Ray,
Our correspondence a bit of fun? We'll see.
At 22:13 20/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
Keith, Thank you for your comments. Im always aware and amazed at how
different our life experience is. We have both accomplished but in
wildly different venues and systems. Below is my experience of what you
are speaking about. I put mine in italics and bold because I cant
see. It has nothing to do with aggression. :>)) REH
Of course not! I always knew you were a gentle soul. Underneath. Mostly
leaving agreements and disagreements as they stand I'll follow with a few
more comments.
-----------------------------------------
Ray,
A few comments on your latest:
At 21:56 19/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
William Baumol told us in 2004 that productivity has vastly increased the
money that is available. The problem was where it was going. We have
plenty of real capital. We are not a small island nation off of the
coast of Europe. We have vast resources and a population that is a
tremendous natural resource as well.
Neither of these is important in itself. Small countries with almost no
resources and small populations can do very well -- e.g. Sweden,
Switzerland, Singapore. What's important is innovative ability and a
culture that will support unusual initiatives.
REH: Are you advocating for small is beautiful?
Not for the reasons that Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore happen to be
successful at the present time. All of them, as "national economies", are
quite vulnerable in fact because they depend in each case on only a few
industries which happen at present to be highly profitable. Actually, each
of those three have been adroit so far in switching from one major industry
to another. Singapore, for example, having moved from freight services to
telecoms is now subsidizing biological research in a major way because it
sees biology as being the next major industry (and, I think, quite
rightly). In future years, though, I think that "national economies" will
be increasingly meaningless. In all economic sectors we are seeing the
emergence of web-shaped organization across the world rather than being
concentrated in any one country or region. National governments are
increasingly not able to keep tabs on them, nor on an international elite
class which accompanies the firms.
But I would certainly advocate small is beautiful even though, strangely, I
have never read Schumacher's book. Forty years ago I moved in circles very
close to him (the Soil Association, for example) but I shied away from
abstractions such as "Buddhist economics". I am now so averse to
abstractions that I will probably never read it, even though it's sitting
on my bookshelf and tempts me from time to time. My own lifetime drift
towards advocating smallness is based on the evidence of anthropology and
evolutionary biology. We behave best in small groups.
-----------------------------------------------
What we suffer from is a lack of genuine ideals that stress life,
equality, unity and the effects of actions down to the seventh
generation. Most of all you need a cultural program that
· builds individual competence and insight,
True
REH: good
· develops a program that is a part of the real world and not
fantasy based in religious theories.
True
REH: good
-------------------------------------------------
· Seriously caring about every single citizen in the country and
their growth and evolution
Not necessarily. Besides, is it possible?
REH: Yes. My family and people have a history of it prior to 1900 when
our nation was broken up by the U.S. private enterprise immigrant
government. Today we are reconstituted as a properly competitive
cut-throat nation ala the Western Powers. Note this response about us
from the 1880s:
In 1883 a small group of Eastern humanitarians began to meet annually at
Lake Mohonk, where with an agreeable background of natural beauty,
congenial companionship, and crusading motive, they discussed the Indian
problem. At their third meeting Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, a
distinguished Indian theorist, gave a glowing description of a visit of
inspection he had recently made to the Indian Territory. The most
partisan Indian would hardly have painted such an idealized picture of his
people's happiness and prosperity and culture, but, illogically, the
senator advocated a change in this perfect society because it held the
wrong principles of property ownership. Speaking apparently of the
Cherokees, he said: The head chief told us that there was not a family in
that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper
in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar. It built its own
capitol, in which we had this examination, and it built its schools and
its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got
as far as they can go, because they own their land in common. It is Henry
George's system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home
any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is
at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up
their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the
land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.(36)
(36) 1900, pp. 25-32; Lake Mohonk Conference, Report, 1904, pp 5-6;
Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1900, pp. 655-735.
I would contend that these are ultimately more efficient than the current
competitive market model. These processes were what I was taught at my
parents table and what I lived and live by. It is my culture. It is
also the reason that so many of the voice teachers in New York give away
so many lessons to the deserving and disciplined poor. The same was true
of my English, Black, German, French, Italian, Cherokee and Lakota
teachers and artists. It does seem that Artists are the Indiansof the
European cultural world.
