The convenience-autonomy payoff is real. The contemporary social order maximizes conveience at all costs, while parecon as written basically maximizes autonomy at all costs. Here is a proposal to weaken that somewhat.
In parecon and in Daniel Saros’ model, preorders play a significant role - individual consumers share their preferences with the planning process in some way or another, which is then incorporated into the production process. Both incorporate some flexibility into this process, with ex ante price adjustments so that consumer markets clear.
This has some negative sides. In Erik Olin Wright’s dialogue with Robin Hahnel, and in Jan Groos’ dialogue with Daniel Saros, both interlocutors bring up the annoyances of specifying what you want in advance, and both proponents say “yeah, I guess it’s a little annoying, but there’s some flexibility built into the system and it allows planners to know actual consumer preferences better than capitalists or a Lange model could estimate from past purchasing decisions alone.”
But it is annoying. Robin Hahnel says he wouldn’t even bother filling his own needs profile out and just leave it to his local consumption council to pester him until they just filled out his needs as identical to last year! To be fair, that’s what I’d do, too. So here’s a modification to Parecon and/or the Saros system that would assist.
your preferences aren’t all that unique
Different people have different wants and needs. But not that different. If you knew my:
age/cohort
rough body shape
gender/Bem quadrant
most outstanding Big Five scores
distance from a city center
spouse and kids, or lack thereof
unique medical needs
religious or ethical hard lines, like keeping kosher or being vegetarian
I bet you could do about as good a job as me at purchasing basically all of my material goods, other than books (which are pretty well-handled by physical libraries and online repositories). Actually, people are non-unique enough that if you could know most of the above for me, you could probably guess most of the others - and you can probably guess a few just from reading this blog. Maybe your purchasing habits are more unique than this clipart I found, but I’m not.
So you could actually have something like a “neighborhood consumption council” that was based on nonlocal criteria. A very crude way to do this is that you could assign people to consumption councils based on demographic data like the above. That would be pretty arbitrary, though, and the categories probably obsolete within a short period of time. Much easier just to let people choose a nonlocal consumption council. These consumer councils could compete for members, easily dissolve, and easily reform.
The nonlocal consumption council would (1) purchase public goods for its members (2) set a schedule of which things to preorder or purchase based on individual income. N.B. that, just like local consumption councils, you could have money that was “left over” for flex purchases or individual adjustments, and there would presumably be a way of adjusting these as you go along as well.
advantages of nonlocal consumer councils
Returns to scale on reducing transaction costs. Going through product reviews and figuring out what you need is a form of labor. Some people find it fun, especially for certain products, but most of the time it’s a drag. If your decision criteria aren’t meaningfully different from a bunch of other people’s, this cuts down on this kind of labor (and you can still have some flex spending set aside for what you do enjoy.) Instead, your option-evaluation labor is concentrated on which consumer councils to join.
Funding public goods. Albert and Hahnel rightly point out that neighborhood consumption councils could fund public goods, but plenty of public goods aren’t local. Nonlocal consumption councils could budget collectively for nonlocal public goods, especially art, research, media, and cons/festivals that appeal to their members.
Signalling identity. Empirically speaking, this is largely most of what people in highly prosperous countries want from their consumption. Which consumer collective you join will signal to others (from the clothes you wear, and so on) subcultural membership. Like most political extremists I dislike this feature of postmaterialism even as I participate in it, but it is what it is.
Coordinating over positional goods. At least within a consumption collective that broadly corresponds to a subculture, people may have goods they want to beat out the other guy - things that make them worse off because they’re objectively expensive or unethical, but that they want to get because “everybody has them.” (This, however, is less true the less genuinely competitive they are.)
Motivated consumer research. Capitalist firms already try to decide what consumers want, and consult them as they do so. However, consumers’ motivation to participate in this is generally crude and extrinsic. Product reviews are genuinely sometimes pursued with genuine verve, but those are ex ante. Every sufficiently large consumer council would have a few members who were likely to be enthusiastic about setting some of the trends in the subculture.
Far-term thinking. This is relative to pre-orders more generally, but people tend to plan more aspirationally at a year-long level than a minute-long level. They plan for ambitious hobbies, healthy eating, and not blowing their entire paycheck on one wild night. From the perspective of a standard revealed preferences perspective, you can argue that this makes preorders a source of inefficiency - but this seems, to me, like saying that writing on Substack is bloviating and boring compared to writing on Twitter. The same person is smarter on Substack than on Twitter, because the latter operates at a faster clip. Our society needs more slow thinking and less fast thinking - and my guess is that the same would be true for most societies with modern technology and consumer choice.
Flexibility. What I think Daniel Saros’ model - which involves consumers listing all the goods they might possibly want in priority order - is trying to go for is really an attempt to simulate an individual’s utility function. However, listing all goods in priority order is a pretty silly way to go about this (because of how goods combine and substitute for each other, and so on.) Both Parecon and Saros’ model involve adjustments to individual income based on effort, and any economic system will have to deal with unexpected shortages (baby formula, or during the pandemic, “everything”) and hiccups. When done at scale, however, you really could get a schedule of orders by income and of plausible substitutions.
why doesn’t this already happen under capitalism?
Much of this could already be implemented under capitalism. Surely if it did, it already would? I think there are two reasons.
First, the technology to do this efficiently is relatively new. You already see grasping in this direction, such as with lootboxes, subscription services, and so on.
Secondly, people aren’t used to collective decision-making, but to individual marketplace choices, which makes it easier to engage in the latter even when (when fixed learning costs are taken into effect) the former might be more efficient.
Thirdly, my own reason for not signing up for something like this is my feeling that it would be a scam. In a world (like ours) where someone can get very rich, “what if they’re just going to take the money and run, possibly in a subtle way” rationally drives down social trust and prevents relatively high-trust options like “outsource most of your consumption decisions” outside of, say, family units.
possible concerns
I have two possible concerns.
First, as noted, this reinforces mechanisms that cause identification at the level of consumer categories. I reflexively dislike this, even as it’s objectively not all that important.
Second, if consumer councils are few enough in number and grassroots participation in them is low enough, this could constitute a potential chokepoint for managerial elites to arise. (This already exists for virtually any way of organizing production, but now we get one for consumption as well.)