I think one has to be careful with a concept like "comparative advantage". It was conceived in a world in which advantages and disadvantages were seen as essentially static. Country A had an advantage in growing grain, so that is what it produced and traded. Country B had an advantage in wine, so it produced and traded that. Because of their respective advantages and trade, the people of B could eat porridge and the people of A could drink wine.
Fast forward to the fluid, globalized world of the present. A couple of decades ago North America and Europe had a comparative advantage in producing cars and many other kinds of industrial products. In a relatively short time that advantage disappeared and shifted to Japan, China and other parts of the world. In a complex, industrialized and brain driven world, what farmers and grape growers produce means very little. Who can produce oil and other industrial commodities, however, continues to matter a great deal. But what really appears to matter now is technical knowledge, the ability to organize and the capacity to define the terms under which trade takes place -- the ability to keep the international value of the Yuan low, for example. OK, so it may still be thought of as comparative advantage, but comparative advantage so complex and taking place at such high speed that classical economists would have felt completely overwhelmed. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION' Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 12:04 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Professional Ethics (of economists) Sorry about the memory. I have a good product from Isagenix called "Ageless Actives" that has really helped mine. They also have a "product B" that makes you feel good as you remember. I give that credit for my remembering those conversations, although the welfare state of the Veterans Administration Hospitals takes a close second. If the "irresponsible's" had their way I would still be wondering what day it was. Instead I'm inventing a new course for a leading specialized educational institution. I didn't realize you are eighty. :>)) As for comparative advantage? We went through that then and I still the feel the same now as then. It's an obvious simplicity like a lot of science that takes credit for things being described that have already manifested themselves in the consciousness while society has moved on. For example; Einstein "discovered" the Law of Relativity but it had existed for at least five hundred years before in voice teaching and the Arts in Western Society. If you count the relativity of acoustics and musical instruments you could say that it had existed as a principle in that science since Pythagoras. It's no wonder such stuff was suppressed by the absolutist religions of the day. They had betrayed the principle of religion born to the child in the mother long before that so absolutism was their only defense. Being raised in the absolutism of the government religions on the reservation, the process relativity of musical composition was a nightmare and my redemption. Not being raised in the relativity of the Arts and the practicality of musical instruments, today's students become enraged that there is all that "relative to" attached to a musical "law." Note that the same fundamentalist students can't even understand the meaning of the word "Theory" in the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of Music. "Theory" to them means a guess that hasn't been proven. In the Musical arts, as you know, time goes forward, backwards, inside out and upside down. Forward, reverse, retrograde and inversion. In the world languages, relativity (position relative to) is a common part of the grammar of every native language sentence in the Americas. But science is the child that comes along behind the parent and describes the obvious as if it was the answer and was brand new. The simplicity of Comparative Advantage does not mean that the complexity of humane world trade has been arrived at. I don't listen much to the absolutists in theology but I find Dawkins and his ilk in Science to be childish and to make the same mistake as the fundamentalists about the word "Theory." The answer is for all of the Domains of Culture to grow up and that includes science and especially the science of economics. The Aztec solution to people betting against the culture was a good one IMHO. Those creeps became fertilizer. Have to go to work. This is my day to groom tomorrow's class. It's a lecture and exercise on Diction and a general Review of the elements of Musical techniques and acoustics. Thanks for the conversation. REH At 19:13 25/09/2011,REH wrote: Thanks Keith, you give me an opportunity to remember and to brag on my family a little. I apologize to the rest but I only know what I've experienced and remember. I admit to being an old man with memory issues and I hear that you feel very pessimistic and that, when I came, you didn't feel that others on the list felt as you do now, but this is what I remember. I remember, in particular, three discussions that were very principally about these same issues while you continued to preach Comparative Advantage. There were several of us who spoke otherwise. I didn't "preach" Comparative Advantage. I don't need to preach it. But if you preached against Comparative Advantage then you were wrong. Comparative Advantage simply means that an individual, or a business, or a country is most efficient (is most prosperous) when it exchanges what it's best able to make against what is available from others. The purest case of non-Comparative Advantage economics is that of slave labour and this is not efficient. That's why it inevitably gave way to wage labour in due course -- although this itself is nowhere near as efficient as it might be if all potential talent were not blunted by state education. As to the other two issues, I have no memory at all. I have a decade more senility on you. KSH One was Michel Chossudovsky when we spoke of the breakup of Yugoslavia caused by the outside World bankers. My daughter is half Yugoslav and I knew, from my family, of what he spoke. We were all appalled at what was happening to a beautiful people who had declared peace between ancient enemies only to have the outside banks rip open the wounds and restore a state of war. Michel was the one who introduced me to the problem of UD shells that stayed in the environment for the life of the radiation and what that meant for the children of Yugoslavia once the war was over. Michel's comments about the World Bankers were not unlike your recent comments but without the killing that he was experiencing from his homeland