Extensive Price Making is an Equilibrium Outlier

Even though many of us take extensive price making for granted in time based services, this set of circumstance is actually an equilibrium outlier among many nations. For instance, history provides ample evidence that systems of knowledge centered agglomeration which depend on other sources of wealth, can be quite fragile in the long run. All too often, when citizens can't utilize knowledge via non hierarchical means, they end up missing basic or critical steps which could help them achieve daily goals. Worse, they lack any viable patterns of participation in the institutions which bear responsibility for continued knowledge preservation. 

Since direct reciprocity has only become more difficult for services generation - especially during the 20th century - societies increasingly rely on asymmetric participation, production and consumption for a wide array of knowledge based activity. Alas, this approach has led to sectoral imbalances and accumulating debt loads. Much in the way of applied knowledge is publicly supported. However, this means that much of today's day high skill activities are financial obligations for future citizens, rather than market based production and consumption options for people who need them now. Despite the fact this set of affairs can't continue indefinitely, we still lack any Plan B which could stabilize and lessen budgetary burdens many nations face for knowledge based needs. Perhaps it's the fact no Plan B is being actively discussed, which encourages major political parties to completely ignore the possibility of imposed austerity and hardship in the near future.

A major challenge in all this, is to once again relearn how to use knowledge and skill through more directly reciprocated patterns. Not only would symmetric time use mean greater market participation for all citizens, reciprocal time matching can create more immediate wealth, thereby lessening the perceived need for governmental redistribution of all kinds. Time arbitrage is a viable Plan B which would build a more complete framework for time use potential in local community groupings. The local adaptation of production and consumption settings for knowledge, could ultimately transform communities which otherwise find themselves left out of knowledge production and consumption in urban markets.

The group time of local mutual assistance would function as a form of internalized market pricing. Since the majority of time use potential becomes accounted for in a market context, time begins to function as a valid price taking mechanism for participating groups. Likewise, being able to price take makes good deflation possible for services generation, such as extensive price taking in tradable sector activity has led to good deflation in countless forms of resource capacity.  

Consider how defined equilibrium settings can gradually restore sectoral balance by allowing participants to coordinate time more fully. Importantly, this market option makes time based services more sustainable over the long run. Meanwhile, however, the U.S. may be experiencing even more political polarization than other nations, since healthcare price making is more extensive than what generally occurs in most nations. Indeed, our healthcare organizational capacity actually makes U.S. healthcare more of an outlier, in relation to other mature economies. This extreme dependence on national support also helps to explain why it is often so difficult for both the production and consumption of healthcare in the U.S. to remain in a sustainable position, possibly even for the medium term. While price making is always an understandable urge, fortunately we can recreate market options which make room for the more sustainable practice of price taking, in the use of highly valued skill and knowledge.