Now all the above is very interesting indeed. Where I think you and Henry
L. Dawes go wrong is that you anathematize "selfishness". You, me, the
Cherokee, the Wall Street crook are all "selfish" to the same extent that
we are all hungry from time to time or want sex. Let's get rid of the
abstraction and use status instead -- something can be seen and, if
necessary, measured. Each one of us wants the security of status within the
group we happen to choose. However, there hasn't been a single "simple"
hunter-gatherer group in the world in which its individuals haven't been
tempted by the new status goods that are available outside their group. Not
a single group or tribe has ever said: "No thanks. We're happy enough as we
are." Whether it's factory-made bead necklaces or TV, personal ownership of
status goods is too strong to be neutralised by the softer benefits of
group living.
It's only when we've gone far down the route of the acquisition of status
goods and our individual status in a far larger, more complex, society,
that people start to realize what they've missed. In the case of the
Cherokee, now that they are seeing the deficiencies of the modern world,
their previous experience was recent enough to start to register strongly
again. In our case (in the UK) our previous communal life and customs lie
so far back, and there have been so many events and convulsions in between,
that we need historians and archeologists to give us only glimpses. But yet
(as the response to Schumacher has shown us) the yearning for community
still exists. Increasingly, as modern working communities are destroyed by
automation and there are no enticingly new status goods to keep us
motivated, we, too, want smaller governmental (ultimately communal)
entities. Wales and Scotland are becoming increasingly detached from
England (Northern Ireland always has been), and England itself is fast
dividing culturally into a north and a south. Even within that there's a
further cultural separation between London and the rest of the south.
Where you and I differ is that you see the persecution of the Cherokee and
other native peoples as being almost fully that of exploitation by the
West -- private and governmental. There's no doubt that the persecution has
been nasty but push-and-pull is also involved. Individual Cherokees have
wanted the status goods of the West and have inevitably become Westernized.
But they want to go back and re-create their own smaller communities now.
Good luck to them.
And, I believe, they're going to succeed (in due course) -- because, as the
modern system lets them down, millions more, tens of millions more, in the
Western world will want to go in the same direction. But we can't go back
as agriculturalists or hunter-gatherers. A new society needs a new central
technology also. I happen to believe that biology will supply that in due
course. And it is only for this reason that I believe that it's going to be
possible to re-create the smaller communities that our genes adapted us to
over a period of millions of years.
--------------------------------------------------
There is nothing long range about the private sector and working with it
is tremendously expensive when compared to the public sector.
Energy and resource companies think much further ahead than any current
government in the world -- except China perhaps.
REH: Good point. I grew up in Oklahoma where the oil and mineral
companies ravaged the landscape, destroyed the minds of children with
lead, zinc, heavy metal and petroleum pollution as well as polluting the
aquifers for three states in order to get the last little bit of oil out
by pumping saltwater into the depleted oil wells.
Yes, their record is a seriously bad one but they didn't ravage in full
knowledge of what they were doing. No-one knew much about these things in
those days. Let me give you an example of ice-cream in Victorian England.
It was very expensive. Most people bought a "penny-lick" from the street
vendor. He handed you a small, usually glass, vessel slightly dished on top
in which sat a spoonful of ice-cream. You paid your penny and you licked it
away and then handed back the penny-lick. The vendor would then deposit a
bit more ice-cream on top and sell it to someone else. Nota bene! I've been
very careful in describing this operation. Have you noticed anything? He
didn't wash it (never mind sterilize it!) between customers. It was, in
fact, probably the biggest vector is spreading TB around Victorian society
-- particularly among the middle-class who could afford to buy more
penny-licks than the poor. Was the vendor spreading TB around on purpose?
No. Neither he nor anybody else were aware of the TB bacterium.
