Direct Democracy For Non Tradable Skills Settings

Could time arbitrage assist local skills so that direct democracy becomes possible? First, consider why direct democracy has not been possible for services needs, thus far. Ordinarily, once skills sets are exposed to (compensated by) other sources of wealth because of the nature of their investment structure, lower income levels become less able to coordinate skills sets through financial means. This is when lower income levels could benefit from the assistance of time value and coordinated educational capacity, as noted in a recent post.

Once time value becomes subordinated to skills value, time compensation benefits from unspecified amounts of resource capacity from the wealth of tradable goods structures. When time value becomes variably proportioned, group time aggregates can only be coordinated through pricing structures, instead of time use preferences. Even though upper income levels can (mostly) coordinate time value through this pricing structure, lower income levels fall away from participation through monetary coordination.

However, even though governments limited services capacity through assigned meritocratic time value structure, they still attempt to coordinate services capacity which does not actually exist. Hence the needs of lower income levels can slowly undermine group decision making processes, in markets that are solely structured through merit compensation. In these settings, knowledge may be made available to large populations, but it is only allowed economic context on the part of the elite.

Consider already existing arguments, why certain voting processes on the part of large populations "don't make sense". Once skills sets are reimbursed on meritocratic terms, they become exposed to limits which make voting processes seem unreasonable. Even though national health care systems still appear feasible, nations become ever more compelled to make this marketplace less accessible. Incentives become aligned for producers, consumers and third parties alike to avoid the need for the healthcare product wherever possible, because of the way the product is envisioned and structured. For most systems, meritocratic structure as the only services option, can eventually reduce the marketplace for many forms of services product.

I thought about these realities after reading a post from Angus, ("Kids Prefer Cheese"), a few months ago titled "The Powerful Negative Theorems of Economics", where he wrote about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem:

Simply, this tells us that there is no ideal, comprehensive way of aggregating individuals preferences into an aggregate choice. Arrow shows there is no mechanism that is non-dictatorial, satisfies independence of irrelevant alternatives, and pareto efficiency.

In representative democracy for large populations, voting for (representative) individuals is even further removed from desired services representation, than attempts to provide merit compensated time capacity at local levels. At national and state levels, opposing political factions attempt to cancel out the services options of "opposing" parties. Indeed, voting for politicians who "promise" to tweak services structures, is not useful in the same sense as voting for a product with one's money, which can at least positively affect marketplace availability (hence outcome) for tradable goods.

Time arbitrage would allow local populations to internalize what is normally assigned to political structures in terms of non tradable goods. One way to think about this process is a better understanding of an old phrase, "think globally, act locally". It's a phrase which needs an update for current times: think "locally" for non tradable services, investment and education, think "globally" for the resource capacity of tradable goods the world over. Fortunately, tradable goods need not be subjected to local decision making processes at individual levels, because the marketplace of tradables depends on world conditions. Whereas a non tradables marketplace sometimes needs time investment capacity for local decision making processes, in order to remain economically viable and stable.