“How many of you own a power drill?”, posed the orator, Rachel Botsman. “Well,” she continues, “that power drill will be used for a total of about 13 minutes of it’s total life.”
Admitantly, I originally clicked on this video to check out the chick who’s presenting. However, upon viewing, she introduces to me an extremely interesting concept: ‘share your stuff in lieu of buying, barely using and storing more stuff.
Rachel summarizes the logic behind this emergent economic concept saying that we, “don’t want stuff, we want the needs or experience it fulfills.”
As are alot of the videos at TED talks, this is an interesting idea; enjoy.
Now that you’ve watched it; if you will, chew on this:
If we did, indeed, learn to share our power drills so as to more effectively utilize the minimum life therein, what would happen to the production of power drills? It’s safe to induce that the quantity of power drills supplied would be greatly reduced as the quantity demanded is reduced. Many of those regular people with living, breathing families associated with the production and distribution of power drills would be made redundant (that’s British for laid off or fired). Of course, being that there is a real need for power drills, at some point, equilibrium will be achieved. But the gap left due to sharing will ripple. Further, if sharing takes off in lieu of consumption of larger commodities such as automobiles, where will the butterfly-effected eventuality leave our monetary system?
Will we (as she implies) find ourselves full circle amidst a barter-based economy where our currency in more of a weighted average formula which is to indicate one’s “trustability.” At some point in the not-so-distant future, she appears to argue that there may become a dilemma where the Monetary System stands in one corner and Bartering bounces aggressivly, challenging the way the world works in the opposite. Surely the evil empire of banks and insurance would not allow for money to devalue to the point of extinction, but she does make a decent out-of-the-box argument.
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