Often I suspect there could be new interesting ways to mix the mixed economy. Money, how to use it, & price equilibria are familiar to us all. But surely the price mechanism isn't the only mechanism that we could harness.
Suppose a communist society as you've described decided to implement a very basic gift economy mechanism like this. First, they vote weekly, using a cardinal method and an app on their phones, to give ratings to various economic tasks they want done (e.g. production of consumer goods, services, public works, restoration of the environment, law enforcement, whatever). The ratings serve as a rough measure of economic priority. Second, individuals and firms may produce for the gift economy, i.e. do the tasks the people voted on and distribute the results back into the gift economy. For distribution there is a virtual queue, and the key incentive is that firms doing higher-priority tasks are put closer to the front of the queue. So to get first and best choice of scarce goods, people will want to get into firms doing higher-priority tasks, and firms will try to adapt their production to serve higher-priority ends.
As written, this is far from an optimized mechanism. I'm trying to keep it brief. Nevertheless it has clearly got a feedback mechanism to reward successful firms and successful individuals, so we'd expect it to tend toward interesting equilibria as firms and individuals adapt to pursue their interests and the public co-adapts in their votes about economic priorities. But these would be different equilibria from the monetary part of the economy, because the mechanism is so different: unlike money, this mechanism involves no tit-for-tat exchanges, no store of value, and no wages.
Regardless of the (flawed, fixable) details of that mechanism, it helps illustrate why mixed economies interest me. When there are more mechanisms available to solve a problem, (e.g. monetary, gift economy, barter, political action, personal favors), and the more robust those mechanisms are, that increases people's ability to solve their problems in ways that meet their needs and desires.
Often I suspect there could be new interesting ways to mix the mixed economy. Money, how to use it, & price equilibria are familiar to us all. But surely the price mechanism isn't the only mechanism that we could harness.
Suppose a communist society as you've described decided to implement a very basic gift economy mechanism like this. First, they vote weekly, using a cardinal method and an app on their phones, to give ratings to various economic tasks they want done (e.g. production of consumer goods, services, public works, restoration of the environment, law enforcement, whatever). The ratings serve as a rough measure of economic priority. Second, individuals and firms may produce for the gift economy, i.e. do the tasks the people voted on and distribute the results back into the gift economy. For distribution there is a virtual queue, and the key incentive is that firms doing higher-priority tasks are put closer to the front of the queue. So to get first and best choice of scarce goods, people will want to get into firms doing higher-priority tasks, and firms will try to adapt their production to serve higher-priority ends.
As written, this is far from an optimized mechanism. I'm trying to keep it brief. Nevertheless it has clearly got a feedback mechanism to reward successful firms and successful individuals, so we'd expect it to tend toward interesting equilibria as firms and individuals adapt to pursue their interests and the public co-adapts in their votes about economic priorities. But these would be different equilibria from the monetary part of the economy, because the mechanism is so different: unlike money, this mechanism involves no tit-for-tat exchanges, no store of value, and no wages.
Regardless of the (flawed, fixable) details of that mechanism, it helps illustrate why mixed economies interest me. When there are more mechanisms available to solve a problem, (e.g. monetary, gift economy, barter, political action, personal favors), and the more robust those mechanisms are, that increases people's ability to solve their problems in ways that meet their needs and desires.