Growth Rate Explained
In the US, a commune movement sprung up in the 1960's, and grew to fairly large numbers, and then died out. That movement was fueled entirely by word of mouth. It had several problems which reduced its growth rate. One problem was the system used in those communes simply didn't work well. Many people went to try out commune living and quickly found out that it was not so good, and then left. Word of mouth was much slower then, there was no Internet to spread the word.
There are two factors which will create growth for this new society. Both of them are logarithmic growth, in other words they start slow and then speed up drastically. Here's an example of a logarithmic growth rate. Say you start with 100 and double every year. Ten years of growth looks like this: 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800, 25600, 51200, 102400.
The 1960's commune movement was probably a bit faster than this, even with its problems. When something doesn't work so well, it grows faster initially and slows down as people start to see the problems. My guess is it probably grow at a rate of about 5 times per year for a few years, than died off at about the same rate, probably reaching a population of around 50,000 people or so. That is just a guess though, I can't find real accurate info.
For word of mouth to grow really fast, it must be supported by something which really works. If the system would have been a working system, which people liked, the rate would not slow down so quickly. It would have continued at that rate into the hundreds of millions range.
Since there are two factors creating growth rate, both of these factors add to each other. Let's just assume that both of these rates are that it doubles every year. In that case, if we start again with 100 people, the growth for ten years looks like this: 400, 1600, 6400, 25600, 102400, 409600, 1638400, 6553600, 26214400, 104857600.
The other factor for growth rate for our new society is basic growth. That is, just like any company does. Earn enough money, and acquire more people.
For this type of growth, it is not necessary for the people to agree with or understand this system of society. Poor people have little options. They have been discarded as garbage by the Capitalist System. They do not want to think about what system works best. They just want to go on about their lives. They will join our system, simply because we offer them a better life. They have nothing to lose.
This type of growth is simply a matter of money. Yes, money. Money is only a temporary thing in this society, so bear with me. Money is a tool for creating collaboration. Poverty is lack of collaboration. We can learn to collaborate without money. Also, note that money is really only evil when it is used to motivate.
Capitalism uses greed to motivate people. A by product of that method of motivating, is that it creates greed. That is the problem with money. It is not bad when it does not affect individual behavior. It is not bad, when the individuals are isolated from money's effects. In our new society, money is only for trading, to acquire what we can't create ourselves. As our society grows, it will trade less and less, and become more and more self reliant. Eventually it will produce everything it needs, and buy nothing.
For a company to survive, a company needs to make about $60 an hour in order to pay its people about $20 an hour. The money goes to paying loans and many other things. We do things a little differently. To us, the $60 an hour is the important number. $60 is $124,800 a year.
For us to acquire a new person in our community, we need to supply a home, food, health care, and add to our machinery collection.
In a poor country, people work for $50 a year. One can buy a house and land for about $2000 or so. What would $124,800 a year accomplish in such a community? How many people could be brought in?
In a commune, the cost of living is about 1/4th the cost of living individually. 'Course, I'm not talking about a system of extreme poverty. Let's assume that we have half of our people working on construction of new homes. This means we must half the potential income per person to $60,000. Put 30% of what's left on sales and support work, and we have $42,000 left over.
That goes towards money to buy materials, do research and development, buy luxuries, things like that. Yes, luxuries too. This will be an extremely luxurious community. If you can imagine, what would it be like if we have 100 people, each spending $1000 a month. That would be $100,000 a month! In a community with 100 people, only about 5 cars are needed, so we'd have those the first month. The rest would be spent on other things. Everything bought with that money is there for everyone in the community to use.
'Course, initially, this growth rate is a little slower. Initially, the costs are much higher. We have to buy all the machines we need. We might spend $150,000 for one machine, but in the future we'll produce that machine for ourselves at a cost of $20,000 or so.
When a company produces a product to sell, it figures the product must be produced for about 1/7th of what it will be sold for. Everyone wants a cut of that money. The banks get a large portion of it, charging interest at each stage of the game. For example, when the wholesaler buys it form the manufacturer, money is needed which means interest paid to the banker. I met a guy who imports lighting. He pays basically 25% percent for a loan to cover 2 months worth of inventory.
When our community produces a machine, we either sell it or use it ourselves. When we use it ourselves, we don't have any of those expenses. The only expense is shipping. When we sell it, we sell it direct, again without any expenses from the bank. That doesn't stop us from selling it at a comparable price to our competitors though. If our competitors would sell it for $150,000, we'll sell it for $125,000. It doesn't matter if our costs are only $20,000.
Why would a person want to give their money to have other people in the community? In a resource based society, people are the most valuable resource. The more people, the better all our lives will become. If you pay for building an apartment for Joe. You suddenly have Joe to work for our community the rest of his life. Buy a tractor to feed 100 Mexicans, and you have 100 Mexicans doing work creating all kinds of new things for our society.
