Gentlemen, Curiously I recall that the natives of the Canadian West Coast had a culture based on debt. Lavish gifts were presented at potlatches that appeared to court total poverty but the culture seemed to view debt of this type as prestige since the recipient was expected to out do the giver at the next potlatch and was shamed if unable to ante up. Western thinkers concluded that it was a suicidal culture and the Canadian government stopped the practice which is now considered to have nearly destroyed the entire culture. For some reason this social organization survived for centuries without white interference and I have no idea how it stabilized itself and actually created a highly innovative society. There have been many other strange variants on social wealth distribution but I suspect they were indeed local and trust was stabilized which seems to be the key .
All systems are based on trust and lack of such spells failure for all systems. Currency is not the basic principle but rather trust which can create any of a multitude of systems.(It could be argued weakly that copper served that purpose until white men arrived with steel) Gold may be an attempt to base a system on the lack of trust. Which is interesting since it depends on it anyway. Experts on game theory please comment, Is the Japanese board game considered a Non-Zero sum game? Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky Ph.D.(Civil Eng.), M.Sc.(Mech.Eng.), M.Sc.(Biology) 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg, Manitoba CANADA R2J 3R2 (204) 2548321 Phone/Fax vbur...@shaw.ca -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: September 10, 2010 6:17 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] national debt and zero-sum games Stephen Thompson wrote circa 10-09-10 04:08 PM: > Its called Conscience of a Liberal. > BLOG: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ Cool! Thanks. I've placed it in my RSS aggregator. Of course, that doesn't mean I'll be industrious enough to actually read it. ;-) But I'll try. Maybe by the 2012 election, I'll have a more fact-informed opinion. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
