Gary - Watching now... but THIS rant was Eric's not mine... mine was previous and more rambly!
- Steve > 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 <desm...@santafe.edu > <mailto:desm...@santafe.edu>> 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, <thompnicks...@gmail.com >> <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> <thompnicks...@gmail.com >> <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> 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 >> thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> >> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ >> >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. >> -.. .- ... .... . ... >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> <http://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 > <http://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/
.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... 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/
