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How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about. 

Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool:

Most people have an idea of what crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful.

Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics:

  • New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs
  • Using buying co-ops to lower costs
  • Using seller co-ops to pool advertising and undermine large corporations
  • Tactics for carving out more and more niches where those seller co-ops can compete with large corporations
  • Creating a gift economy
  • Realistic mechanisms for replacing executive control with worker control
You could slice-and-dice a crowdsourcing challenge in any number of ways. 

A Social Experiment: 

In capitalist economic systems, the chief executives of large corporations earn huge salaries and bonuses for their services to shareholders. This is reasonable, up to a point, because chief executives bring education, intelligence and relevant business experience to the sorts of big decisions that keep a company prospering, So, is there a sort of justification for high CEO salaries. This fact begs the question: Are CEOs making better decisions than the workers could make about running the company?
Are CEOs Necessary?

The question can be answered in a couple of ways. Mention Company X, which is growing like gangbusters because of the CEO's great leadership. As they say on the Internet, "The plural of anecdote is not data." So, I can't address the question by offering an example of a great CEO. A better approach would be to compare the performance (profitability or earnings growth perhaps) for worker-owned companies like REI. But, those companies still have C-level executives, so that doesn't answer the question either.

I propose a social experiment. Compare a real company being run normally and one simulated company in the same industry. This company would be run by the workers, who make the same strategic decisions the CEO would make and execute. There could also be a historical test: compare this historic performance of a company after numerous executive decisions. Compare that performance with what a group of simulated employees would do given the same information.

Which company gets better results, in terms of profit? That would be one simple way of testing worker-controlled companies versus CEO-led companies.

Of course, I don't know what practical effect this specific simulation would have. Setting it up and running it is enough of a challenge for the short term. I suppose running several of these trials would undermine the argument that we need CEOs and their (sometimes) incredible compensation,

Comments are Welcome:

Thoughts? Reactions? Please leave a comment. If this little essay has been thought-provoking, please do share it! 
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