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Eric -<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class="">I would put up this one as a constructive reply to
your link below, not to counter but to add alongside:</div>
<div class=""><a
href="https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/"
class="" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil-2006/</a></div>
<div class="">I am pretty sure I have posted this to the list in
the past, but it remains a strong reference for me. <br>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>I was (only vaguely) aware of the Cuban "special period" and
think the description of the Cuban people's response in the movie
was very inspirational. It helps a great deal that Cuba has a
very good climate for year round agriculture and that it's people
were not terribly addicted to personal-conveniences as provided by
our idea of modern technology. I have not really paid attention
to what has evolved there more recently.</p>
<p>I have friends/colleagues in Ukraine who are old enough to have
remembered both Chernobyl, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the
Ukranian independence. They went through some similar
experiences to Cuba, suddenly not having direct access to the huge
false-economies of the Soviet Empire and having to try to keep a
system running on nominally only what could be produced
regionally.</p>
<p>I wondered when Puerto Rico got hit so hard by the hurricane a
few years go if THEY might not follow a pattern closer to Cuba's
as described in the movie.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class="">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.</div>
</blockquote>
I agree that Gary's video leaves me waiting for "the other shoe to
fall" when I know the beast in question is more like a centipede
than a biped.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
</blockquote>
Yes, in spite of our just-in-time logistics system, there has been
quite a bit of product in the pipeline and it is not like *every*
factory and *every* packing plant, etc. shut down immediately or
entirely *IF EVER*. Your reference to the style of glossing in the
movie is well-taken and I think I agree it was deliberate and
aspirational more than pretending that (as you point out) that 2
months in we can *know* that everything is going to be OK even
(especially?) if we cut our manic hypercapitalism by a factor of 2
or 10.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
</blockquote>
The improvements in health and nutrition they report is a good
indicator.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class=""> 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.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>But I would claim/suggest that a "catastrophe" like the one we
are on the crest (of the beginning?) of is a good opportunity, not
unlike the "Special Period" of Cuba, for that center of mass to
shift perhaps. And there are directions to lean that will help
that or alternatively hurt (return to normal) that.</p>
<p>Good video and good thoughts,</p>
<p> - Steve</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:57C99079-80D3-4717-8C13-270A16601C38@santafe.edu">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Many thanks,</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Eric</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
<div><br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On May 3, 2020, at 10:05 PM, Gary Schiltz <<a
href="mailto:gary@naturesvisualarts.com" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">gary@naturesvisualarts.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<div dir="auto" class="">Great rant/stream of
consciousness as usual, Steve! Has anyone watched this
five minute video yet? A bit utopian, but maybe not...
<a href="https://vimeo.com/411278238" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">https://vimeo.com/411278238</a></div>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, May 3, 2020
at 7:23 AM David Eric Smith <<a
href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">desmith@santafe.edu</a>>
wrote:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px
0px
0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)">
<div
style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"
class="">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.
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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).</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Very inadequate. </div>
</div>
<div
style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"
class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Eric<br class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On May 3, 2020, at 1:33 AM,
<<a
href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"
target="_blank" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>>
<<a
href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"
target="_blank" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="">
<div class="">
<div
style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;text-decoration:none"
class="">
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Colleagues,<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">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? <span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">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. <span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Don’t yell at me. What
fundamental proposition about
economics do I not understand?<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Nick<span
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </span></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""> </div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Nicholas Thompson</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Emeritus Professor of
Ethology and Psychology</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="">Clark University</div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""><a
href="mailto:ThompNickSon2@gmail.com"
target="_blank"
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="" moz-do-not-send="true">ThompNickSon2@gmail.com</a></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class=""><a
href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/"
target="_blank"
style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"
class="" moz-do-not-send="true">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/</a></div>
<div style="margin:0in 0in
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