Today, even without government regulation no oil company would go about
things in the same way as it did 100 years ago. New knowledge about all the
ramifications of oil drilling has now worked its way into everyone's
consciousness. It's part of a new culture and even oilmen share in some of
this.
-----------------------------------------------
America has made the business of the private sector into a simple
profit machine for share holders. That is new.
No, it's out of date already in the case of many of the largest firms,
particularly in the financial sector. Shareholders (and pension funds with
high shareholdings) take second place to the top managers of firms who are
only concerned with their current earnings and perks, not with longer-term
profitability.
REH: I wish you would talk to our bank creditors about being out of
date. We could use you to advocate for us.:>))
I'm afraid that I don't have the clout or visibility for that! Besides I'm
not diplomatic enough. I'd sooner string one or two of them up as examples
to the others than try to reason with them to any effect.
------------------------------------------------------
Companies that were seriously involved in community building and long
term planning have been replaced by companies that ravage communities and
steal the resources of the weak.
Most firms don't want to ravage communities. They want a large consumer
base which willingly buys their products.
REH: This is a big difference in our experience. I would not deny that
it was that way up until the multi-national craze. However, I believe
the case can be made for community development and support for companies
being a respite in the timeline of Imperial Capitalism's History. That
would make the current TNCs a return to the old model but without the tie
to the governmental base they had during the Nationalist Empires. But
although I am a fellow of the Organization of American Historians I would
never claim to be more than an observer of these trends since I neither
write nor teach history.
You "neither write nor teach history"? You're doing it all the time -- at
least on FW!
---------------------------------------------------------
They call it the creditindustry and it has permeated the entire stock
market structure of the country. It is also recent.
True. But the immense growth of credit has been due to the running-out of
a chain of uniquely new consumer goods such as we had between 1780 and
1980 and for which customers saved for. Motivation for "new" products
since about 1980 has been so weak that an entirely new financial sector
had to arise that would thrust credit onto customers and firms.
REH: You may be right about that.
I'm sure I'm right. My viewpoint, simple though it's expressed above, is
the result of a great deal of reading and thinking over the years. I'm
totally confident that this is the basic reason for the decline of the
West. I might be wrong, though!
I simply comment on the effects of the changes that happened at the end
of the Clinton Administration and accelerated under Bush II.
------------------------------------------------------------
How long before this fact is realized? I dont know but in my
experience the private sector can only do very simple economie of scale
processes that force it to follow the public sector in the really
creative public projects.
What creative public projects are these? I know of none. Creative
projects only arise in individual minds and can only be taken forward by
relatively small groups. In many cases if they're successful and it's in
bureaucracies' best interests such projects are taken over by the state.
REH: We wildly disagree on this one. I don't believe you can separate
individuals from their environment and culture.
I agree. You can't separate individuals entirely from culture. But
occasionally an individual comes along who is not totally conditioned by
all the current mores and concepts. He still has room (in his frontal lobes
while they're developing between puberty and about 30 years of age) to
develop ideas that no-one else has had hitherto.
Creativity means competence and inner motivation. There is bloody
little of that in capitalism and in government.
But creative people are always a bloody little proportion of the
population. Occasionally there are fantastically creative people in
capitalism and government. Steve Jobs is one; Peter the Great is another.
But I find more creativity in the Artists of the two U.S. Army Musical
organizations than on the outside. Stable salaries, even though far
below the private sector, create an environment where the men and women
of the ensemble literally develop cultural gold in the outside
organizations that they work in as second jobs. The only downside is
the Authoritarian structure which was too much for me. It is not
oppression and abuse but authoritarianism that I find intolerable. I
will create no matter what. It is a part of my culture and my family
and peoples history that we take things in one area and apply them to new
areas and develop new ways of thinking.
All creative people need sponsors or a rich daddy. And usually they don't
care very much where their financial support comes from.
---------------------------------------------------------------
· You dont have serious private space programs.
· Nor do you have a chip-fab lab anywhere in the world financed by
the private sector.
The biggest ones are in Taiwan and they're private.