and his family. I would point out that the Bankers were like poor homeowners who bought houses they couldn't afford. In this case it was trusting their funds to a dying despot when the country was in a fragile state of transition. Bankers blame our poor homeowners for the housing crash here but don't accept the parallel for themselves as the "investors" in the dying Tito. They just stuck back hard and destroyed the place. Like the race riots in the 1960s in Washington, D.C. and Watts, L.A. So much for the value of their sophistication and culture. Second was the Lean and Agile Manufacturing which I wrote a lot about. Some of the arguments I put on the list about the problems of Lean and Agile as manifested in the Arts since the 1920s have come to fruition in the larger economy. A direct article that I wrote on the model of the movie business appeared in your Guardian Newspaper. Either he was reading our conversation or it was morphic resonance. That article almost made me leave the list because I perceived danger in my expressing these opinions in a world where I had to get along or not survive. I was internet naïve about the privacy of information. It is only my retirement and the perks of being an old fart that has freed my tongue from the inhibitions of needing to be OK with everyone in my business. As a result they've asked me back to teach because of the success of the people I've mentored. The Third was an article on Veblen and on Automation and the fact that the projected figure for unemployment with robotics and automation was 40%. As I remember you were on the other side of that argument and I wasn't alone in believing the figure and the Automation argument because the mines in the Quapaw nation went from hundreds of employees to six as the mines automated and the town economy went into free fall which my father fixed by establishing a town business council around the capital of the school budget, with the schools and banks as a senior partner. Without the school monies invested in the town, the town would have died and the culture would have been lost. They agreed to work with each other and built new companies, a boat manufacturer and a construction company as well as many small businesses like the Picher Development corporation which held up until my Dad left. On the business side, one of the students my father trained was Donald Johnson who would later become the CEO of a fortune 500 company the Modine Corporation. Usually Dad's success story was with Artists so we are proud of Don who was our football hero. Like you, in your music business, my father refused to take a salary from the PDC and kept his teacher's salary, while volunteering with the PDC because the corporation was meant to hold the town together and build a spirit of economic cooperation around the largest budget, the school budget, which came from the government. My father said simply: "If the town fails there is no need for schools." It worked until he retired and then the next superintendant removed the school monies from the town bank for a cheaper interest in another town and the whole thing collapsed. So that small system, [which depended upon the same belief and cooperation as the WWII effort did in America,] worked as long as they were responsible to each other. Short term self-interest killed it and eventually the town itself, in spite of the tremendous spirit of the people. It was the typical WSJ market perspective, as advanced by the people who followed my father in the schools, that was incapable of dealing with the tragedy of the lead pollution and maintaining a viable community. The people who left were the whites. The Quapaws remain and they are quietly cleaning up the place because they are family and the earth is our mother. They believe in responsibility and cleaning up their messes even if they had little power to stop them. I believe that the Quapaw's responsible cooperative system's model is a better design model for America's culture and economic structure than small household budgets by local families because the psychology of the market is often the deciding factor. Of course if you have the psychology of more successful household budgets of serious families like the wealthy old families here and even the crime families then it might work as a model, think Rome or your Henry VIII, but that is the brutal Ron Paul model. Those models are not genuinely economic but cultural. It's the short term personal selfish model that doesn't work unless you have unlimited capital resources, like the Robber Barons in the 1880s and a whole country to rape and pillage. My father and mother were sources of pride for me but their attitudes were not unusual for the Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri region of the country. One of my mentors, John Warfield, the father of systems and complexity science in America grew up down the road in Missouri, Elizabeth Warren, who founded America's Consumer Protection Agency and a Harvard Professor is from the small town of Wetumpka, where I have relatives; the area in Kansas that includes the lead and zinc mines is filled with opera singers who understand ensemble and positive work with the latest one being Heldentenor Robert Dean Smith who grew up down the road from me in Chetopa and went to school with my father's teachers in Pittsburgh, Kansas. He's the rage Tristan at both the Metropolitan and Bayreuth this year. He's also a student of my teacher here of 40 years, Maestro Daniel Ferro. Our states had both the demons and the saints but the overall attitude of our generation was to be smart psychologically and the "It takes a village" mentality that taught me how to survive in the arts and make a living including getting a salary from my own company without killing it. There are many successful ensemble builders such as my uncle C. Clay Harrell who as City Manager of Muskogee, Oklahoma talked the state and nation into founding the Port of Catoosa in the middle of the country outside Muskogee and wrote the legislation that set a port connected to the Gulf of Mexico that both fed the area and provided an inexpensive waterway connection for Oklahoma's energy exports. He then went to Vienna, Virginia where he was instrumental in founding Wolf Trap Farms National Park of the Performing Arts and Tyson's Corner, at the time the largest shopping center in America, all in the town where he was the Manager. He was a public servant and still serves at the age of 98 as an image of the value cooperative leadership. Another cousin Kenneth Devero after being a successful city manager became the successful Business Manager for the City of Fort Worth, Texas. [Of course that's