[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Gary Schiltz]

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 <desmith at 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, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <
> 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
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
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