose things based on some reason apart from satisfying themselves. Allocation of goods to the people who like or need them most is such a reason. Therefore people should allocate to themselves food that they like the taste of more than other people do, all else equal.
If all this goes awry, as in my previous answers society can always fall back on Encouragement Points (link to above) to get people to consume stuff that there is a glut of, or to avoid stuff that needs to be carefully rationed.
Satisfaction Points won’t stop someone from buying 100 or washing machines and destroying them, or even a million, so there probably needs to be a law against buying frivolously in this way.
Question 8 – What’s stopping the Inspectorate, the Equality Courts and the Jury Rule Processes from becoming corrupt?
Nothing can guarantee that these institutions won’t succum to corruption and hierarchy and become examples of Animal Farm style hypocrisy. However, the same can be said for trial by jury and one person-one vote in our society. I think that radically egalitarian structures such as these have advantages over partial equality, as it’s easier to spot deviations from them when it isn’t a matter of degree. Also equality seems intuitively moral to many people. Few would dare to openly attack trial by jury or one person-one vote in our current society now that they are established. Corruption-proofing these institutions is also a matter of trying to employ clever social engineering, like getting lots of different people keeping an eye on one-another and not putting certain individuals in a position where their honesty is being relied upon to hold the system together. I hope that the institutions that I have devised have these features, but improvements are always possible.
Corruption and failure of the system are always possibilities but don’t seem to me to be reasons to give up trying. As I explained above in Question 2, radical alternative societies don’t have to be guaranteed successes for them to be worth a try.
Question 9 – Won’t the black market take over?
The free market system has pervaded our current world. Anyone who thinks that it will go away easily is probably kidding themselves. Equal Satisfaction may, I admit, be seriously prone to a thriving black market. My system attempts to regulate the amount of preference satisfaction each person attains. One only has to avoid or pay-off an inspector for a short time to take some drugs or have some sex, i.e. get a lot of satisfaction in a short space of time with no-one looking. These services can be used as payment, along with good old-fashioned precious metals or some other illegal medium of exchange.
My hope is that the black market won’t take over but as with my previous answer and Question 2, above, even with this as a real possibility, it’s not reason to give up on giving the system a try. One advantage Equal Satisfaction has over Soviet Communism in trying to eliminate the Black Market is that hard cash has been removed. Also, if all goes well, wealth hierarchies have been removed, making successful gangsters pretty conspicuous. Lastly, in Soviet Russia the motivation of many criminals would probably be to get even with legitimately better off people. Under Equal Satisfaction the Equality Courts allow them to do this without resorting to crime.
Question 10 – Under this system people can vandalise their own homes and immediately get a new one given to them by the state. Isn’t this a problem?
As with buying a 100 washing machines, mentioned above at the end of my answer to Question 7, Equal Satisfaction needs to make this against the law. Those that vandalise their own homes will be treated like vandals of other people’s things, and while their level of preference satisfaction won’t be affected by what they do, they will find themselves quickly being restricted in terms of being allowed to spend time unsupervised in a vandalisable home.
Equal Satisfaction 