[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Sat May 2 14:30:17 EDT 2020

Marcus, Gary, 

Thanks for responding.  I stipulate that mine is the sort of question that could only be asked by a person too privileged to be taken seriously.   But such people should occasionally be heard, so I was asking to heard.  And you heard me.  Thanks. 

Let’s put it another way.  What we call the economy is kind of [like] an addiction to speed.  Calling it an addiction highlights the fact that withdrawal is a hideous experience that can kill you.  

Allow me a Marxist sort of thought.  In whose interest is it to increase the velocity of transactions in the marketplace?  It is in the interest of the corporations and governments that skim off those transactions.  If we COULD slow down the rate of transactions without killing ourselves, who would suffer?  Large organizations that tax those transactions. (I think of corporate profit as a tax.)  That is why the government just sent me 2400 dollars that I absolutely don’t need.  The letter from Donald say, “Go thou Nick into the market place and rush about so I may tax thee.” 

This Marxist thought is similar to another.  Why in the sixties did THEY allow feminism to escape from the bottle since the 19th century.  Because THEY realized that if THEY could turn intrafamily and intra community transactions into market place transactions then the same work (raising families) could be taxed two or three times as often.  

THEY are bastards.  Why are we helping THEM do their work.  Or are WE THEY?

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 11:38 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Hey Nick, did you mean your question to apply to mostly the USA? Europe? Asia? Africa? South America? Although I keep up a little bit with what's going on in the USA and a bit more about Europe, lately my familiarity is more with Ecuador and to a lesser extent the rest of South America. Down here, we are far from being in a sustainable mode. I can drive one day a week. Supermarkets are open only until 1:00 pm, nationwide curfews from 2:00  pm until 5:30 am. Open questions abound: will farmers plant anything during the lockdown? when will the country allow imports again?

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:34 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at 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

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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