Great rant/stream of consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not... https://vimeo.com/411278238
On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > I can’t weave a grand diorama that has the meaning of everything in it, > and anything I try will come out a mess. So let me try for Less is More. > > I think part of this is habit and commitments. Somehow the society has to > sort out a predictable way to arrive at who has a right to consume how much > of what. A surprising amount of structure goes into that, and it has > enormous inertia. Part of what we are trying to “restart” is a set of > systems that happen to be doing an allocation that we don’t have other > systems in place to do as an alternative. > > Take food production. Fine, what people need to eat is relatively > inelastic, and not wildly different from one human to another, compared to > dollar-wealth. But over the past 80 years, nearly all food calories are > produced by very few decision makers and enormous capital outlays, levered > to the hilt with credit, on really bad (regular, fast, and inflexible) > turnaround times. (This means Corn, Beans, lesser Wheat, to some extent > commodity meats.). The story is a little more diversified for the nutritive > value of food (fruits, vegetables, et al.), but different in structure > where near-slave labor takes the place of capital and a different analysis > is needed. For now I will just look at the simple one. > > We can’t all suddenly move back to the farm and grow calorie crops. We > don’t own land, we don’t have skills, and besides there is no easy angle to > do that in a system that over-produces already. So the production is > there. But if we don’t have a way to pay the “farmer” (really a > grant/loan/lobby businessman more than an expert in soil health etc.), why > should he give us anything to eat? You could say “Ah, he only needs enough > to live, and he is only one man, so he could give the rest away because > people need it.” But he isn’t only one man. He is a vastly debt-leveraged > operation, with enormous capital replacement and maintenance costs, huge > loans for fertilizer/seed/pesticide, and no way to pay that unless he turns > over the crop within certain price ranges (or lobbies hard to get Dept of > Ag to make up the difference; what happens is a lot of both). So he has no > choices if we don’t have money, and we have no choices if we have no > money. But then what should anyone pay any of us for if the US operates on > 1000 farmers, but there are 378M mouths that want to be fed? Some system > has to work that out. > > During the near-century of technological increases in output optimization, > the rhetoric was that with less labor used to produce consumables, people’s > efforts would be liberated to do other good things. But to the extent that > those things aren’t “necessary” in the Maslov sense like food is (following > Steve S.), really all those other people are useless. > > One could try UBI, or have some utopian fantasy about centrally managed > communist economies, but apart from small-scale experiments on UBI within > much larger conventionally-run countries, and Kibbutz-level communes, I > don’t see evidence of mechanisms to put behind those visions. So we are > left with an unsolved problem of distribution. Not least, just How do we > coordinate it? But also how do we do so stably enough that the system is > perceived as having some kind of legitimacy (close enough to “fair”, to > being individually negotiated and thus allowing people to want different > things, all the marginalist Econ stuff). > > Take any other area. Gas-powered transportation. Well, maybe you don’t > “need” it in the sense that you can conjure a world where you live and work > close together and have support for walk/bike/pubtrans etc. But where you > are now, you and almost everybody else in the US, has demographically > committed to being unable to do much of anything without plugging into that > whole “unnecessary” system. So some part of the economic inertia comes > just from the thick web of these commitments that people have made, which > leave them unable to withdraw from dependencies on lots of complicated > services. > > Easiest way to get 100,000V if you started with 100V? Coil some wire to > make an inductor, plug it into the wall, and then cut the wire. Sudden > shifts of anything have a dimension of problem just from the timescale, in > addition to whatever may have been problems or virtues of the normal state > of operation. > > > If one thinks that these kinds of “commitments” or “inertia” as one > principle, and the mechanics problem of negotiating a widely-applicable and > adequately stable set of permissions for access to a wage as the second, > are two broad “primary” drivers of the restarting, then there is still a > vast depth of smaller-grained design choices that have accumulated since > the Industrial Age, in supply chains, transportation, management, law, > etc. It’s a hard web to change fast without a lot of chaos that drowns a > lot of people. > > However bad it was during the last depression, city people still could go > back to the farms, because there there was food, and they could somehow > chip in in exchange for eating, to get around the coordination failure. > Now, with all the permission massively centralized, no people in the > interior, and everything going through bank credit, even that demographic > shift no longer exists as an option. > > There is a whole separate story about the fact that the predator and > parasite class are still there, and they aren’t going to leave of their own > accord, but I think that is more a story of motive and how the mechanics > gets steered and evolves, whereas what I put above is just about what > mechanics exists. I think the mechanics will dominate in the > immediate-short term. > > Very inadequate. > > Eric > > On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM, <[email protected]> < > [email protected]> wrote: > > Colleagues, > > I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and > good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again. What exactly > is this economy we are bent on reviving? What exactly is the difference in > human activity between our present state and a revived economy. We can go > to bars and concerts and football games? Is that the economy we are > reviving? It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy > and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of > people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to do? > > > You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were > put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and > protected to see how the population would develop. They never got above > two hundred. Infant mortality, etc., was appalling. Carnage. In the same > space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population > of tens of thousands. > > Don’t yell at me. What fundamental proposition about economics do I not > understand? > > Nick > > Nicholas Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology > Clark University > [email protected] > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ > > > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > > > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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