Even a small community of 100 people, if it doubles every year will be up to 102,400 in 10 years. One would suspect that growth from word of mouth (other people forming communities based on our system) would likely change that from doubling once a year, to doubling every 3 to 6 months.
If word of mouth adds one community for each of our new communities, that means at the end of 10 years we have 104,857,600 people. If word of mouth brings our growth rate up to doubling every 3 months, it means 104,857,600 people in 5 years.
Remember, word of mouth will increase exponentially as well. Every year that goes by, people will see more and more that our system works. It is easy to say an idea won't work, when it is nothing but text or pictures on the screen, but when you can actually go to a community and walk around and see it in operation... When you can buy products produced by the society, and see the quality and technology... When you're in danger of loosing your job, because this new society is producing products so vastly superior and at lower costs...
Money is of no use to people in this new society. I suspect most will want to sell their houses and keep their money in the bank, while they try it out for a year or so, then many will dump the money into the society, 'cause they'll see how important it is. I think very many people do care about saving the world, they are just waiting to see the way. Which is more important, save the world, or have money in the bank which you can't use for anything? Money which could bring a lot of suffering poor people into the new society, who will work and produce many new interesting things.
One of the areas we want to concentrate on early on, is designing and building machines and robots. These we'll produce for ourselves and also sell for additional income. The more machines we have, the more income potential we have, and by producing them we can get them super cheap.
There are a whole lot of people in the world who are very interested in creating a new society. Many see our current society as evil, and would greatly like to support a new society. We can take advantage of this, and use it to help not only our new society but a whole lot of other experimental societies as well.
I would like to create a web directory, which will list products produced by alternative societies, intentional communities, and stuff like that. People who want to support new society research will then look through our directory whenever they need to buy something, to see if we have anything listed at a reasonable price. If there is something, they'll buy from us, rather than buying from the capitalists.
It is not money that we need. It is collaboration. Collaboration is where the real wealth is. Money is only a tool to get collaboration. Collaboration can be gotten in other ways, like this web directory idea. Such an idea would draw the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of collaboration a year, and that collaboration would also grow exponentially.
This will make it much easier for alternative societies to form and prosper. This is extremely important, 'cause if our plan isn't the right one, maybe someone else's is, and this web directory will help them get going and potentially help save the world.
Now, back to our community. It will have 2 more properties to it. One is that it reproduces. That is, a portion of the income goes to producing additional communities of the same model. Maybe even a portion goes to producing new communities of new design also, not sure how to do that though. A community is like a living thing, it should reproduce.
Another thing is this community needs to network with all the new communities it creates, to form one gigantic society. It will also network with similar communities, on an opt in basis. It will allow opt in on each point individually. 1. Free visiting. People from member communities can visit without paying lodging or food or anything. 2. Free migration, people can move from community to community freely. 3. Sharing of marketing channels. 4. Sharing resources, income, products, and technology.
Where the old style of communes and worker controlled factories fail, is they are very poor at producing new technology. Our system produces new technology very fast. If some of these communes and worker controlled factories join with us at level 4, they will use our technology to produce income, which they will share with us. In effect, it makes us appear like a much larger community than we are.
Remember, there's 15,000 people in worker controlled companies, so if we can produce new technology which will make those companies prosper. That means we prosper. If we had all 15,000 people networked with us, working closely with us, and we are producing new technology extremely fast, how long would it be before all 15,000 of those people decided to adopt our system?
Now think about this, one person can buy a small company in a poor country, and convert it to the type of community we are talking about. By doing so, the community is created with an existing income source and an existing population. There is no need to find people who believe in this type of system. People don't want to think about how the society works, they just want to live their lives.
One person has already done this, and so the process begins. He told me it only costed a few thousand dollars to acquire the company with 100 people in it. This is in a very poor country, where many people make $50 a month.
We need more people though. Don't just sit back and watch to see what will happen. If you are going to wait and see, at least while you are waiting, work hard and make money. Some of you maybe squatting and not paying rent or home loans, if so, don't sit around and do nothing. Work hard and make money. If you don't have a job, and can't find one, there are plenty of things you can do to make your time useful. I know a guy who used to work as a security guard, so that he could have his time while working there, to do his own things. He could write books, bring a laptop and work on the computer, etc. That is a good example of making more efficient use of your time. Drivers for shipping companies like UPS tend to get paid a lot, and it is fairly easy work.
Making money is not the only way to help. There are many different tasks that need to be done. This site needs artwork done. Architectural concept pictures, to show what life will be like, and help get people interested.
Communities need sources of income. Some people have access to information or customers who want work done and are willing to pay. That might be work which requires purchasing machines for or not. Some people might be willing to help by purchasing some machines and starting to produce that work, which someone else located. There are many things that can be done, if people put their minds to it.
Collaboration is the key. Money is nothing more than a tool to gain collaboration. We can learn to collaborate without money.
If you are interested in helping, write me and tell me how you'd like to help, or what are your skills and stuff. If you are not interested right now, check back every 6 months, or so.
E-mail: