On 01/12/2014 09:12 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > It's not just the money that matters its the ideas and the > leadership too.
Of course, I agree. But we can make a further distinction between ideas like, say, a waterless urinal versus, say, credit default swaps. While I agree that all inventions (distinct from idle ideas) matter, I think the financial inventions (e.g. micro-loans) will typically have more impact ... good or bad impact. We spend a lot of time staring in awe at things like the large hadron collider or the mars rover, modern physical theories, etc. But I think a good historian of technology would do well to pay a little more attention to the financial inventions that have made money so fluid. On 01/12/2014 09:25 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:> On 1/12/14, 9:50 AM, glen wrote: > What I was getting at in the other e-mail was that it is, in some sense, > too fluid. A lot of people that look at their credit card balances > after the holidays can probably empathize with that. It is too fluid > for our government. It is too easy to forget that war X or entitlement > Y means a non-trivial fraction of the productivity of every employee in > the United States. Same goes for executives in big companies that can > (and probably will) soon find other big companies to run, or retire to > their yachts. Maybe. I don't know. I agree it can seem too fluid. But I can't shake the sense that I'm biased. I look at various people who really just need a tiny amount of capital to, say, start a food cart or a hand-made soap business, or whatever, and look at the ways they have to spend their time to satisfy multiple objectives. They have to feed their familly, pay their bills, avoid the various traps with "law enforcement", etc. If money were too fluid, they would be able to get their hands on some without becoming one of the upper class, usually light-skinned, credentialed, citizenry and filling out reams of forms and such. Similarly, I watch people who lose their jobs, hunt for new jobs, lose their homes, get in fights with their spouses, etc. just because they couldn't get their hands on a few thousand bucks to tide them over for awhile. Yeah, most of these people are ill-programmed with delusions of the American Dream. So, to some extent their downfall is their own fault. But if money were a little more fluid, maybe it would be easier for them to learn about the real system, the hidden system, that governs their lives... the system only rich people can afford to learn about. Here, it seems clear to me that the problem isn't really the fluidity of money but the leadership and rules set up by the people with most of the money. I've repeatedly pitched to our neighborhood association the idea of setting up a fund for people in the neighborhood who are at risk of losing their houses. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Nobody HERE benefits when a house goes back to the bank. Why not build up a $50-$100k community fund to help those people retain their homes in tough times? But they haven't really taken to the idea. Their money is _allocated_, viscously trapped in whatever isolated, private, self-centered plans/worries they have. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Flipping locks of blond and straw and brown and red ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
