Bruce Cahan of Urban Logic and Kevin Jones from GoodCap led a discussion on “The Economy of Abundance.”

Cahan introduced the idea of the Means Meter. How do you know you’re creating the good? How do you now what social values you’re either enhancing or impeding? How do you translate social values to the monetary economy?

For example, if you offer poor people healthcare, you’re bettering their lives, but also, if a disaster happens, you already have an infrastructure in place. But it’s hard to put a value on that.
What if you had a Means Meter connected to your PDA or cell phone? You could go to Home Depot to buy light bulbs. You aim the meter at the GE display. It says “This was made in a child labor factory in China.” The meter tells you another brand urns more inefficiently than the average light bulb.” You can walk on and use the meter to find the product that best implements your values. It will give you feedback that’s valuable to not only you but the manufacturers, the retailer and governments. We can use web 2.0 to aggregate your personal affinity characteristics.

Audience question: are there metrics for this, so that the problem becomes simply building the software and device?

A: There are vast volumes of disconnected data sets that this could unleash.

Al Chang: It’s about the decommodification of products by adding inefficiencies back in. It starts to become possible to have the child labor free light bulb. Good means different things to different people, and this might be enough to enable smaller companies and niche products that appeal to fewer people.

Jones said, “We could vote with our dollars for the kind of world we want.”

Cahan: “The platform would have to be agnostic, do a good job with web 2.0, because my values are not your values.”

Chang: “It’s about making information and connections dead cheap and holding that community together. Five years ago we weren’t doing conferences for $35 a person.”

Do there need to be reputation systems and ratings? Yes, along with easy icons like red and green dots. Maybe an agent or layer that aggregates your actions and gives you your own score.

Jones: Working on an initiative to help a consortium of Mennonite organic farmers. Their costs are higher, so it’s hard for them to get loans. Bankers don’t understand the social value they provide and don’t take that into account.

Gail Williams of The Well said not everyone would care about the social value, but if you could get some kind of “karma point” that you could redeem, that could make it more appealing to the mainstream. And what about something like tagging, letting a subset of people who care about one little issue put tags on real-life commodities?

Challenges: The amount of noise in the system. Too many data points and different values. Also, it’s a supply chain, so there are a lot of variables in there aside from the product itself.

Jones: Start with some true believers and go from there. For example, hook up the Slow Food people with those farmers.

Cahan: Ways of calculating total cost of ownership could apply here.

–Susan Kuchinskas

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