Texas and Texas is another world.] What worked for all of these people was the culture of cooperation and the belief that together they could all work out competent answers to complex situations. It was Warfield who spoke the message that all of them lived. He said: "Complexity is not external, it is a situation of the human mind. Nothing is complex if you know how to do it." That was my dad's, my uncles and my own teacher's attitudes. It motivated their actions and until the people Chris called the "predators" became ascendant, it worked. That is what I've been saying with others on the list, from the first day I came. It wasn't the leaders of the list who invited me, it was list members who read what I wrote on the Learning Org. list and asked that I come here as I asked my cousin Karen Cole to join the conversation a couple of year's later. Karen still does the news service, the Casey Report that is sometimes quoted here. The underlying principle behind our beliefs is that we accomplish things together http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/09/elizabeth-warren-class-warfare-video-/1?csp=34news That we "owe rent for being an American." Martin Clark, Chairman Martin Clark Oil Company, Oklahoma State Senator, Mayor Ada, Oklahoma and my mother's brother. And that governing is always an act of negotiation and a willingness not to make winners and losers but to bring every citizen along no matter what their talents. As an outsider, the problem of Europe as I see it is similar to what we now have here. Our States exist in an attitude of competition and derision rather than an attitude of appreciation of the values each bring to the table. It doesn't help that the Christians and the Muslims are proselytizers of other people's children. Others simply believe themselves better and will not deign to allow the outsiders as equal, except maybe "separate but equal." They bristle when you use the word "apartheid" just as others bristle when "blood quantum" is tied to Nazis although both are parallel processes. I think it's interesting that the British Prime Minister would vacation in the Red Triangle of that country that is a terrible mess [Italy]according the Anglo Newspapers here and abroad. He was caught in Tuscany when the riots started at home around his policies. Tuscany, Bologna and I sat next to the former Communist Mayor of Greve at my teacher's school this summer where Robert Dean Smith and I remembered our upbringing. Why do the capitalists vacate in the Socialist communities? Why not in capitalist Liverpoole? It reminds me of what the Christians call a "paradox." It has been better at times and worse as it is today. Frankly so many see no value outside their own contexts. It is always, IMO a problem of value and respect. Germany doesn't seem to respect or value Greece. etc.etc. but it's no different here. Until the patronizing cultures find a way to accept all of the diversity as equally valuable and not to steal each other blind, it won't work unless everyone crashes and no one has anything. Then you will deal with the issue of vendetta and blame. A good Intelligent System's Designer will take all of the parts into account and make a place for them. The problem for me was never whether God was an Intelligent Designer but whether I could become one in my work and thinking. God can take care of God. I'm not responsible for that but I am responsible for my own life and for being a citizen of this insane, diverse wonderful country. REH From: Keith Hudson [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 4:13 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Ray Harrell Subject: RE: [Futurework] Professional Ethics (of economists) At 08:07 25/09/2011, Ray wrote: (KH) I think all previous theories of labour are now invalid due to increasing automation and specialization. Whereas in pre-industrial times the two previous 'systems' needed close on 100% participation we're nearer to 50% already (IMO) with the other 50% either on no-work or make-work. This is already a major problem in the advanced countries for both the production market and the welfare state. The production market will be able to adjust by means of increasingly versatile customization but I can't see how the welfare state can unless by increased taxation and/or work sharing (at least not with our present atrociously poor educational system for the majority). Keith (REH) My understanding of the above is the reason that I came to this list. I agree with Keith and said as much. I'm glad to see that he has come around to the same side that Tom Lowe and some of the other early Futureworkers were speaking about ten years ago. I was on Futurework List before you were, Ray. At that time there were no others who were as pessimistic as I am now (within conventional political and economic contexts). I was invited by Sally because I had started the Job Society in England and I thought then that there was some possibility of devising a policy for jobs. And so, I think, did some of the early FWers. We tried, and I think we failed. Events were moving too swiftly and too radically -- and still are. The politics of the existing nation-state is patently unable to cope with the change and I think the best we can do on FW (and it's worth doing) is to try and see exactly what trends are taking place and how they might end up. We might then be able to make some sort of theoretical bridge between now and then. KSH The seeds of this virus are still a problem however in terms like "make work." I don't see the moral advantage in creating a magnificent company with a large workforce to produce a product like Coca-Cola. I don't see that fracking or the tar sands of Canada are ultimately more real than Dietrich Fischer Dieskau who brought a whole generation of Germans back from the brink of despair after WWII I don't see what the moral advantage is of so many products that are considered "real" work by the marketplace when they essentially are trash and trinkets. Better to consider what is lost in the current marketplace and rules of engagement. How we sell our genuine human birthright for cups of soup. How we can give up great orchestras like the Philadelphia Orchestra. Great opera companies like the New York City Opera. Great cultural products, great public works and great advances in human science. All truly not cost effective due to the current market myths put forward as "real" work. Let us have more makework by real virtuosos at performance of whatever might raise the human soul. REH Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/ Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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