[FRIAM] ill-conceived question
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun May 3 12:53:22 EDT 2020
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 <desmith at santafe.edu
> <mailto: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
>> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <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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