[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

Sun May 3 17:57:59 EDT 2020

David, thanks for your thoughtful response. The film does present a very
simplified, and probably elitist and naive view. I will have a look at the
film you referenced and reflect my thoughts back here.

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:49 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Hi Gary,
>
> I would put up this one as a constructive reply to your link below, not to
> counter but to add alongside:
>
> https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/
> I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in the past, but it
> remains a strong reference for me.
>

> Six weeks or two months into a shutdown, with pictures of glittering
> skyscrapers in NYC with nobody maintaining them, and yoga people sitting on
> posh porches overlooking the forest, I get the impression that something is
> being overlooked.  If I saw the same video made by a Panamanian immigrant
> in Brooklyn, living with 6 family members in a small apartment, I would
> feel safer abducting from the anecdotal point of view to a generalization.
>
> I don’t say that to disagree with the intent of the short video you
> circulated, which expresses preferences that I also hold.  But all the ways
> we create damage, from climate to farmland management to ecosystem
> destruction happen partly because it is hard to understand long-term
> trajectories from the early stages of transients, and we are particularly
> bad at recognizing that transients are that.  This little bit of inertia,
> while people consume stocks that were in inventory already, does not look
> to me like a model for an alternative steady state in barely any respects
> (though still a few).  I don’t doubt that the maker of the video
> understands this and would agree, but he probably sees the end of making
> the point as justifying the means of omitting these things.
>
> I like the Cuban case because it starts to get into the weeds of just how
> much _work_ is needed, and how many and how diverse are the problems that
> require invention to solve, to significantly re-arrange a social system.  I
> think the documentary makes the case that the move they made was entirely
> in the right direction.  The thing that makes it feel real to me is that it
> was a lot of work for a modest and very incomplete improvement.  To make a
> good world will require that kind of work-for-change as a way of life to
> which we remain committed over generational timescales.  It also required
> that the center of mass of the society be going in that direction, and not
> just a committed fringe swimming against a current that is all going the
> wrong way.  The latter nut is one that is seeming particularly hard to
> crack.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Eric
>
>
> On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <gary at naturesvisualarts.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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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