REH: My source on that statement is Hedrick Smiths 1995 book Rethinking
Americawhere he analyzed the Sema-tech government/private program that
created a chip-fab lab as well as the successful government/private
programs around the world. At the time he made several observations about
the Asian versus the American processes:
1. During war, American always cooperate, but in a peacetime we never
cooperate,
2. We knew that their universities are not better than ours&.. We found
out that they are cooperating much more closely -- the suppliers and users
-- and the government has helped them. They are providing a catalytic
environment for industry to work together.
3. &according to a global study done by the U.S. Semiconductor Industry
Association, entitled Creating Advantage. The study found that the free
market had never generated a computer chip industry anywhere in the
world. etc. etc.
The private sector in America has destroyed government research in favor
of more expensive private research. Has destroyed the public sectors in
culture, healthcare and is working on education and is hopelessly more
expensive in the production of energy which is highly subsidized in order
to make private succeed. They are also working on private prisons and
privatizing the military for profit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
· The private sector cannot even develop a profit making complex
artistic ensemble.
What about Glyndebourne Opera and thousands more projects around the world?
Glyndebourne is a Chamber Opera right? Under a thousand
seats? Patronage Showcases by the wealthy do not make a national
program for the general public. America is filled with
Glyndebournes. Where once there were 66,000 opera houses, there are now
210, just the right number to service the wealthy and give Trinkets and
Trash to the average citizen for their brain development.
I wouldn't demur.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The best they can do is widgets and trinkets and trash. Shiny things.
Many are, but many more make "widgets" that the modern artistic world,
among others, depend on.
Actually the history of Art is the opposite. Galileo got his processes
from his father a music theorition. The Ultimate Abstractionsthat
Whitehead speaks about as the basis of all knowledge, are found as the
foundation for the virtuosic development of the human instrument through
the Arts. There have been plenty of engineering widgets to come out of
both the theater and the work on perspective and images by painters,
sculptors and over the last thousand years or so and opera design since
Vincenzo Galilei and the Camerata di Bardi inventedthe form .
We'll have to disagree here. Certainly there have been two-way effects but
by far the most predominant one has been the influence of technology on the
arts. Perhaps the best example was Bach's standardization of the 7-note
scale which would not have happened without the development of the
multi-keyed fixed-stopped instruments. Otherwise music would have persisted
in being divided between a variety of single-voiced scales and modes such
as the Phrygian or Hungarian or dozens more in Asia. It's doubtful whether
4-part harmony would ever have developed.
I suspect the real history is more like 100,000 years or so when it
comes to creativity stirred by psycho-physical abstract exploration and
disciplinary virtuosity.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Great works of the human spirit do not come from the private
sector. Nor does equality of opportunity and an efficient use of resources.
Once again, great works arise in individual minds and are usually taken a
long way forward by quite small private groups. There is a maximum of
opportunity when a new idea first starts to shape up. Efficiency can only
arise from competition, never from a unitary owner like a monopoly or the
state.
Once again, my experience is totally the reverse of yours on this
point. I would argue that the current problem in the market is not some
cycle but a mistake about the root of human creativity and how it is grown.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps your comments about a war are true of England but I can
guarantee that they are not true of here. America is arming itself.
I wouldn;t guarantee anything about England or America except that the
Western world is going to experience an even worse financial condition
than we have now -- caused by the nation-states' takeover of money a
century ago which is now crashing about their ears. The politicians and
treasuries of the Western world have absolutely no idea what to do next.
Agreed, especially on the final sentence. They have lost their culture
and their way. When they say Art they are talking old works that have
little use for them other than simple entertainment or pleasure based in
predictability. Science works to discover and build predictability down
to a singularity. Art is the reverse, as is creativity, it is a
flowering evolution away from a singularity to many points of
enlightenment. In music, as you well know, we call that a messa di voce.
Well, the printing of money is not going to be a case of messa di voce!
It's going to end catastrophically (and pretty shortly, too) when foreign
investors, particularly the Chinese, refuse to prop up America any longer
by buying its government bonds.
Thank you for your time and for your thought. It was fun.
REH
The last bit won't be, though!
KSH
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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